The Traveling Salesmen Project

The Adventure Begins

Mykul and I are traveling salesmen in the spirit of Willy Loman.  We travel to a different city each week in search of a living.  We give ebay seminars and sell Internet Storefronts ( ecommerce opportunities.)  But what we sell doesn't matter, it might as well be dancing lessons or snake oil cures. 

We are salesmen, poets, philosophers, social observers and drunks.  Follow our adventures as we visit cities around the United States.  Here are our other websites.

Mykuls Webpage

Lead Love Birds: Poems by c.a. leibow

Realtive Drunkenness and Affection

c.a. leibow, The Accordionist

c.a. leibow,s Gray's Anatomy: The Poems and Others

Our flight leaves Monday the 15th at 7 AM

Download i_will_return_with_salts.mp3

Melbourne, Florida

5am Monday Morning Jan 15th

This is too fucking early to wake up. It had been a long time since I had to be awake at 5am, it is more likely that I am finally going to sleep at this time. We are flying out to Orlando and the temperture is 5 degrees in Salt Lake City The pilot tells everyone that its 75 degrees in Orlando at 8am. This is a good gig.

FLYING

I have had a phobia about flying for years and now I have a job where I fly everyweek, and never a direct flight. An ironic job choice.

ARRIVAL

Mykul and I walk out from the baggage claim waiting for our luggage and are assaulted by the heat, 80 degrees and humid. Its wonderful and I spend a few minutes smoking a cigarette and just feeling the weight of the air and smelling the mix of flowers and jet exhaust.

We get into the rental car and drive toward our hotel. As we are driving, Mykul starts counting:

* 1 Wild Boar
* 1 Wild Turkey
* 3 Pelicans
* 1 Paper Mache Lion
* 2 Paper Mache Alligators
* 1 Paper Mache Shark pierced by a liqour store sign.
* Assorted bugs.

We are going to Melbourne for our first workshops and on the way we drive through Cocoa Beach where we will be on Wed. Cocoa Beach is dingy and slighly apocolyptic. I notice a few of the strip mall signs. One hair salon is called, "The Hair Poets". Mykul decides to get a quick trim and ask the girl behind the corner if they can give him aSonnet she tells him that the girl that gives sonnets is out but if he would like a Haiku she could help him out, There was a fishhing shop called, Just Shut Up and Fish, and a Church's sign tells us that Jesus could Pimp Out Our Lives!
We stop at the beach and collect shells and just stare out at the ocean.

We arrive at the hotel in Melbourne. Melbourne is more inland and is nauseatingly suburban. James Kunsler in his book "The Geography of Nowhere" observes how with the modern version of chain stores and malls we can't really tell where we are. This is Melbourne, there is nothing distinctive about it, with its chain resteraunts, grocrey stories and malls. I could be in California, Florida or a number of of other states.

We spend the night preparing for the next day and end the night sharing a bottle of Vodka channel surfing.

Cocoa Beach Florida

Wed Jan 17th

Finally we make it back to Cocoa Beach Florida and have our workshop. This group is an interesting group. There is a retired railroad worker from New York who retired to Florida 20 something years ago. He is living well of his Railroad Pension, one of the few pension systems still giving back for years of sweat and labor. There is a retired Hells Angel, a cigar lover who is starting a cigar store and doesn't really know anyting about cigars. There is woman who wants to sell coffee tables that are sculpted dolphins and horses, and a German father son, who bring their dog, Daisy with them. Daisy wants to start a business focusing on the needs of dogs smaller than rats.

When the day ends Mykul and I decide to walk. One thing about this job, is that the rest of the team doesn't drink, and wont let us use the rental car so we walk each city while they watch cable tv. Walking is a great way to get to know the less obvious parts of a city, the smell, the feel, the way living rooms look through open windows. Again both of us are very aware of the smell. The winter in SLC pushes scent down, holds it in a headlock of snow and ice. Winter smells mechanical.

