Once I was on top of this mountain napping when I heard a man say, "Cell phone bitches are ripping me off, but bitches don't care!" and I wanted to laugh aloud but I didn't as I was half-asleep.

I’m skeptical of people who seem to know who they are and I’m wary of those who profess to know too much about anything. I suppose you can know things like the periodic table and you can go on about that for a while or you can know how to work with tofu. People who cook with tofu but don’t really understand it produce something to the effect of what it is and what it sounds like: bean curd. I either have writer’s block or I’m forgetting how to live. Some pot smokers think they’re forgetting how to breathe. Who's to say what’s what?

“Truth,” said some professor the other day, “is what your friends let you get away with.”

The worst thing you could do is say, “Let’s agree to disagree,” unless we’re bickering over something petty. If we’re trying to deduce some ultimate truth, don’t be a distraction and point out that one of us thinks a certain way and the other another. But anyways, I don’t want you to think I’d argue about the nature of truth because I feel badly for people who think they are smart. They get all forlorn feeling  due to their intelligence, but the truth is that we are alone, the dumb fucks too. I just can’t handle people anymore, nor can I handle all the hipsters in this city with their skinny jeans, their stupid loafers, their ridiculous hair, their sad, mopey looks and their plaid blouses. Jesus Christ. I don’t like being in the city. There has always been in me a desire to be alone. My oldest longing is to own a small cabin in the woods and a canoe, tending to a little garden and keeping the company of dogs and trees and books. Yelling at tourists. Fucking city good-for-nothing tourists. Maybe I’d fuck the tourists. Probably. And then I’d read them things, conjure up some meaning for us and stick it in the air, let it linger in a room that smells like sex.

I never tell my mother anything about my life because quite frankly, I think she’s crazy. Yesterday my best friend Farnia (pronounced FAIR-NEE-AH) made the remark that if Hitler had had my mother in the Third Reich, we’d all be speaking German right now. We’re not joking. My mother is far too intelligent for our own good. Farnia has seen shit go down at my house. My mother has been to California twice to visit Disneyland and she’s not even American, yet somehow last week  a Californian Congressman leaves a message on her cell phone and says, “We’ll swoop in there and fast-track your paperwork” for whatever the fuck she wanted done with her friends. She is quite simply a terrifying woman. People in powerful positions revere my mother, reasons for which I am completely at a loss. She is strangely influential, which is why she and I are typically at each other’s throats as she is used to people listening to her and I despise people who can’t come up with their own ideas. I’ve done a whole slew of things, most of which I’ve never shared with my mother. Sometimes I fly to other provinces for a while and let her think I’m at a library in Vancouver. If I told her about the manner in which I conduct my life, I’d have to provide some rationale for it. And I don’t know why I do these things. I don’t have any answers.  Answers are for those pretentious hipster fucks I loathe so enthusiastically.

I hate to rag on my yoga teacher because I adore him, which I hate to admit since everyone admires him just as much as I do and I don’t like anything the yogic masses like as they’re these strange ethereal beings I’m quite positive never hear a word I say when they ask me how I’m doing after class. Anyways, I’m not ragging on my teacher Ryan -- I’m just using him as an example. One could say it isn’t his strong suit to be on time. And I think being rather inept at this suits him very much. He carried a watch around the entirety of yoga teacher training to be on time for everything and I thought this seemed very unnatural and detracted from the whole experience. If people are so eager for him to be their teacher, I think they should be prepared to wait a while for him. Being prompt is polite and boring. Making people wait is a good way to make them angry and he’d stir up every other goddamn emotion in us anyways, a quality of a good yoga teacher. He has a way of getting people all fiery and crazy and euphoric about being bendy and spiritual and upside down. And I mean, that’s fucking exceptional because most adults can’t even touch their toes. The night of the day I posted my love-hate rant on how absolutely bizarre I found yoga teacher training to be, Ryan and I were in the Blue Room, the stinking feral-cat-piss room, where he was standing on his head swinging from side to side and where I was relentlessly kicking up into forearm balance because I was hell-bent on nailing that pose. I fucked my elbows that night. Anyways, we were all yoga-swooney by the end of it and we said no hard feelings over my love-hate rant and we talked about our admiration for Kerouac and we discussed how absolutely trippy yoga can be and I asked him if he ever thought it was all in his head and I so liked his response that I smile over it whenever this conversation comes to mind. But I’m getting off-track. Actually I don’t really have a point.

The Man Behind The Drug

In the beginning it was just words. Empty, meaningless, spoken words. I called my friend Corey to talk it out and maybe bring out the emotions I was supposed to be feeling. Once it hit home it hit hard. My life was upside down. The strongest smartest man I had ever known was now a slave. I mean how could a man steal from his own son? Was I overreacting? Was I dreaming? I remember yelling, tears in my eyes, stomach in knots.

"I never wanna see you again!" I screamed, feeling like it was someone else choosing the words.

