Stephen King

Notes from the Road (pt2)

And so… a lot has transpired since our whirlwind swing through the New England and the D.C. swamps. To be more explicit, we’ve wrapped the HSoB tour in a bow visiting all 48 mainland states. Admittedly, some got less attention than fairly warranted. Texas most egregiously. So, after taking care of health, dental, optical, and vehicular care in good ol’ Hays, America, we (Rocinante and i) made our way south when the Late October chill started infiltrating the great state of Kansas.

1st stop… Tejas…

Since the time is neigh for diving head first into the book project, i couldn’t in good conscience leave the current snapshot of Texas stand unfinished … we’re searching for that “fibrillating heart of our divided nation”. And Texas in an important pole in the current energy disturbance. So, we HAD to spend more time here. And so we did. Starting with a stop in Red Rock, a rural berg roughly 30 miles from Austin. We have friends there, including one bass player who i assume wishes to remain nameless. He’s the one from whom i learned the expression, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” He was a literal comrade in arms as we stumbled through a giant swath of the 1980s in the same Rock-n-Roll platoon… we took no prisoners. As well, a brief detour to celebrate Thanksgiving with a Texas comrade from a different war, the 2000s… the Bush years. Another fellow soldier whom i’m assuming wishes to remain anonymous. From him, i learned that there are no problems in Civil Engineering that, “can’t be solved with a bullet.” He has effectively estranged from his home state, but i suspect he still harbors a deep connection to this storied “whole ‘nuther country”. One thing for certain, he has a keen Texas ear for good music.

Anyway… Texas… after escaping the late autumn chill in Kansas, cruising over the vast tabletop of the Texas prairie, listening to Crime and Punishment via audio book, deep in a reverie, my concentration started wafting in and out with disjointed strains of a song i once knew by heart but hadn’t heard in many years. The voice was that “high lonesome” distinctly Texas lilt, and as the miles rolled by, the music grew more intense and i couldn’t ignore it any longer. When the song started drowning out the book, i turned it (the audio book) off, and racked my memory for a door that could lead me into the song properly, but it didn’t appear. Finally, wishing to get my concentration back in order to track the Dostoevsky novel properly, i pulled over in one of those Texas prairie parking areas for a quick Google search. I HAD to get a bead on that song. And here it is… Lilah, by Don Henley. From a record released the year my first marriage was falling apart. The song evidently embedded itself in the hole where my soul had been before the divorce. Anyway… it was the endless Texas prairie that stirred the song from its resting place, and that impression will be with me for the rest of my days.

Now, in Rocinante’s slipstream as we made our way South, an early November arctic blast ravaged the Eastern Midwest, and more, reaching all the way to Georgia, even Northern Florida. And since we have no interest in climates dipping into the 30s, we beat a burning path to Corpus Christi after sharing a few beers, reminiscences, and current doin’s with my old Rock-n-Roll war buddy.

After crossing the prairie, escaping the white knuckle traffic snarls of Austin, and finally spending a few weeks here in South Texas, i have a better impression of the Lone Star State and with that, ready to dive head first into the book project.

For that purpose, back to the River of Grass… back to South Florida and the Miami-Dade Public Library Network. I’ve begun the process of world building and character development, and i know i have a lot to learn before screwing up enough courage to present a manuscript to publishers. I also know the chances of snagging a professional deal are slim to none. But i’ve read Stephen King’s comments “On Writing,” and from that, i know rejections come in bushel baskets. So dear loopers, please understand, i don’t do any of this out of an expectation for something more than, how did Papa Vonnegut put it? Oh yeah, renewing, “feeding, and growing my soul”. And by some lucky coincidence, this has been my retirement plan all along… #winning.

Onward through the fog… Rohlfie

HSoB: Notes From the Road (pt1)

(A single spotlight hits an avatar, RONNIE HAYS, mid-60s, holding a worn acoustic guitar. He doesn’t play it. He just holds it like a shield or a piece of driftwood. He stares out, not at the audience, but through them.)

My pinkie toes. That’s what i remember about New Mexico. Not the Flagstaff sky, which was a shade of blue so deep i could’ve drifted upward into it forever. Not the train… a glorious old steam-belching dragon chuffing its way toward the biggest ditch on planet Earth. Nope… i remember my pinkie toes, both of them, singing soprano arias of pure, unadulterated pain inside a pair of waffle stompers that were just a whisper too narrow in the front. A purchasing error. A metaphor. I was trying to rise above the heat and the soul-choking smog of Albuquerque, to summit the Embudito Canyon Loop, but i was grounded by a millimeter of poor planning. C’est la. I turned back halfway up, defeated by footwear, then pointed Rocinante toward Georgia O’Keeffe’s ghost in Taos.