We are looking for the strip clubs we saw when we first drove through. Strip clubs are not our first choice of entertainment, but in most smaller towns , they are open the latest. We walk about two miles and are not finding them. I look down an alley and see an adult book store. Across from the bookstore is an electrical substation and we stop and are quiet for a moment and just listen to the crackle.

The bookstore seems out of place, the complex is nestled in what appears to be more appropriate for a dentist office . The bookstore is extremely lit, much brighter than any adult bookstore should be. Behind the counter is a very large black women, it looks like she hasn't stood in weeks. Talking to her is a skinny, meth-head looking man, his thin mustache looks more like any eyebrow thats fallen down to his lip. We ask them where are the gentlemen's clubs. He tells us to go to the Lido, and not to go to Cheaters, because the Lido has better looking women. So we continue walking.

We finally make it to The Lido in Cape Canavaral, about 4 miles from the hotel. A typical club. The women were ordinary and there were only really three attractive women and only one was a stripper.
We watch from a distance, observers more than participants. I say to Mykul that I would be affraid of Cheaters if these were much hotter women.

Pixie, an attractive blonde with an attractive face siddles up next to me. Her name is perfect, her voice is high and anoying. She has just got off the stage and is chumming for a few extra bucks.

" So where are you from?"
" Salt Lake City, I am a traveling salesman."
" How about that, I am the welcoming committee for Salt Lake City Boys"
"Well what does that entail"
" I give you a lap dance for 15 dollars."
" What's a lap dance."
" Its where I sit on your lap and rub all over you for the lenght of a song"
" really, can I choose the song, like "Bye, bye Miss American Pie" 12 minute version?"
" I have never heard of that one,"
" I don't thinks so hun, I'm just observing, I am a writer, I observe alot."
" A writer needs a lap dance, you can write, 'her nipple was so close to his mouth.'"
" I'm OK.

Pixie left and another woman came to Mykul and I and asked if we wanted a lap dance. The owner of the club knows his sales process. There was a lot of suggestive selling going on. We finally decide to leave. The drinks were over priced at the club so we stopped at the CVS pharmacy and bought two bottles of wine. We decided to walk the four miles back to the hotel along the beach. A wind had picked up in the north and it had started raining. The beach was completely abandoned. We walked drinking wine talking about life and art and the things we wanted. The ocean was freakishly warm. Mykul stood looking out at the ocean and was text messaging a girl he has been spending time with making her jealous, as I tried not to think of the woman who left me behind.

The light on the water and the shore was incandescent. I wrote the following lines,

The sea rushes the shore sending
love letters
from all those
who died at sea
And moonlight shadows
of sandpipers, read
them with their long beaks.

We walked for miles getting drunk on the ocean and the bottles of wine. The ocean is better than any strip club.

When we finished the last bottle we put in 5 dollars, corked it and threw it into the ocean.

We owed a debt to the sea.

Download 02_now_i_can_smile.mp3

Leaving for Vacaville

This morning I woke at 6AM after going asleep at 2AM. Sleep is something that escapes me. We are leaving for Northern California. Two seminars, one in Vacaville and the other in Redding.

When William McDaniel purchased land from Manuel Vaca, he agreed that a one square mile area would be used to create a township. The land was recorded on Dec. 13, 1851, and the township was called "Vacaville." Vacaville prides its "Creek Walk" not unlike San Antonio's "River Walk"( at least that's what they say and has one of the lowest crime rates in Northern California.) Maybe Mykul and I will steal a car and go for a joy ride to San Franscisco.

Garbage Can, Vacaville, CA.

Vacaville, California

Monday we arrive at the Sacramento Airport earlier than we usually arrive, and thank god that it is warm and green! We have most of the afternoon to wander the small downtown area of Vacaville. We feel that no trip to Vacaville wouldn't be complete without seeing the "creek walk" as the tourist dept calls it. We imagine the river walks of other towns where four star hotels look over it and there are street musicians, art galaries and fine dining and where even on a slow night there are attractive women strolling. We figure that since it is a creek walk it will be like this but smaller. We walk to downtown and look for it. We find it 25 feet down in what could be more described as a gully with drained coffee snaking down it. The one eating establishment that looks over the drainage is closed.

