The Road to Freedom.

Things I learned from a drug tripped Vegas bus terminal.

I’m sitting on the sofa by a fire. It is March, and in Montana that means …snow. We tend to get a good bit here in March. I’ve already wasted probably too much time on X today so I set my phone down and came here to think for a minute. I tend to think best when I put words on a page. 1. it focuses me into a single place, and 2. I can work through the background chatter, dropping what is unimportant and focusing in more on what is important.

There is among a wide spread demographic of people I follow a sort of disdain and mockery of what we are going through in America right now. “2024 is going to be the worst” is a message many insinuate if not outright say. Even some of the thinkers I respect who are good at sifting through the news are saying it.

And as much as I enjoy a little cynicism, I don’t really like that message as a whole, not when it becomes the dominant take on life. I’m perhaps more optimistic than most, but I think when you say a thing is going to be bad there is a good chance your mind is going to follow the path it has set forth, and will continue to see it as such, even if it isn’t so. I believe in a sort of voodoo that we often become what we think. It seems like every year towards the end of the year people say something similar too… “2023 was the worst,” and before that “2022, can you believe how bad it was?”

Every time I’ve heard this I have a moment of sympathy in case maybe their spouse died, or perhaps their business went under, but 99 out of 100 times it’s just nonsense. They unexpectedly didn’t become a billionaire and buy that Porsche they have dreamed of. It’s more related to unrealistic expectations or just someone seeking the sympathy of others when they are not warranted or even needed. It’s kind of bullshit honestly.

As you look around America we have our share of problems, but we also have a huge problem of people worrying too much about things that do not affect them and which they can not themselves affect. I’m not saying those problems aren’t there, only that they are not the scope, scale or relevance people tend to suggest.

For a lot of people life is good, if not great, but because we are told to always expect more, expect the newest, expect the most, it can feel like a let down when it’s not, or when we see others with more. People in an average car want the newest, not realizing perhaps how good it is to even have a car in the first place. People with an average home wanting a better home, not realizing just how wonderful it is to have a home. People with a job that pays average wanting a job that pays more without realizing the increase in stress or responsibilities that come with it, or simply not realizing that it takes time for most people to move upward in this regard. Our media has lead us to believe that it’s common place to just “get there.” It’s not. Work is work. And it takes time to move along and upward. You don’t just get to the top of a mountain. And while there are certainly valid examples of young people becoming rich overnight, that is statistically still an anomaly. And while these people love to claim it’s their talent, it usually is more based on luck or connection than anything else.

Back in the 90’s I was hitchhiking from Arizona to Montana. Hitchhiking was still a valid, though fading form of transportation and I wanted to experience the uncertainty of it. But after a horrific ride with a drunk man who wanted to take me out to an abandoned mine from which he’d been fired “by a fucking white man”, I decided to take a bus. I talked the man down and redirected the trip, convincing him to take me to a bus station by offering to buy him beer, which I think he deemed more important than killing me. But it was sketchy as hell. A story for another time. Yes Mom, you were right, hitchhiking can be dangerous. As a 21 year old I guess I needed to figure it out for myself.

By midnight I had landed in the Las Vegas bus terminal with a several hour wait ahead of me before the next departure that would take me to Montana. By now I’d been traveling 2 days and only made it a few hundred miles. I set my pack on the ground and leaned back against it with a bunch of others around. This was peak human watching in my mind. There was a hippy with patch sewn clothing carrying a guitar case and small rucksack. There were countless homeless people, many of whom did not intend to take a bus anywhere. A quiet dour goth couple. And a man who came and sat next to me with tattoos up his sleeve and a fresh haircut, who wore a mechanic’s shirt and his hair greased. It was a scene.

I started talking to Edwin, the man with the tattoos. He’s just gotten out of prison earlier in the day. His girlfriend had cheated on him. He’d actually been fine with that, but when the girlfriends new boyfriend tried to steal his Trans Am it was too much. He saw red. He beat the man within inches of life. After a few years in prison Edwin realized he didn’t want to live a life of violence. Trans Am or no Trans Am. He had just gotten out of prison. She’d told him to stop bye and get some of his stuff. He wasn’t going to. None of it was worth the test. He was leaving Vegas immediately. Wasn’t sure where. Somewhere in California.

