Beaumont, CA: Psyched

Miles since last blog: 10.1
Miles Total: 3709.7

Route

I'm finally getting excited not just for the walk ending, but after the walk, of course this corresponds directly to getting deeper in debt but I can ignore that a little bit longer before the hounds begin to bay.

I know you've all been twiddling your thumbs and doing your underwater basket weaving and thinking, "WHAT IS SKIP GOING TO DO WHEN HE FINISHES!?!" (It seems a sizable portion of my readership statistically is insane)

Well, I don't have a long term answer, but the short term is: Traveling. I am booked up for about two weeks visiting the 'rents in Hawaii starting a few days after the walk and then a week after that I plan to go back to Prague for two weeks, sometime in or after there I am also trying to find time and cash for Buenos Aires and Roatan (Honduras). Color me excited. My skin is actually hot because I am so incredibly psyched to GO, GO, GO!!! Now that the walk is in it's last 8 days (a few days ago when I said ten my brain was fried from the sun, I had 12 left even then) I am starting to have solid dates and places and people to meet in them that I have known and loved for more than a week. I had no idea how exciting it would be, but many of these plans are sort of coalescing today and it is leaving me super charged.

It's hard even to think of the past at the moment. So here I go, Blythe. The desert was hot, maybe a little too hot, and I hadn't walked far, maybe a little too not far, before long, I had to rest out of the heat. I had been sketching out some of the lyrics for my long planned zombie comedy musical romance and the heat of the day and dryness from singing had worn me out so I slank back off the road behind a broken down old shack and laid down in the dirt. The flies were buzzing and I couldn't get a decent rest, "cool its youz guys," I snapped.

Down the road a bit of dust was being kicked up and a car was bouncing up the dirt that passed for a road. A tall dark man got out and started questioning me, "what are you doing?" "do you want this cold glass of ice water?" "do you want to stay at my house and get food and a shower?"

I said yes to all of it, which probably left him a little confused with respect to the first question. His name was Marvin, a nice guy who was into cage fighting and being a pastor, I wondered if ever at the same time. I could see him rubbing a guys face against the cage bars, "repent sinner!" he would rasp in the victims ear. I stayed the night in his living room and all the next day he let me rest, waking me periodically to feed me and take me to see his other family, which he helped out but wasn't 'involved' with. He twirled a loaded gun on his finger and was nice as hell, funny too with a past that was as wild as my hair in the morning. I was a bit sad to leave such a great guy and character in the dust when I trekked off into the sunset, but my cousin was coming from the state capitol and I had to get moving.

The days with Cousin Kathy passed beautifully in a colorful haze of sunsets and fast food deliriums. We had our adventures, helped another man walking across the desert, found a stranded motorist and helped him with his overheated car, we were a duo of preemptive Sam Becketts (Quantum Leap) traveling through the desert to put right what could have gone wrong. I got a cactus to the foot and Kathy snarled at the Dead fish in the barnacle shores of the Salton Sea. We rode the Painted Canyon and hunkered into mineral baths, those were the days.

Since then I've rolled rough and said goodbye to Kathy, Ando (my carrier), and a host of other things like my tent, sleeping bag and blanket. I've been couchsurfing and experimenting with authentic homelessness in the cold and windy passes exiting the Coachella valley and the giant dinosaurs that lie beyond it. But I've said to much. Until next time my monitor mates, my blog buddies, my life lovers, my my my.

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