Disappointed we find the first liquor store and buy a pint each of whiskey. Mmmm Ancient Age goes down easy. The city itself is quite quaint and feels like Santa Barbara's poorer, bastard child. Its 3pm and a few stores are closed already so we decide to go back to the hotel and return in the evening to see if the bars are hopping.

9pm

We walk the few blocks from the hotel to downtown and the bars are pretty much empty and mostly sad old men who have been held down by gravity so long they seem to sink into the ground, or the barstool or the booth.

We decide to walk through the old neighborhood next to downtown proper. The houses are big and Victorian and not subdivided into 20 rat hole apartments like they have been in Salt Lake City. We walk checking out the houses, looking in windows, wondering about the lives that are lived in Vacaville.
There is an extened family walking behind us making it difficult to drink. So we cross the street and take a few plugs; that's when Mykul sees an orange tree in someones back yard. Its been years since I smelled the smell of orange blossoms.

One of my strongest memories was being little living in Mission Viejo CA in a new cookie cutter subdivision, one of the first ones in the middle of a large old orange grove. by March the house was flooded with smell of oranges. I'd like to think if there is a heaven, it smells like that. There are no more orange groves in MV, they all have been raped and cemented over.

Mykul wants an orange or two and so do I. We climb up the 10 foot wall using a chair we borrow from someone's dark porch, Mykul being look out. On the otherside of the wall and butted up next to it, is some garden furniture, it will be an easy escape if we get caught. We look around the yard and do not see a sign of anyone or, a dog, so we drop down.

The tree is well hung with oranges. We each pick one and put it to our noses. The smell is intoxicating especially since we only smell heater dust and winter back at home. We now want all of them! Mykul climbs into the tree and starts throwing oranges down to me. We are trying to be quite, but my shirt is so full I keep missing the ones he is throwing and the oranges start making large thuds on the ground. I tell Mykul that maybe we can't take all of them. It takes a little time to convince him but he finally agrees. I give him most the oranges but put three in my coat pocket. I get on top of the wall and Mykul stands on the garden table handing them to me as I quitely drop them on the grass on the otherside. We are giddy until we hear a slidding door open and hear a woman say, " OK Cindy go out and go potty." Either this woman is an abusive mother or Cindy is dog. (who names a dog Cindy?) Mykul has already processed that it is a dog and drops the oranges at his feet and is on the wall with me instantly. We look and see a Boxer staring right at us. Us and the dog look at eachother for only a split second but it feels much longer, then the chorus of barking and growling joined by a second dog. We jump down and hear the sliding glass door open and hear the voice of a man. We start running as fast as we can and ditch into an alley. I don't like alleys and try to aviod them at all costs. The alley is dark and narrow and doesn't say anything to my intrusions We wait a few minutes trying to catch our breath.

Walking back to Main Street we share one of the oranges that I have in my coat pocket. It is very good. We are looking into the bars to see if there are any women, but just more gravity fallen men. We pass one bar kinda quicky and we think we see a beautiful woman. We walk back only to find it to be a Coors cardboard cut out. Damn!

We end up at TJ's tavern. It turns out to be a decent bar with 20-30 somethings and one resident old man who tells stale and unimagintive stores to the younger kids. When we walk in we notice a skinny girl with a pierced lip, she smiles big as we walk in. We have a few drinks and go out to the back porch to smoke a cigarette. The old man is telling his stories staring at me like he sees something on the inside of me that makes him fearful. The pierced lip girl comes out and I light her cigarette. We start talking, tell her we are traveling salesmen looking for a farmer's daughter." she laughs and says we need to go to Fairfield for that. She's pretty and has a snaggle tooth that I can't stop looking at. I love snaggle teeth. We talk and laugh and......... till the sun comes up.