The words! The words were like poison to him. It killed him inside a little bit every time. He left feeling the poison starting to attack. I cried on the stairs for what seemed like an eternity. It surged up in me! The anger was consuming. I drove my mom's explorer downtown with a baseball bat on my lap. I was looking for him and the monster selling the cause of all this. I wish I could say this was the worst of it. I wish I could say these things only happened for a little while. Those demons took him from me over and over again. I never lost hope and the sad thing is that it might have been easier if I had. I miss him! I've missed him for the better part of my life. His end was a beginning for me. A beginning in many ways. I'm thankful for that, and I'll never forget the man behind the drug.

"'You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?' We didn't understand his question and it was a damned good question." ~ Kerouac

“I need to take!” I yell down to Shane. We’ve been climbing all day, a group of us, and we're on our last route. I’d ascended a wicked crack in the rain and I’d had a handful of good falls on rocks well above my grade. On overhang you don’t fall against anything that feels real -- you fall into space and you swear goddamn fucking christ and then you have to get creative and swing your way back to the mountainside. But on this last climb, which should have been a smooth jaunt up, I'm full of fear and I'm not looking where to go. I'm staring at the knot of rope that keeps me from plummeting to my death. And wondering what my body will look like after crashing against the forest floor and the sound it will make when it happens.

“Just push through it, Ken!” Shane hollers up at me. He thinks I'm tired, but I just need to let go of the mountain and lean away from the cliff to see for myself that the rope will hold me and that my death is all in my head. But I'm too terrified to argue with him and I don't have much choice but to keep moving for he won't let me down without a fight, not before reaching the top, so I mutter fucking christ and put my faith in the sound of my breath and in the feel of the rock.

The night before our day climbing Skaha bluffs we are laying in the hot tub looking at the stars. I’d just arrived from Alberta and I don’t have an answer for him when he asks how long I’ll be staying this time. He strokes my legs and after a while asks if I feel lost.

“Oh yes,” I say.
“Do you like it or does it concern you?”

“Both.”
I relish the feeling of being in water.
“They say they strangely miss me.”
“Who?”
“The yogis I parted ways with,” I say sadly.
“They told you this as a group?”
“No, one at a time. A handful of them. And their exact words have all been ‘I strangely miss you.’ Why should it be strange?” I ask him defensively, sitting up. “It makes me feel it’s strange others should miss me as though they’re surprised it’s me they miss.”
“I don’t think they mean it like that... You have a way of creating intense connections with the people you meet,” he says. “They’re surprised by it now that you’re gone.”
“Oh,” I say. “Well that makes me feel better...”

Last night you could have found us at this party of perfect strangers. The owner of the lovely house that we are partying at is unnerved because I tell him what I think of him when most people would have been making small talk.

"This girl will know you before you even speak to her," says a friend of mine who hasn't liked me since he met me until yesterday. Nobody likes feeling exposed.

But I like the man whose house we're in. I'm endeared to him and I like the look on his face when a deer decides to swim in his pool. I was unaware deer could swim. Our host jumps into the pool holding a baseball bat and an extension cord with which he is trying to lasso the previously calm animal. I stand there in a daze listening to the deer and feeling everyone get hyper and electric and I wonder how I got to be with these people.

Emboldened by the frenzied crowd, he bum-rushes the deer in the pool and and I don’t think I’m breathing and I can’t decide whether I love this life or whether I despise it that we all exist together to experience emptiness and call it a story.

Next thing I see the deer is bouncing haphazardly across the lawn and now the owner of the pool is the hero and the king and we all revere the greatness he has made for us in our minds. The king of the party is trying to convince me I am a hippie for not wearing deodorant and for not giving a flying fuck and I am rip-roaring drunk, celebrating the life of the deer and rebelling against my better judgment. We get childlike on that happy lawn making headstands and handstands and forearm balances and half moons. And I think the night is swooning because we are young and witless and know-nothings.

Somewhere near Jasper Provincial Park near Lake Louise

When it was time to leave Alberta I drove to the Okanagan. There I chucked rocks into my grandfather's truck for gardening purposes.

Listen here -- Time to Pretend by MGMT

“Come on,” Japhy yelled down to me. “We only got another hundred feet to go.”
“I’m staying right here! It’s too high!”
I nudged myself closer into the ledge and closed my eyes and thought “Oh what a life this is, why do we have to be born in the first place, and only so we can have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors as huge mountains and rock and empty space,” and with horror I remembered the famous Zen saying, “When you get to the top of the mountain keep climbing.” The saying made my hair stand on end; it had been such cute poetry sitting on Alvah’s straw mats. Now it was enough to make my heart pound and my heart bleed for being born at all. “Besides,” I thought, “rest and be kind, you don’t have to prove anything.” Suddenly I heard a beautiful broken yodel of a strange musical and mystical intensity in the wind, and looked up, and it was Japhy standing on top of the peak letting out his triumphant mountain-conquering Buddha Mountain Smashing song of joy.
~ The Dharma Bums, Kerouac