And like all of those “best laid plans”… a perfect day, ruined, setting me off on another journey altogether. You get those, sometimes. A gift. A trick. I was at Lake Wilson, back in Kansas. A limestone bowl of water so almost clear, like a dusty mirror on a rocky prairie. Not a breath of wind. The kind of day that makes you think the whole grand, chaotic carnival might just work out. And then the phone rang… a branch of the family tree just… fell to the grass… just like that… gone. The universe had provided a perfect day, and then, the bill. The HSoB tour was born right there, in the silence between the ringing and the news… an extended Bardo in motion.

And then, as if waking to a disjointed lucid dream, Cannery Row. Walking through the ghosts of Steinbeck’s worlds, smelling the salt and the history… beautiful. Then from the hand-held dream portal, i saw some new AI-generated video… something someone made with a sentence prompt. And soulless cartoon pop-stars with autotune larynxes, hitting all the right pitches on demand. Was this a dream, or were we building a world without flaws, without the shaky notes, without the happy accidents? A world of deus ex machina? A perfect, yet unrealized machine partnership? A place where my screaming pinkie toes would seem out of place.

What can we do? Here in the real(?) world… after the 2024 election, when the tectonic plates groaned and shifted rightward… a slow-motion drift that picked up steam with Bubba’s saxophone… and then poor Uncle Joe took to the debate stage like he was trying to remember where he’d left his tennis ball tipped walker… what do we do? I decided. I would be an anonymous troubadour… like Kwai-Chang Kane with a song list instead of Kung Fu. At worst, i’d languish in utter obscurity, singing to light posts and fire hydrants. At best, i’d become a gadfly on the rear end of a naked emperor’s pony. A tiny, buzzing annoyance for the forces of indecency.

Then came winter. The bomb cyclones and blizzards hammering the interior, but where was the Anonymous Troubadour? South Florida. All of January, February, half of March. I became a connoisseur of the Everglades, that “River of Grass.” Alligators sunning themselves like lazy, armored gods. The quiet hum of a billion insects. It was a primordial peace. Meanwhile, the forces of chaos were perfecting the art of “flooding the media zone.” A new outrage every hour, a new tweet to send half the country into a fit of cheering and the other half into a spiral of despair. The gasping death of democracy, playing out on a 6-inch screen with real life, ancient and unbothered, oozing by in a Florida swamp.

Then, Springtime in Foley, Alabama. A land of asphalt and every consumer convenience this roving malcontent could desire. Wide parking spaces. Good Wi-Fi. I almost stayed. But Mother Nature was cooking up her own brand of chaos. Springtime tornadoes, spinning up like God’s own potter’s wheel. I grew up believing this was a Kansas/Oklahoma thing. Now they were chasing me through the coastal South, as if to say, “You can’t escape the whirlwind, son. Not even here.”

On the way, i met a guy in a Louisiana dive bar who told me about Amos Moses, a local swamp-dweller who could allegedly dance with gators and heal the sick. A regular Cajun Jesus Christ. The New Apostolic Reformation had nothing on this guy. And while we were swapping local myths, the big, global myths were playing out in blood. The Holy Land, a place that’s anything but. Civilian casualties, famine, talk of ethnic cleansing and genocide. No easy answers, just the hard, cold reality of bellicose leaders discarding compassion like a soiled napkin. Even Israeli Jews were in the streets, screaming against their own government’s handling of the tragedy.

We find our bliss where we can. A perfect song, a mineral bath. Oh, Sweet Golly Miss Molly, the mineral baths. Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Hot Springs, South Dakota. Sinking into that sulfur-scented heat, you understand that this isn’t indulgence; it’s healthcare. It’s sanity. Ancient Romans knew it. I was just catching up. And while i was soaking, trying to dissolve the knots in my soul, the ticker tape of modern U.S.A. life scrolled on. In the year of our lord, 2025, there would be over 300 mass shootings. Over 300 little holes punched in the fabric of the country, one for every day, it was getting harder to feel whole. A perfect day… then the bill. Maybe i should avoid consuming news for a while.

Turn the page, and the Appalachians… the rolling hills of the Virginias and Carolinas were beautiful and suffocating. But towns like Boone and Morgantown were so peak-and-holler infested, driving through them was like being on a roller coaster you can’t disembark. It gave me a strange kind of claustrophobia. And then perspective… the morning news from Ukraine. Atrocities that make the U.S.A.’s 300+ mass shootings look like kindergarten playground scuffles. It’s all a matter of scale.