The seminar turns out well eventhough I didn't get any sleep.

But finding a farmer's daughter made Vacaville an alright place.

Redding, California

Tuesday Jan 31st 2007

Our next city is Redding, California about 3 hours north of Vacaville. Driving I start talking note of the small towns that we pass:

Yolo,
Zamora
Arbuckle
Willows
Artois
Coming ( a very satisfied town)
Gerber
Proberta
Narnia
Red Bluff
Girvand
Redding

We arrive pretty late, put our bags into the room and look for something open, to quench our thirst. Across the street is a 24 hour Casino. Inside on the right is a bar with about 10 people, mostly hip kids in their Dickey uniformity, but somehow not quite right, like the kid with tattoos a Dickey hat and jacket, regulation facial side burns, but light blue jeans and puffy white skater shoes. Leaning against the bar is a larger woman with an orange dress and red scarf around her neck. She is droaning a slowed down power balad Karaoke version of Whitesnake. We walk further back into the "Casino" looking for the casino. In the back there are about 4 poker tables and two are full. Here to things seem scripted, the two younger men in proscribed goatees smoking cheap cigars, the woman leaning back in a black ill fitting dress showing the obligatory clevage and cheap perfume. Here they are big rollers, sitting in torn fake leather chairs, thread bare tables and dreams of a different life.

We go back to the bar and get a few drinks and the same woman is singing Karaoke. We go to the patio to have a smoke. A thirty something, leather faced but once attractive woman comes out and sits at the table across from us. She comments on our suits and asks what we do. She tells us that jeans would work better in Redding than suits. I notice that her shirt says Misiltoe. I ask her if I am under the misiltoe where do I kiss." She gives us a blank look and then we have to explain her shirt to her. She still doesn't get it. She goes on talking and talking about real estate, and her voice became a frustration of flies buzzing in our ears.

We leave the bar, walking past the same woman singing yet another dirge of some popular hit and walk out into the night air.

Wednesday

During the seminar there is a lot of down time for us as the presenter goes through his sales pitch. I am reading Helene Cixous and amazing writer and feminist theorist.

" We are criminals and we do not know how to express or prove that we are criminals. The problem is, as criminals we were recognized as such, we would have to pay for the crime. Yet if we paid, the crime would disappear and our debt wiped out.

We must keep our crime safe, to avoid the terrible fate of being forgiven."

Helene Cixous

This seminar is larger than usual and it makes it harder to make connections with people. One man says he is a writer and his book is in its tenth printing. I am curious about this book. He tells me that it is a book about financial independence through window washing. Books on window washing sell more than poetry in the US. America, a country not of poets, but of Bankers and Window Washers!

I am also reading Book of Sketches by Keroauc and decide to write one of my own.

Late morning
Red lion

Hotel Parking
Redding, California

Staring at Big Ass
Gas station sign
Orange &
Blue 76.

And the stretched
Out brown line horizon.
Electrical

Tower arms
stretched out
forty feet,

Farther out
Old White
Volcano
Shasta

Stares back.

The seminar ends and Mykul wants to stop by at Chico where he used to live and go to school. Chico is college town and is known as a party school.

In Chico we park and hang out at a locals coffee shop. The town is mostly dead. Mykul finds out that we missed an open mic poetry reading by 30 min, we bow our heads. While we are sitting there, three hybrid hippie/skaters come up to us and start talking. One is dancing on some kind of stilts. They ask Mykul for rolling papers and start rolling a few joints. One of the kid is a magician and starts doing tricks for us.

Mykul has some friends that live near by so go see if we can hook up with them. They have a good time talking about old times and catching up. The guys are smart and we talk and laugh about topics from Korean culture, Poe, Andrew's horrible Texas accent when he tries to speak Japanese. Andrew tells us of a short cut back to Sacramento and we leave about 2 am. Our flight leaves at 6:30am so its another departure day without sleep.

