Already Stockton has fled and returned, and Big John, who appears to hold the greatest swing over the project, has threatened to pull out yet remains in what appears a guardian stance.

The whole thing is bizarre and outlandish. One night it's Ramon at an interstate rest stop directing a highly dangerous and most certainly illegal pyrotechnics display for the camera, and not two days later the very same man is shouting "Who the fuck did that?" when I off-handedly ignite one pack of firecrackers in a moment of extreme ennui. "What do you wanna get us kicked out of here?" he shouts and the whole gang gets quiet as though the school principal himself had slapped a ruler on his desk and demanded to know who had snickered at him.

Ramon is a tyrant and a fool. He's got all the markings of a shallow, unreliable yet full of promises Hollywood snake in the grass. Yet he's way out of his element out here on the road with us. We're artists, true blue crazies well-accustomed to going without and torn through with an independent streak as long and as sharp as a battle sword.

But on the other hand, Ramon is an innocent of sorts. He shouts and stomps and never looks you in the eye because in truth he's scared shitless of you. Underneath that exterior of bullshit is a very insecure but probably well-meaning guy. And as a filmmaker, perhaps he too deserves the title of artist. I wouldn't know, having never seen his art yet having experienced plenty of his personality.

Chiquita and Ned have returned. Good for them. This means we're succeeding in moving the city to the mountain. Not that we really set out to do so. But the choices are hardly balanced. At $6 or even $13, a night spent in the forest by a lake is light years away from a dirt lot by the highway on the outskirts of Rapid City.

But there return in not so good for me, or for this story rather. It means distraction. I am tempted once again. So if at any moment the words cease in mid-sentence, well, you'll know why.

It grows dark. I remember the sweetest of naps this afternoon. It was sometime between little fits of rain, between my mid-afternoon swim with Chiquita and Seven's return from the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Sturgis. The skylight was covered in canvas, as it has been all day, allowing in only the tiniest points of the dim gray light of day such that from inside my cave it appeared that I was looking up at a starlit sky. The campground was empty and all was silence and rest. I folded up the computer, set it aside, and lay down. And I slept. And when I awoke it was due to no disturbance, only my inner clock signaling that I was sufficiently rested. It was perhaps the most beautiful and pure sleep I have had in weeks, perhaps years.

Now I drink instant coffee and watch the yellow candle whittle away on the shelf to my right. All day the hatch has been open to afford me ample air to breath, and now looking down it I see only darkness. Night has come.

The road is divine at such moments as this. This is eternal camping. This is the possibility of travel without end. And it feels good. It doesn't matter that some filmmaker struggles with an impossibly small budget and an excess of hot air and that he is supposedly in charge of all this. It doesn't matter that I myself have less money on hand than it will take to get me back to the west coast in gas. It doesn't matter that the only magazine that has for sure committed to taking this story doesn't even pay. It doesn't matter.

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Last update April 1, 2004