Then Pennsylvania… Amish country. A different kind of rolling beauty, pastoral and profound. The horse-drawn buggies, the men’s beards, the ladies’ bonnets. It was like driving through a photograph from a hundred years ago. Strange and wonderful. And then, as if Stephen King had personally designed our itinerary, we landed in Horseheads, New York. A town named for the mountain of bleached horse skulls discovered by early settlers. They put the weird right there on the welcome mat. From Horseheads’ digital nomad-friendly library we planned several day trips. From the macabre to the hallowed… Woodstock and the Big Pink. We meandered through the forest and landed outside the house where The Band forged their sound. I just listened to the whispering pines. After that, to Hartford, to see Sam Clemens and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s next-door visitor’s centers, wrestling with the soul of America a century and a half ago. Some fights never end.

Which leads us, of course, straight into the belly of the ailing beast: Washington D.C. The 250th birthday of the U.S. armed forces. The President wanted a parade, a big, gaudy show of military hardware down the Mall for his own birthday. In response, a “No Kings” protest was called. I went, expecting a worst case scenario, like Kent State, like Tiananmen Square. What did i find? Maybe a hundred people. Mostly old hippies, the very same tie-dyed specters Stephen Miller claims to be a clear and present danger to the republic. Lots of smoke. No fire. An insurrection of gray ponytails and Birkenstocks.

And the road goes on forever… stay tuned… much more to come.

(Ronnie Hays looks down at the guitar in his hands, as if noticing it for the first time. He strums a single, unresolved chord that hangs in the air, then begins to sing…)

I got a black bomb…
It’s tickin’ away…
I’m gonna take it out…
On the Blue Highway.

(The spotlight fades to black.)

This Land: Maine

Ronnie, aboard Rocinante (his trusty mount), felt the thrum of steel belts and asphalt as they rolled over the state line. The final stickpin on their quixotic “Hot Springs or Busk” tour… Maine! Land of sprawling nothingness peppered with the occasional Dunkin’, or so Ronnie imagined… Time for some lobster rangoon and a few more chapters of “Journey to the End of Night” from his audiobook.

“Upta camp!” Ronnie yelled to Rocinante, who responded with a disconcerting hesitation. Celebration was, as usual, premature. It smacked them in the face like a rogue wave of rockweed and kelp. Outside a dilapidated general store smelling faintly of woodsmoke and looming dread, a specter materialized. Tall, gaunt, skeletal, seemingly woven from the shadows, it pointed a bony finger.

“You ain’t from ’round here.” The phantom croaked, its voice like dry leaves scraping together. “This here’s puckerbrush country. Ya can’t get there from here, not really. Not without payin’.”

Ronnie scoffed. “Paying who? The moose mafia?” He’d heard this kind of backwoods hokum before. An encounter with a kooky pair in Derry, New Hampshire, with their whispers of clowns and floating balloons, had been similarly dramatic. They said they were from Bangor, and they seemed quite hesitant to endorse Ronnie’s wish to visit the home of that town’s famous resident, Stephen King. The woman had a pale anti-witch sort of countenance, like viewing a photo negative. White hair, fairly translucent skin, and a wry, knowing grin that gave Ronnie the stumbles. Her companion was a tall brooding figure reminiscent of one of Ronnie’s favorite childhood television programs. He was a dead ringer for Lurch, The Addams Family’s butler. The couple had a dog on a stout leash who took stock of Ronnie in a manner not typical of canine pets, a more sophisticated intelligence, not anxious, but not willing to let Ronnie pass without a proper olfactory inspection.

This motley bunch seemed to be warning our heroes away from Bangor, but the ever-rational Ronnie wasn’t willing to reroute the tour. He considered himself immune to such provincial spookiness.

But Maine… Maine hummed with a different kind of weird. Twelve thousand years of human habitation, the rumble of ancient glaciers, the ghostly echoes of birchbark canoes and longboats full of grumpy Vikings who probably just wanted some mead and a decent pillage.

Upon arrival, our heroes found Bangor a bust. Rocinante, usually welcome in the most unlikely parking lots, was met with glares. The traffic was a Gordian knot of SUVs and pickup trucks, each driver seemingly mainlining black coffee and simmering with a quiet, territorial rage. Ronnie felt like a single, tangled strand of dental floss in a Sasquatch’s beard. Downtown, brick and shadowed, felt less like a literary pilgrimage and more like the prelude to a particularly grim Edgar Allan Poe story.