The drive is down a state road past working orchards. The moon is half full and lights the bare trees. There are patches of fog across the road and in the fields. These feel like the true field of dreams where the dead wander at night hidding behind trees as our headlights come to view. Here they hunt for fading memories of the living, among the roots of bare fruit trees and give off their sad light of longing.

Almost to airport, we can't stay awake so sleep at a rest stop. We wake up two hours later and meet the rest of the team curbside. We land in Salt Lake City and the only thing we can think of is sleep.

Augusta, Georgia

Leaving was an ordeal.  Since I ride a motorcycle I ride the bus during the winter.  It is Presidents day and I forgot, so the buses are not running like they are supposed to be.  The weatherman says that it is 36 degrees and I look out the window and it has stopped snowing, so I decide to walk the 14 Salt Lake blocks to the stop that leads to the airport.  It's 5:30AM.

The first 10 minutes of the walk are OK and then everything changes, like being in love with a younger woman.  The temperature drops 10 degrees and it starts snow, really snowing.  The snow is wet and my shoes are sloshing with freezing water.  I am wearing a green 50's style jacket and I look like a sugar coated green bean. 

I cut across a large parking lot to make it to the bus stop on time.  The wind has picked up and I feel like Amundsen crossing the Antarctic.  The bus is not coming for another hour and I will miss the flight.  I call for a ride.  I wait an hour in the cold walking to keep warm.  On the plane my feet and hands are tingling with sharp pins till they warm up.

Augusta, the de -facto home of James Brown.  We are staying at a hotel three blocks from where he shined shoes when he was 5 years old and a few blocks from a statue of him that was by buried four feet of flowers, pictures and letters when he died.  The convention center in town was where his funeral was held. 

The seminar is the worst we have ever done, not one person bought anything.  But the city is calling us.  On the corner of Eighth and McComrick is a sad blue horse standing on a balcony.  Srange but true.  I am talking to the hotel manager and she tells me about the Spirit Ple dust down the street.  This is a pole that slaves where chained to when they were being auctioned off.  She tells me how people( read White) have tried to tear it down.  One man chained the pole to his truck and as he tried to pull it down had a heart attack and died on the spot.  "I don't believe in evil spirits" she says.  I look at her and say, "Who said they are evil, I think they are the guardian spirits of memory."  She looks at me with a barely hidden disdain.

The team is down, I don't really care, the only thing I want to do is explore Augusta.  We finally leave at about 8:30PM.

We walk down eighth street and pass a few strip clubs, I am not  in the mood and suggest that we look for a good local bar.  We ask a guy on the street and he tells us about a local basement bar that white guys will like.  We walk in and a young guy is playing guitar and singing Jim Croce, " Bad bad Leroy brown."  There is a table of very gay men giving a birthday bash for their straight girlfriend.  The bar is mostly empty, otherwise but the beer is cheap.  We stay awhile.  The highlight of the bar is the men's restroom.  It hasn't been updated for 50 years and it feels like a time machine. I think of all the men taking a leak after too much beer, and all the things they were running from by drinking, the broken dreams, the lost loves or even the celebrations of birthdays, births and marriages.

We walk back towards the hotel and we want something different.  Matt says we should at least check out a strip club.  We decide to stop at the Discotheque Lounge. Under the 60's something neon sign it says "girls girls girls."  We walk in and pay the cover.  The club is mostly empty and very attractive early twenties girl comes and talks to us.  She is tiny and though not my type beautiful.  I don't like strip clubs for the most part, all the women ridden hard and put away wet, sad and dark, and something I have a moral conundrum with, but the women here don't have the same feeling, their faces are open and look healthy.  Matt and I talk to Bunny. Bunny is very sexy but not very bright.  We talk about her job and are maybe too inquisitive about it, but she wants $20 for a table dance and will put up with us for the few extra dollars.  Its a financial mis-step on her part but she opens up to Matt and they talk as a new girl starts dancing on stage.  She is physically perfect

Black hair, blue-green eyes, long waist and long legs.  I sit at the stage and put a few dollars up.  I am reading Chris Abani's The Flaming Virgin and in one scene he describes the smell of strippers, like they all buy the same lotion from Victoria Secret.  She is dancing in front of me and tells me to stand.  She takes off my hat and glasses and puts my face between her breasts.  The smell...intoxicating and expected.  She looks at me as she walks off stage and smiles.

