There are nearly three weeks between my last post and taking the time to sit down for some small talk with myself: the gravity of change that comes with traveling needed a longer moment to settle. That part of me thriving in constant stimulation must allow expectation to fade as I return to a routine and a culture from which I feel increasingly alienated. But this is my life at this time in Phoenix, Arizona, one of bearing witness to the mendacity of a population trying to buy happiness.

Well, the fact of the matter is, I really never stopped writing as I have three documents on my desktop representing some 2,400 words of observations that linger in the realm of uncertainty, meaning that maybe they find their way to the blog, and maybe they don’t. Not that this was all I wrote, but I was also busy dragging some ancient memories out in the writing about Caroline’s adventure at Yarn School in Harveyville, Kansas, back in September 2007. That was triggered by my ongoing attempt to account for every travel day Caroline and I’ve taken since the advent of consumer digital photography.

If you look to the right column of this blog (or near the bottom if you are viewing this on a smartphone), you will see a block with the heading “Other Pages.” At the top of that section is a link to a page titled “Travels In The Digital Age” which is my attempt to eat all of your bandwidth; just kidding. Seriously though, as of today, there are 540 records (images and links) that track our adventures away from home, starting at 9.9.99. I found our oldest digital image, and from there, I’ve tried posting a photo from each day out on the road. So far, I’ve caught up to October 1, 2007. During that time, it appears we were traveling on average 67 days per year, which seems like a lot of vacation, but more precisely, we vacationed 5½ days per month, which doesn’t sound like that much. Ultimately, I think I’ll be adding about another 1,000 images before I catch up to where we are today, but at that time, I’ll probably never recommend someone clicking the link because it will download hundreds of megabytes in imagery. And that moment won’t be very soon as I’m nearly two solid years into trying to bring this effort together.

What’s taking so long to assemble this massive post? As I move from year to year, ensuring I’ve grabbed at least one image from every day we were traveling, I stumble into trips that have never been documented, so I review the photos and try to write something to those. In other cases, I posted only one photo of a trip as bandwidth limitations in those days wouldn’t support the posting of 30 of my favorite images from the 200 – 500 I could shoot in a day. So those posts get updated too, and, luckily, Caroline hunted through a bunch of our old notebooks, discovering travel diaries that came in super handy in fleshing out some of our forgotten stories.

While we were in Germany, I hit a new milestone: 1,500,000 words published here at JohnWise.com. Back in July 2020, I wrote that I’d shared a little more than 1.1 million words, so having written nearly 400,000 between then and now, I’m pretty happy. What does this number mean? Really, nothing at all, though it is a good metric assuring me that I’ve been diligent in exercising my nascent skills. Sadly, my next bragging milestone requires a half-million more words to be written, so after a bit more than another year out, I’ll be posting an entry with the simple title: Two Million.

But does any of this answer “Where I’ve been?” No, it goes into some small details of what I’ve been doing, and the snarky answer of where I’ve been could simply be stated as I’ve been in the milieu. This has become a question that is stymying me as I scan the last couple of weeks trying to discover if there’s been an overarching theme tracing through my mind, and, other than generalized malaise, I can’t put a finger on anything particular. Yet, I have this nagging feeling that just beyond my conscious view there is something preoccupying me and that if I just posed the question of where I’ve been to myself, I’d ponder and then answer this. Nope, not coming up with anything, so I must have been nowhere.

As I wrote yesterday, I’d successfully written John Wayne Gacy; how about trying Charles Manson? I didn’t really have much of anything to say to him as, at 24 years old, I was a noob, and I was about to find out just how stupid I really was. I first wrote the California Department of Corrections asking for Manson’s address; the response offended me with its language of effectively calling me a deviant. The guy who wrote me closed his letter with a kind of best wishes to find what I was truly seeking as though I was on a pilgrimage. I was, to say the least, upset.