Then he heard it. A voice, omnipresent and resonant, seemingly emanating from the very asphalt. “Get OUT!” Ronnie didn’t wait for a second opinion. They needed to skedaddle, but not before soaking up a bit more authentic provincial dread for the upcoming loopcircus.com post, “This land: Maine.”

Their escape route twisted through a labyrinth of densely wooded backroads, the “puckerbrush!” A claustrophobic embrace of pine and shadow. Every rustle of leaves like spectral footsteps. Every twig snap prelude to a jump-scare directed by a particularly malevolent George Romero on a sugar rush. Coastal Down East Maine, advertised as a haven for artists, felt more like a haven for things with too many eyes and teeth and not enough discernible flesh.

The meander back south was a blur of paranoia and close calls… a shadowy figure by a deserted lake that turned out to be a very large, very still loon. A guttural snarl in the woods that was probably just a disgruntled beaver, but still… Maine had gotten under Ronnie’s skin, a splinter of ancient fear he couldn’t quite dislodge.

Finally, the familiar, slightly less but not completely un-haunted bramble of Tewksbury, Massachusetts, appeared through the pines. Rocinante practically sighed with relief. Boondocker-friendly! And the library! Sweet, glorious, digital-nomad friendly WiFi. Ronnie parked, the tension draining from his shoulders. He could almost smell the lukewarm coffee and the comforting sight of the open laptop. Time to finish this damn story and forget about Maine if only for a little while. The unsettling, unforgettable vibe of a state where one truly understands why you “can’t get there from here.”

Onward through the fog… Rohlfie

The road to Bangor…
Lined with puckerbrush…
The ancient glaciers…
The rocky coast…
If you can hear…
The Viking ghosts…
They’ll say… you can’t…
Get there from here.

This Land: New York

Of course, like California, Texas, and Florida, New York is too big for just one post. However, we’ll have to settle on this phase of the tour as Ronnie & Rocinante are on an ever tightening time schedule. They may return to NY in late July or August, Texas in September or October.

Anyway… New York! The Big Apple! Everybody’s got a New York story, right? Like it’s a damn pilgrimage you gotta make to prove you’re a fully functioning ‘murican. So, Ronnie has his personal connections to New York, that slab of concrete crammed with eight million other schmucks all trying to get somewhere slightly faster than the next guy.

First up, Bob Dylan! Yeah, Bobby Z. The voice of a generation, a moniker he wisely refused to hold. Voice like a rusty wheel on an outlaw biker’s ride, but hey, you know what they say about the squeaky one! And Ronnie has a deep reverence for Dylan’s impact on the music biz. Over the years Ronnie has cultivated a small garden of his own. Well… not so much in the “business”. Even though he was active as a player in the 1980/90s, he retreated from that merry-go-round in time to ring in the new millennium. No longer playing for money, but not willing to abandon his garden. He’s out there with a tiny little rake and a watering can, growing organic, timeless songs while the bulldozers of pop-country are paving a formulaic paradise next door… in “the biz”.

Anyway, Ronnie retreated from the biz. Got out before some cheap hustler grafted a spiked dog collar on his neck and made him rock out about peach cobbler, or cherry pie, or something equally inane. Meanwhile, in contrast, Dylan, like Ronnie, came from “nowheresville“. But, unlike Ronnie, Bobby Z. made good. You could say he cashed in. Or you could say he wisely avoided J. Edgar Hoover’s death ray at a time of serious danger for influential folks taking contrary views on the war in Vietnam. And Ronnie? Well, he “jumped off the bandwagon in time to raise a couple kids and try to pursue some resemblance of adult career-like activities.” Translation: he chickened out and got a job! A job, folks! That thing you do so you can afford the therapist you need because of your job! But hey, at least he’s got his self-produced records, no autotune, all-natural. Not perfect, in fact, fairly crude. But hey, imperfect authenticity beats sanitized, pitch-corrected pablum any day!

Next up for Ronnie’s New York story! Those goddamn 1970s and 80s TV programs. Oh, the cultural landmarks! “All in the Family” apparently had a big impact. Well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it? His maternal grandad and eldest uncle were “Archie Bunker clones.” Clones! Like they were churned out in some bigot factory in Queens! Provincial, nativist, racist, misogynist… the wholeunenlightened enchilada! The things Ronnie’s Grandpa would say watching ball games on TV would make a PC maven cringe all the way to their socks. We kid you not! Probably stuff that would make Archie Bunker hisowndamnself say, “Whoa, take it easy there, Meathead’s dad!” There’s that. Yeah, but for Ronnie, Saturday Night Live came as a refreshing cool breeze… a tonic for the raging rebel soul!

