Booted up this morning in the yet-humid confines of my little rain-dampened abode. Tuned in on a Frank Sinatra song, you're marvelous, you're wonderful, etc. From where I sit I can see down through the hatch and out the open passenger door at the gravel and weeds of the industrial complex "lawn" where we parked the night outside of some tattoo parlor on the proprietor's invite.

It's weird, this tendency to wind up camped out in places or with people I wouldn't otherwise hang out in or with. But this is the third or fourth time our low-budget, no budget schedule that Chloe's saloon-savvy has landed us free "accommodations" for the night. I throw quotes around the word accommodations because, well, sleeping in parking lots, back lots, the back yards of hick town locals who call us "modern day fucking hippies," well, it ain't The Plaza in New York City, now is it?

Free lodging for a motley crew like us means roughing it in an urban homeless person sense. It means highway noise, trucks blowing by so close sometimes they shake your sleep space. It means weeds and chunks of broken concrete. It means slummin' it.

The Black Hills

I don't know what day it is. I don't what time it is. I don't hardly know where I am. I don't care.

Duke purrs and rumbles beneath me, a dragon heaving and twitching in dream sleep. A short while ago all was quiet 'cept the rain on the tin roof and bubble skylight overhead. But then the deep-cell RV battery died after many days of uncharged use. The computer began blinking at me, holding out as long as it could to give me time to save. I did. It died. And I spent the next half hour rigging up a charge wire from the main battery to the new, auxiliary one behind the driver's seat. Then I fired up the Duke, put a test lamp on my connections to make sure we were getting a charge, then crawled back up into the cave to type.

How long does it take a battery to charge with the engine running? I haven't a clue. The dragon heaves and grumbles.

Duke is no longer a car. He is a ship, a mad galleon adrift in mid-western America. Today we sail blindly in thunderstorm seas. When I heard the thunder coming, lumbering across the lake on feet of falling trees, I moved in action, unlashing and spreading out the giant army tent canvas to fully cover the trunk sculpture. As the rain began to come in earnest, I used one of the two tikki torches that jut from the front of the trunks to hold some of the canvas out and over the passenger door so that I could boil water for coffee whilst seated on the running board. The rain came then harder and the thunder crashed and Duke rocked in the wind. I just managed to boil water when I had to retreat inside the ship to escape the spray of the sea. I closed the door and sat awhile in the backseat peering out the porthole at the frothing Black Hills South Dakota squall. Then up into the cave I climbed, lit a candle, fired up the 386 and began to write.

There is so very much to write. I have been at sea now for at least a hundred years, or so it seems. So much has happened. Where can I begin?

Most everything I have written to date has been in the form of rough notes or heartfelt starts on chapters hardly developed let alone completed.

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Last update April 1, 2004