My next act had me funneling my indignation back into the typewriter as I hammered off a letter to the office of then-California Governor George Deukmejian. I let him know how incensed I was at this attempt at trying to guilt me into not exercising my 1st Amendment rights. I sent it off, never expecting to hear another word. When I did hear back, I wished I never had. The Governor’s office apparently reached out to the Department of Corrections and let them know about the butt-hurt idiot in Germany using a military address to whine about not being able to write a madman without a lecture. I was assured I was free to write to Charlie at San Quentin Prison, and the letter that was sent to me was being taken out of circulation. My first thought upon reading this was, “Well, this is going into my State Department file along with all the other crazy shit that’s in there from my time in the military.”

Manson never wrote back, and as I shared in the previous blog post, I lost interest in exploring this avenue of deviancy as it really was just a morbid curiosity to communicate with someone seriously on the fringe of society. When people around you are boring conformists and what you seek is potent stimulation, the paths you might take could look peculiar to those around you, so it goes.

Goddamn, I hated the Army. Oh, I loved basic training, and I got into my job as a part-time database programmer, part-time videographer/trainer, and data processor, but the bullshit of playing soldier was alien to me. I wanted an experiential life, not a regimen dictated by blind obedience and pretending that we were doing something important. Important to me was art, literature, music, creativity, exploration, history, love, fucking, and generally peeling back the skin of the onion of culture.

I’d joined the military in 1985, and by the end of 1987, I was free of that psychodrama to begin my full-time journey into the natural world of deviancy outside the machine of conformity. For two years at Rhein-Main Airbase adjacent to the Frankfurt International Airport, I had plowed into every word of Friedrich Nietzsche I could put my eyeballs on. I had dined on the vulgar fruit of Charles Bukowski’s effluvium. To my surprise, I learned that fist-fucking was really a thing, as was shit-eating and piss-drinking. Bertrand Russel was playing a role in my life along with Wilhelm Reich and a host of other thinkers. Art had been a part of my everyday existence, as was the discovery of music I’d never heard of before. And then I left the military before my term was up in large part due to a photo I’d taken of the performance artist Johanna Went, but that’s another story. From Ft. Bliss in El Paso, Texas, I headed back to Germany, and if I could have parachuted right into the red light district, I would have landed on the first prostitute I saw.

I wanted visceral and raw life to counteract the attempted brainwashing I’d endured for more than two years, and the only way to get there was to further embrace the antipodal world from where Americana and the U.S. military stood. I didn’t know how to reach my counter-culture heroes, who were celebrities in their own right, so I turned the other way and tried writing someone who was still a captive of total control.

Prison is where I thought I was while acting like a soldier, so why not write a prisoner? But I didn’t want a pen pal; I wanted to write someone who was a kind of Socrates or Dr. Frankenstein in his own right, and so I took aim at a serial killer. Maybe the most famous person who met that criteria in the 1980s was the Killer Clown, a.k.a. John Wayne Gacy.

So I found his address at Menard Correctional Facility in Illinois and wrote him a letter; he wrote back. For a few months, we exchanged letters, culminating in Mr. Gacy sending me an oil painting of some Disney characters dedicated to my daughter Jessica. I’d imagine that would make some people groan, knowing an infamous serial killer was creating a painting for someone’s 2-year-old daughter. Such is the life of someone feeling outside the mainstream.

Regarding what’s in the book from me, well, that can mostly remain private into eternity as the book is largely unavailable unless one wants to part with nearly $1,000 to secure a copy, but nobody on earth could ever have that level of interest in what some idiot 24-year-old had to say to a monster. For years, I was embarrassed to be included in the book, and I do believe that was Gacy’s intent, but here I am among fellow weirdos, such as Lux Interior of The Cramps and a young Oprah Winfrey, exploring our curiosity.

Is this something that progressed or obsessed me as I grew older? Nope, after trying to establish contact with Charles Manson, which failed, I was already growing out of it. By the time Jeffrey Dahmer was apprehended I was tempted to write him but instead satisfied myself by picking up a t-shirt with his mugshot on it while on a trip from Germany to Los Angeles. Wearing that shirt in Germany went unnoticed by Europeans who had no idea who this cannibal was, but American tourists traveling through would raise their eyebrows at the rude hippy flaunting such ugliness. I was reveling in it because back then, I was loaded with a bunch of fuck you.