The next girl comes to dance and she too is physically perfect, more curvy than the last girl.  This girl's face is not as open as the last, she is more reserved, less comfortable.  I am a man of contradictions.  I watch her, there are tears in my eyes, I am not sure why I am crying.  She probably thinks that I am some freak.  Maybe I am.  I want to posses her sexually, want to save her, want her to save me from.... I don't know what.     She finishes dancing and disappears.  I don't blame her.

My first stripper comes out, we talk.  She tells me 20 for a table dance.  We walk over to the table and I give her 20, tell her she doesn't have to dance.  She says that she has to, "house rules:".  She dances for me and I get lost in the curve of her right side, the changing movement of back.

She finishes and sits next to me and we talk.  I tell her that I am a poet and she tells me that she loves E.A. Poe, especially "The Tell Tale Heart"  We talk about her mother, the club, her boyfriend.  She asks me to recite a poem to her.   The club is loud so I put my mouth to her ear.  I can feel my lips against her ear, the heat of my breath.  I recite, The Hotel Cavalier and The Green Chair  I look at her when I am finished and there are tears in her eyes. 

We talk about her job and her boyfriend, how he read her diary and confessed but realized how much she loved him.    I told her its hard for a man to love a woman who is a stripper and it has nothing to do with her.  She understands, tells me how her man brushes the hair away from her face every morning and kisses her goodbye on his way to work.   "I usually pretend I am asleep and rarely say anything but I love it."  I tell her to tell him,  I  tell her how I have done that, no matter where the relationship was, and how I would have loved to have been more appreciated.    She tells me I am right.  I tell her to go home tonight and hold him, feel his breath, the rise and fall of his chest, the warmth of his body, smell him and feel nothing but gratitude, then tell him how grateful you are that he is in your life and you appreciate how he loves you."  She is smiling and crying and tells me she will."   We talk about other things and say goodbye.  She gives me gentle kiss on the check and tells me thank you. 

Matt and I walk out into the night.  It has cooled down.  We walk the empty streets not saying much.  Finally we go back to the Hotel and sleep peacefully.

Macon, Georgia: Begining of the End!!

How much is your integrity worth?  Mine so far, 2,000 dollars.

(This will be developed into a much longer freelance piece)

The Internet marketing seminar world is composed of about 5 main companies.  Each one is the bastard, inbred child of the others.  This is a world of half-truths, lies, manipulation and pressure all in the name of "opportunity" and  "financial freedom"  It is a modern snake oil sales tent with promises of restorative cures, and financial health!

The company I work for is only a little less sleazy than the others, which is the only reason I have stayed as long as I have.  For the most part the products work, but a stone wheel rolls and what good is a stone wheel?

Macon, Georgia is suburban and sprawling across the Georgia landscape like cancer, eating up land and forests with an insatiable appetite.  "There is money to be made here," is what our owner tells us before our first seminar.

The hotel with its dingy stucco arches and furniture stacked outside of the rooms, is a welcome sight after 3 hours driving.  Driving with these men; stunted in their emotional and intellectual development shortly after their missions, is an unmentioned circle in Dante's Inferno.  Constant fart jokes, sexual jokes, and the endless exchange of TV and movie quotes.  With each new movie, a bombardment of one liners.  Borat was an unbearable movie, not because of the movie but the constant, "Do you like me? I like you?"  "Where is the pussy magnet?"

There is something unappealing about each one of them.  One of the men has gained 80 pounds in the past year and is always asking, "Are we going to eat?"  " Can we eat now? " "I need food!"  There is one hungry and angry baby sitting inside his huge belly banging on the walls.   I always sit in the very back of the minivan, surrounded by all the luggage and boxes.  This is my sanctuary, where I have learned how to doze in every imaginable position.