We were looking around and the scene was getting wild. The hippy now had a crowd gathered around and were playing cards. One of the homeless men, long baggy jeans, a stained white shirt, barefoot, wearing sunglasses, was doing the robot dance. He suddenly turned on his heals and walked up the street like a robot. Edwin started telling me about how he read Kerouac in prison and it had changed his life. He wanted to learn to let things go, to touch the Void, to let the universe play out before him without judgement and malice. As a fan of Kerouac myself I was drawn to this. I listened to his diatribe while watching the scene play out. A few minutes later the robot man came back and, still like a robot, approached us and offered us a cigarette. I took one even though I didn’t want to smoke. Edwin lit his, I tucked mine behind my ear. Two old women were dancing by the vending machines. It was three in the morning. There was a lot of energy in this bus station for three in the morning.

The hippy got up and came over to ask if we had an extra smoke. I pulled my from behind my ear and handed it to him. He stood looking shocked.

“Like magic, man,” he said.

I smiled. It didn’t really seem magical, but alright.

“You want some acid?” he asked.

I looked around. Acid explained this scene. I pointed around the lively crowd that was the entire terminal. “Acid?”

He laughed as we looked around, “every single one. I’ve got a bunch. Happy to give you some. Makes things more interesting.”

I tossed him a lighter to light his cigarette, and declined the acid he held out offering me. Edwin took some.

As Edwin continued talking I eventually began to doze, waking up from time to time, not feeling I’d really missed anything. But then he said something, and I’m not even sure the context, but something that has stuck with me all these years later.

“In the end the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist will have had more fun.”

I paused when I heard it. Edwin, I said, you are alright.

He was blazed by this point but looked back at me with a look that said thank you, thank you for believing.

Edwin sat with me through the night until it was time for my bus to leave. He woke me up with a gentle shake, “your bus to Montana is loading.”

The desert was light now. And as the light grew, the crowd that had inhabited the bus station slowly dispersed and the station began to fill with people who had slept in homes and hotels. People with shoes. People who had just showered and come fresh for their trip. The homeless wandered out into the shadows after a night of acid and cards.

I shook Edwin’s hand and thanked him for waking me up. Good luck in California, I told him. I hope you get another Trans Am down the line.

He shook his head, doesn’t matter what I get or don’t get. I’m a free man, and I plan on staying that way. And I don’t need any thing to be free. I just need myself.

I boarded the bus and headed back to Montana.

There is a lot more to that trip, but for today I can’t help but think about how simple freedom was defined for Edwin, how simple it is when you don’t need anything. I think the more we have the less freedom we have possess. I’m not saying it’s bad to have a home or a car, or nice things to live out our day to day, but it’s when the obsession for more and more and always new takes hold, that is when we lose perspective of what it is to be free.

If you only listen to social media, it’s a rough world out there. But if you get outside, focus on the good things you encounter in your day, look forward to things instead of begrudge them, basically if you try to take on the roll of the optimist instead of the pessimist, it is wild how much more satisfying your day to day becomes. For years I’ve tried to use my own Instagram feeds to remind myself of the small beautify moments that occur throughout the normal day. A flock of geese flying over. My dog running across the field. The way the light falls through the morning windows. The taste of my morning coffee. The moon as it climbs out from behind the mountain to the east. The little moments. They are sometimes only seconds of the day. But when we shift our focus to these things, and look for them, we find them, and get our minds shift to a new perspective of thinking. It wildly alters how we later reflect on the time passed.

Will bad things happen? Yes. They do. Shitty things, annoying things, frustrating things will happen every day. Sometimes they will compound and seem to multiply. But when you shift how you focus, and what you focus on, and strive to work through the bad things instead of just focus on the thing itself, even that act of motion becomes an act of optimism. Motion forward will get you out of them, even if it takes time.

So when people tell me how bad 2023 was for them, I just nodded. Did all of 2023 go swimmingly for me? No, but the bad things aren’t things I like to dwell on. They are simply things I encounter. And as I think of 2024 I’m sure some shit is going to happen, but I strive to never let those bad things define my entire life. I strive to use them as learning experiences. As growth. As perspective. And I know there are tragedies that affect many that are beyond the scale of what I’m referring to here, and I acknowledge that those tragedies can in fact make for a shitty year, even a more challenging life, but that is not everyone, and certainly not the way it goes for most people. And oddly, the people I know that have had the shittiest things happen to them, a kid gets cancer, a loved one falls tragically ill, a bankruptcy takes everything, those very tragic things seem to bring out the best in those people and they are often the last ones you’d ever hear about having a bad day from. That is truly inspiring.

So here is a toast to 2024, and the hope that we can help spread a little optimism to our friends and family. In the end, the pessimists may prove right, but we’ll have had a lot more fun.

Edwin, if you are out there, I hope you are well my friend, and I hope you got another Trans Am.