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Tour Du
Monde, Update from Scott:
Gone Crazy
Date: December 26, 2003
Yester evening a wind storm blew in form the south plastering me in my tent like
a vacuum-packed Weiner dog. Today, bicycling into the remnants of the storm, the
wind is shredding my sun-bleached jacket and my morale.
"If it's not the sun, it's the flies. If it's not the flies, it's the
wind. If it's not one thing, It's another. Ugh, I sound like my
parents. I'm never going to make it." As a child, I began mumbling
statements and rhetoric.
"You'll make it, you always do." Now, I have entire conversations with
myself. Maybe I have ridden myself crazy -- too many hours, sometimes
days, on a bicycle stuck in my head pondering problems and paradoxes.
Am I crazy? This is the story of my quest for craziness:
"My saddle sores are eating me alive. My knees are grinding. And, even
if my peewee hasn't snapped in half -- deep down in the 't'aint -- from
the potholes, I'm so lonely my heart surely has cracked." I've come to
identify this aspect of myself as Primitive Scott. He's the guy
concerned with survival -- the less pain and the more pleasure the
better, especially related to procreation, though successfully
procreating would be a nuisance to Primitive.
"Bicycling around the world is a flawed concept. There are too many
dangerous people and ugly places. And, when I meet magical people and
beautiful places, I'm too busy racing the weather and visas to stop.
I've reached the point of diminishing returns in my travels. I've
mastered bicycling; there is little payoff. Nobody will blame me for
quitting." This is Logical Scott. He's excellent for manipulating the
outer world to attain pleasure. Logical is difficult to identify
because he's my dominate personality and Logical loves to think of
himself as my true self.
"I will. I'm not a quitter. This trip is bigger than myself. I'm doing
it for my friends and family and the dozen people I meet everyday who
never imagined it's possible. I'll never quit. Maybe I will
re-prioritize my goals. As of now, I have no other priorities. I have
to keep going while I'm young, strong and healthy." Rounding of my
multiple personality disorder, this is Spiritual Scott, the most
difficult aspect of myself to define, He's: that nagging angst, an
ideal or true self, God-like, a Platonic form, my superego. Spiritual
is also the most difficult to identify: He's the creative inspiration
that strikes during gastrointestinal meditation, the man who can
bicycle 100 kilometers without sweating, the smile induced on a passing
stranger, it's the serendipitous coincidences, like the string of
friends that have joined my adventure as if to guide, protect, teach
and carry me when I can't carry myself, its the feeling of being a
human molecule in an ever-evolving crystal. Spiritual Scott goes beyond
mind and body to tap into the universe. He's my soul and it has taken
most of my 33 years to identify Him.
"You are not so young anymore. If you want to have a family you'd
better get busy. Women my age are either married, divorced, have
children or such a bad case of the baby bug that they can't see
straight." Most of the time I am not aware of whose talking so I will
leave the following remarks untagged to simulate my craziness.
"Besides, I don't want to."
"Life isn't about doing what we want. If I sat around drinking beer and
watching television I would never get anywhere. Life is a gift. I have
an obligation to myself and society to live up to my potential."
"Since when is life about going somewhere? Where am I going? There's no
prize at the end of the road. It will be the same as any other day."
"Life, love, wisdom, most importantly, my self and my soul. These are
my prizes. To change the world -- change yourself."
"I can have these things at home. I'm not a couch potato."
"I can always go home but I will never have this opportunity again.
Correction: I will never create this opportunity again. I never want to
leave my friends and family again."
"What about now. Grandpa's been dead for a month. And, Grandma's health
is failing. If I'm not careful I'll be dead, too. I've been lucky, so
far."
"Don't be melodramatic. I'm not going to die. I can feel it. And,
Grandma understands. She was the first person I told and she said, 'You
gotta do these things while you can because when your my age you won't
have any knees left.'"
"Do you think another country will make a difference?"
"It's the cumulative effect, the sum of the parts being greater than
the whole, the Gestalt."
"Forget all this nonsense. It comes down to one thing: Am I willing to
live with the regret for the rest of my life?"
"No."
"If you quit anything, quit your damned belly aching. Watch the
scenery. Live in the moment. Your going to have ridden around the world
and not experienced anything. Look at that desert oak. That's a nice
tree. See how the sapling grows without any branches until its roots
find water. That's amazing. You'd have to be an ungrateful b-- not to
appreciate that tree."
It it too late for sight-seeing, I have arrived at the next source of
food and water, a roadhouse 119 kilometers away from the last, and
Australia has scrolled past almost unnoticed. My skin is flushed from
the heat and wind, ghosted white from my sunscreen and speckled with
gnats like a flycatcher. "You're mad," a road train truckie tells me.
His ropey muscles are mostly covered in heaps of blubber and wrapped in
a wrinkly brown skin that's daring melanoma with Aussie pride. Road
trains are semi trucks with four trailers and 56 wheels. They haul
freight from the one end of Australia to the other smashing aside, so I
am told, 100 kangaroos a night.