Then, there’s the mid-2000s. Ronnie and his girlfriend hit the big city! A “whirlwind junket around Gotham.” Five days in Manhattan! Almost enough time to get used to the subway system. Almost! That’s like saying five minutes in a high-school boys’ locker room is almost enough time to get used to the smell! I’ve heard folks say you never get used to the New York subway. Like a mobile petri dish filled to the rim with way too much humanity and the distinct aroma of “what the hell is that?”

They “visited MoMa.” Modern art! Where jaded connoisseurs stare at a red square on a white canvas and go, “Profound!” Yeah, easy money, right? After a good stroll through MoMa, Ronnie and his companion “Sought out culinary treasures.” For some, that would be like paying $30 for a hot dog and calling it “artisanal.” But no, there’s super interesting ethnic fare to discover if you know where to look. Our heroes had an “exotic food on a budget” guide, and it delivered, in spades. They also hiked across the Brooklyn Bridge, a little slice of history. Hey! You can take the boy out of the High Plains, but… Anyway the pair also rode the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building! The observation deck! “Look, sweetie! Tiny little yellow cars full of tiny little schmucks just like us!”

And the highlight: a nighttime 5K around Central Park! Because running in circles in the dark in a city famous for its muggers is just good, clean fun! Nothing like a good dose of adrenaline to pump up your 5K time. And then, the pièce de résistance: Ronnie got yelled at by a Ralph Kramden clone driving a shuttle bus! A shuttle bus! They didn’t have a pass! A pass! For a bus! What is this, Gaza? “Where you from?” the bus driver bellows. Ronnie, thinking he’s clever, says, “Queens?” And the driver, a true scholar of human nature and New York geography, wasn’t buying it! So they had to walk back to the hotel! Oh, the humanity! Trudging through the concrete jungle, probably past a dozen guys selling “I Heart NY” shirts made by children in a sweatshop in a country they can’t pronounce. That’s your New York experience right there!

Finally, Ronnie and Rocinante are hunkered down in Horseheads New York for the writing of this post. Horseheads… central southern New York. Now there’s a name that just rolls off the tongue and lands in a pile of what-the-hell. The story behind it is “somewhat Stephen King-esque.” You might imagine it involving a disgruntled farmer, a cursed field, and a pile of, well, you know. Horseheads! We wouldn’t be surprised if the local football team was called “The Impalers.” Truth isn’t far from all that, by the way. You gotta love a town that just puts the weird right out there on the welcome sign. No pretense, just “Yup, Horseheads. Deal with it.” At least it’s honest, unlike the rest of the current era in the good ol’ U.S. of A.

Ok…

Onward through the fog… RH

In New York City…
You’ll find no pity…
To make it there…
Takes lots of gritty…
But like ol’ Blue Eyes…
In soothing crooner tones…
Make it there…
You’ll make it anywhere.

Ode to the Pseudonym:

Listen up, loopers… Ron Rohlf, here, direct from a van down by the river. Now, i’m not normally one to hide behind alias’. Makes a person slippery as a greased piglet. But then again, who doesn’t love a good trainwreck in slow motion, am i right? That first published work, that public debut… sometimes it arrives like a rabid skunk at a church picnic, just pure chaos, confusion, and stank. Better to hide behind a fake name, spare yourself the indignity.

They all did it, the greats: King hawking his twisted tales as that Bachman fella, Rowling conjuring stories under a man’s moniker. Even old Agatha, bless her arsenic-and-lace heart, she dabbled in deception. Like a pack of racoons disguised as respectable bankers, that lot.

Me? Well, i’m an open book, whiskers and all. Hell, i’m a walking contradiction… part raving doomsaying gonzo reporter, part starry-eyed optimist. I’ll bleed into the digital space, blazing like fireworks gone haywire. From the pointless despair of Geisterfahrer syndrome, to my impression of the Rittenhouse acquittal, to the modern “distracted driver” problem, to the note of gratitude for friends and neighbors on the front lines of local civil life, it’s all there (living in the USofA), warts and all.

Yet sometimes, we creators need smokescreens, ways to test the waters without getting scalded. That’s why we play with names, toss ’em out there like fishhooks to see what bites. So, Ronnie Hays, this “Mongrel of the Rueful Countenance” is more a pitstop on this fool’s odyssey than a permanent fixture… a quest to find a bright voice and when that voice rings out, clear and true as a firebell in the dead of night… well, that’s when the mask begins to fade, the freak flag flies, and the wild ride comes into sharper focus.

Till then, stay loopy, my friends.

And to all willing to take the good with the bad, we salute you.

Cheers…

Loopcircus