The seminar beings with its usual assortment of participants.  Late middle aged, old desperate people looking for a way to make a few extra dollars to pay for doctor bills or help their children out, a few want to be millionaires.  There are retired train workers, a warehouse man, a teacher, a slaughterhouse worker and nurse. 

The beginning of the seminar starts before the presentation.  We are to mingle with the guests and schmooze them up, find out about why they have come.  In the Missionary Training Center, this was part of the sales process for selling Mormonism Inc., called the Commitment Process  and these fine return missionaries who own the company are well aware of its success.  There are 4x more Mormons since I went out and that's when they started using the Commitment Process.  So we small talk and warm them up.

The seminar starts with the fat guy.  He's warming them up, and asks if anyone has anything to eat?  He goes through the schedule for the day.  He introduces himself and his qualifications, but doesn't tell them that he has been doing seminar sales for 10 years.  Introduces the team, and his introductions are false.   He then introduces the owner and main speaker of the company.  I love this part, because the fat guy hates the owner guy but introduces him as his mentor and brilliant marketer.  What one will do for money. At least my stripper in Augusta was more honest and had more integrity then these upstanding family men.

The main speaker, we will call him Ned, has a degree....in acting.  He is good in front of a crowd.  He starts off saying how great it is to come to work and have everyone clap, how many of them would like that kind of job.  Then the lies begin.  "Companies pay me $10,000 dollars to come a work with them on their Internet marketing"  or " I kept on getting laid off after I set up a companies Internet strategies and then they sold the company."  He never tells them that the last company this happened with......was an Internet market sales seminar company.  He tells them about going to a prestigeous school and Ross Perot speaking, giving him this air or business authority.  I wonder how many would buy from him if they knew his degree was in acting?   I won't go through all of this lies and half truths at this time, that's for a longer freelanced article I am writing, but to say the least, I sat there thinking to myself....I can't do this any more, but damn I need the money.

Martin and TC were very young for our crowd, twenty something.  I like them, they are bright and engaging.  TC is a rapper and very talented and Martin wants to do something that will give him freedom.  We go through the 8 hours of seminar and we talk through most of it.  At the end of the day, they want to buy one of our products.  I at least know this product works.  They don't have the 5,000 dollars but can come up with maybe 500 and make payments.  They want to get the seminar price.  That's part of the spiel, " This price is only good for today!"  The boss man wants me to get them to sign a promissory note.  So I take them to the lobby of the hotel/motel and I break it down for them.

" I like you guys, here it is.  The product is good and there is a potential to make some money with it, but these guys who have been talking to you, are full of fucking shit and 75% of the stuff they told you about themselves and the amount of money you can make is a lie.  I have no respect for them and the last thing I will let you do is sign a promissory note binding you to them.  If you want the product he will sell it to you in a week or a month or a year for the so called "seminar price" 

It felt good.

Martin still calls me and is working to get the capital to pay for the product.  I will make sure that if he buys it he will be protected. 

How much of this can I get away with?

NEW!!! THE LAST SEMINAR

The Bar Scene

After the drive I need a drink.  We find a bar in  downtown Greenville, it is the busiest bar we have seen yet.  Matt and his brother start their fishing.  They catch two sisters with lines from Borat.  What the hell am I doing here?  I drink and drink, but it doesn't work like it used to, no escape, no lightness, just a heaviness of trying to constantly be some place else. 

I act, put on a mask of interest.  Small talk and bullshit.  Every 30min or so, I walk out into the fresh air and walk the small downtown.  How did I end up here?  Strange thing, I hate it and love it.  My life is moving with an intensity and propulsion I haven't  known in  a long time.  I am on a path of becoming, becoming something more, breaking the shackles of stagnation, being forced to live, to really live. 