"How would I know if I'm crazy? Has it occurred to you that maybe
you're crazy and I'm sane?"
"Mate, you've been in the outback too long."
I've been told I'm crazy a few times a day for five years -- nearly two
thousand times. I'm beginning to suspect that I am crazy. I ponder this
for a few months. Am I bonkers? "Muy Loco." Or, is it the rest of the
world?
In Melbourne, I meet a haggard Scotsman (generally too drunk and stoned
to be coherent) who spent five years trafficking drugs in India,
growing marijuana in the mountains during the spring monsoons and
summer heat and taking ten kilograms down to Goa in the cool, dry
winter. "If I came to a police barricade, I would slow down until they
lowered their bamboo poles and then I would gun my motorcycle. When
they hit you it doesn't hurt," he shrugs, "much. If you go fast the
bamboo will break you. The police have bad motorcycles and no radios.
They are like tramps."
In Mumbai, India, I met a Malaysian man who was just released from
three and half years in a Goan prison for carrying one gram of
Marijuana. He had lost half his body weight, suffered from
malnutrition, dysentery, malaria, addiction and, since these medieval
gauls require prisoners to provide for themselves, like the London
Clink, he was forced to deal brown sugar, a cheap version of heroin, to
feed himself and his cell mates. (There are more drugs in prison then
outside.) If caught, the Scotsman was facing twelve years to life, a
shortened version. If this isn't crazy, surely Logical Scotsman went
AWOL. "It's not the drugs that are problem for the police, it is the
rich westerners," was the extent of his reasoning. "Never flash any
money or wear nice jewelery or clothing."
I mention my trip to him and after he prods me for information
declares, "Mate, you are crazy!"
"You're calling me crazy," I laugh, "How do you know I'm crazy?"
"Your problem is that you appear normal. You may even think you are
sane. But, take it from me, I know, you are completely mad." Seeing the
shocked countenance, he consoles, "Don't worry. You have to be mad.
What are your options? To stay home? And live a normal life. What would
happen if everyone did this? The world needs crazy people."
This jives with my conclusion of my eternal angst: craziness, a healthy
dose of angst, is the raison d'etre, the sacred fire built under my ass
by God. Life thrives on the mystery, the x-factor, the wild card,
because one in a million, even one in a billion crazy people or random
mutations will succeed and life will evolve beyond imagination.
Unfortunately, I must incriminate myself with every past, present and
future girlfriend by relating the following conclusion to my craziness.
A few days later, life throws another monkey wrench into my works.
Against all logic, against all hormones, for indeed it is magic, for
the first time Spiritual Scott is attracted to a woman, the X-factor.
It's an attraction as mysterious as spinifex grass fighting for a view
of Uluru (Ayers Rock); if I were a plant, I'd move to Thailand, off,
off Patpong, next to a juicy river.
I'm having drinks with our mutual friend and she says, "X deserves to
be loved. She's fantastic. You should fall in love with her. It would
be great." The noisy, smoky bar and all its beautiful and ugly people
disappear. My thoughts catalyze, "X is fantastic; she deserves to be
loved. Maybe that's the reason we met: to love, she needs me." The
truth of this statement sends tingles through my skin. I have no desire
for myself, for a moment my mind is clear. Then a loud thought, like a
voice in my head, booms out of the nothingness, "We are here to love."
And another says, "Life is love." And the two sentences echo off the
inside of my skull and I digest them word by word.
It is interesting to note that the voice told me, "We are here to
love," not "to love each other," not an exclusive, romantic love
but,
simply, "to love". And it said, "Life is love," not, "The
meaning of
life is love," but, as if life (time, space, matter, energy) is
animated if not constructed out of love, a fourth dimension. I remember
a line from the movie 'Adaptation', "We are what we love, not what
loves us."
"Oh, no," I think, "Not again. I think I am falling in love. No,
I am
falling in love. No, no, not falling. I don't know how to qualify or
quantify love. I simply feel love."
This realization, to use Aussie idioms, left me shattered and
knackered. I braved the rest of the evening and then slogged back to my
noisy, smoky hostel. Early the next morning after a restless sleep and
troubled dreams absorbing this hokeypokey stuff, I awoke not simply
believing, implying faith, but knowing and feeling that love drives the
universe and that love is the universe, the Holy Grail, and that I love
everything and everyone.
I pick up my spoon, affectionately referred to as my shovel, and
admired the metal, the craftsmanship, the shape, the tingle of the
spoon in my mouth. Very subtle, like the vapor of a dream, energy from
the spoon flowed into me. I wasn't feeding off this energy. It was more
like the ebb and flow of the tide, the circular breathing while playing
a didgeridoo, a cosmic, quantum dance. "I love my spoon," I thought
and
laughed. "It's true. I am one-hundred percent, certifiably insane.
"Crazy and love, are they not the same thing? Love is crazy.
Crazy in love. I crazy. I love."
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