Maggie is sitting on a barstool, leaning against a wall.  We talk, she is more interesting than the rest of the drunk, self-hating, sad drunks.  She has amazing eyes, clear, sharp and open.  She finds out that I am a poet and asks me to recite something to her.  I finish and she stares at me.  says, " I really felt something, and I don't ever feel anything"    She makes me uncomfortable, the way she stares at me like she wants to devour me....not in a sexual way, I could appreciate that, but more in I will possess you sort of way.   This is the last thing I want.   Matt and his brother have closed the deal on two sisters, like an episode from the REAL WORLD.  I am glad we are leaving.

We stop at their house, they are flirting with eachother, while I talk to the cat.  The cat is articulate, we talk.  She is the best conversationalist I've met.  We talk of all manner of things.  Finally we leave to the hotel with the sisters in tow.  They are attractive, but too drunk to be interesting.  I have little respect for someone who can't hold their liquor.  I have never done anything intoxicated that I wouldn't do sober.  Don't get me wrong, I have said things I shouldn't have, made a fight last longer than it should, but I have never done anything I wouldn't have done sober.  I wonder what these girls will think in the morning?  Maybe nothing being a part of the Narcissistic Generation, where the world revolves around them and everyone else are just players on their stage. 

Finally we are back at the hotel, I say goodnight and can't wait to go to sleep and dream I am a man dreaming, I am a butterfly, dreaming that I am a man.

BASTA!

This was the call of the Cuban revolutionaries, Basta; Enough.  I am sitting in the Seminar and I have to leave, I can't sit there and listen to the lies.  The speaker is desperate to make a sale and he is pulling shit out of his ass.  I am talking to this guy, and telling him some bullshit story about myself.  I am sick to my stomach.  " Thou shalt not bear false witness!"   I am screaming at myself in my head, "You fucking liar"  but I haven't said anything because I need this job. I don't think I can do it one more day. 

I make myself scarce, walk around the hotel, avoid the conference room.  Don, asks me what I am doing, leaving the new guy alone.  I tell him that he's smart he can handle it.  We get into a fight about the whole thing.  I want to punch him, but just lean against the wall and take a drag of my cigarette.  I am sure he feels my disdain.

What does a man have if he doesn't have his integrity?  Pascal has said that life is not about getting the things we want, but about moments when we choose what is important to us, and that people matter, that the choices we make matter.  At the end of our lives we are the choices we have made.   

I am not what they are, I am different.  It's time for me to stop this.  Mykul once said that you can tell the character of a man but whom he associates with.  I believe that, and cannot associate with these small men; I am smaller because of it. 

This ethical dilema has made me think of who I am. Camus has said that in a world of injustice, the only response is to be just.  I chose to be just.    I am a good man.  This is the one thing that keeps me going in a world of compromise and self absorption.  I am a good man.   I can say this with confidence and grace.  Don't get me wrong, I am no saint, I can be a weak man, a fragile man, an asshole and self absorbed man and it has taken me a long time to admit this and embrace it.  In the end, my motivations have been just and true.  Of course, I could have done things differently in my life at times, but I have no regrets.  It is a great gift to be able to say that, and it comes from knowing myself and a willingness to go all out, risk everything for what you believe in.

I am no longer embarrassed by my weakness or my wounds, they are part of who I am.  I am the light and the shadow.  I will stand up for what I value, becuase  I would rather be homeless like David in Wilmington, than wealthy and false.  Authenticity and the search for authenticity is the only way I can live.

We leave the hotel at 5am, get back into SLC at 830pm.  This trip we have circled the US.  We flew South - down to Phoenix then across to get to NC.  On the way back we fly over the Great Lakes.  An appropriate flight path for my last seminar.  Leaning against the bulkhead.....half asleep - I look out the window at America unfolding before me..... So many lives, so many dreams, and I swear I can hear children singing.    I fly above them catching all their prayers as I pass over and hold them for a brief moment and then let them go.   

Beautiful!

This has been quite an adventure.