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.
Bangor NativeWelcome to SK’s MaineRonnie’s crazy daydreamBetter bring a compass
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.
Ok… Rocinante has ventured into the Pennsylvania interior, not so much because Ronnie asked her to, but because the public libraries in Altoona all seem to be stuck in the 20th Century. Either lacking accommodations for folks with their own productivity machines (laptops) or prohibiting Ronnie’s coffee mug AND lacking places for him to work with power and WiFi. Anyway, they finally settled in a Sheetz convenience store to compose this post.
Now, the extent of Ronnie’s personal history with Pennsylvania is from the deep dark days of the 1980s. A time of self-discovery, good times, and madness. Ronnie and few other lost children formed a brief tribal bond, and one of those lost children was a native of Pennsylvania Amish Country. So… rather than dig up a bunch of boring travel-blog fare, let’s relive a version of this story.
Without further adieu, the saga of “Dangerous Dan, the Sonesta Stud.” WARNING – nearly all of the following names and places have been changed in order to avoid future heartbreak or litigation. Consume at 2025’s level of truth-decay:
The weathered picnic tabletop in the Yoder kitchen probably saw more existential dread per square inch than a Parisian café, and that’s saying something. Young Danny Yoder, not yet “Dangerous Dan,” certainly not the “Sonesta Stud,” just Danny, a kid with an ample bowl-cut mop of hair and a future he figured was about as exciting as a rerun of Hee Haw, was chief among the brooders. Pennsylvania. God’s country, his old man called it, usually right before hitching the family horse to the buggy to run errands. For Danny, it was a landscape of muted greens and plain grays, a place where dreams went to die, or worse, to settle down and work the farm.
He’d seen the rock gods on MTV, their hair a defiant sculpture against the drab backdrop of whatever town they’d crawled out of. Poison. Mötley Crüe. Bon Jovi, for christsake. Their rebellion was loud, dyed, and probably flammable. Danny wanted a piece of that. So, the bowl was stowed, replaced by a peroxide inferno and enough Pink Can Aqua Net to qualify as a minor environmental hazard. He spiked it high, a golden crown of defiance, and pointed his rust-bucket west, toward Thornton, Colorado, a place he’d picked off a map because it sounded like it might have a decent guitar shop.
Thornton in the ‘80s. It was a magnet for the misplaced, an endless sprawl of cloned, cookie-cutter future meth labs, much like its inhabitants. Dan, as he now insisted on being called, found his tribe. There was Rikki, a drummer whose rhythm was only slightly less erratic than his love life; Timothy “Zipperhead” Johnson, who’d fried half his brain cells working at a battery plant but could beat Kasparov two out of three, or so he claimed; and a rotating cast of lost boys and girls, all chasing something just out of focus. They congregated in the “Mountain Knowles” apartments along the Valley Highway smelling of stale cigarettes and ambition, the kind of ambition that usually fizzles out with the rising of the “Golden Orb.”
Dan, with his newly minted blonde spikes and a sneer he’d practiced in gas station bathroom mirrors all the way from PA, fell in with a band. Not in the band, mind you. More like… around the band. Their singer, a raven-haired siren named Tina whose voice could melt glaciers and whose eyes promised paradise and peril in equal measure, had a habit of attracting trouble. The kind of trouble that wore leather jackets and carried bike chains. Dan and the boys, fueled by cheap beer and an even cheaper desire to be heroes, appointed themselves her unofficial bodyguards.
Now, the legend of “Dangerous Dan” was born one sticky night behind a dive bar called The Rusty Nail. A gaggle of local tough girls, jealous of Tina’s allure or maybe just bored, decided to redecorate her face. Dan, armed with nothing but his Pink Can Aqua Net (extra super hold, naturally, because even in a brawl, a man has standards) and a surprising amount of righteous fury, waded in. He didn’t so much fight them as…disperse them, in a cloud of aerosolized lacquer and screeching. Tina, suitably impressed or perhaps just grateful not to have a black eye, rewarded him with a kiss that tasted like cherry lipstick and untapped potential. He was smitten. Head over heels. A goner.
The Sonesta Bowl, a local institution smelling of lane wax, stale beer, and desperation, was where the other half of his moniker took root. Dan, it turned out, had a certain…knack with the ladies who frequented the attached tavern. Maybe it was the hair. Maybe it was the brooding silence that some mistook for depth. Whatever it was, the whispers started: “That’s the Sonesta Stud.” He’d just shrug, order another Bud, and try not to think about how Tina’s eyes were increasingly drawn to the lead guitarist, a lanky dude with actual talent and fewer outstanding warrants.
The good times, as they always do, started to curdle.West Colfax was a different beast than suburban Thornton, a gritty strip of pawn shops, rods & bods, adult bookstores, and taverns where trouble wasn’t just brewed, it was served on tap. A turf war, or something equally pointless and testosterone-fueled, erupted between Dan’s loosely affiliated crew and a rival gang of greasers who looked like they’d stepped out of a time machine stuck on 1957. One night, under the flickering neon of a liquor store sign, things got biblical. Or at least, club-ical. Dan zigged when he should have zagged and a tire iron, or maybe it was a table leg (details got fuzzy when your bell was being rung like the Liberty on the Fourth of July), connected with his scalp. He woke up with a headache that could curdle milk and a ragged scab that peeked out from his blonde spikes, a permanent souvenir of his Colorado escapade. Dangerous Dan, indeed.
Then came the scattering. It happened not with a bang, but with a series of mumbled goodbyes and slammed car doors. Rikki, ever the pragmatist beneath the wild-man exterior, joined the Navy. “Three hots and a cot, man,” he’d said, “and maybe i’ll see the world, or at least a different part of this godforsaken country.” Zipperhead, after a particularly bad batch of something he’d scored, decided the ski slopes of Summit County held the answers, or at least better powder. Another, a quiet kid from South Dakota named Rogger Dogger, just packed his duffel one morning. “The grass ain’t always greener, Dan,” he’d offered, a sad smile playing on his lips. “Sometimes it’s just…different grass. And sometimes, your own patch ain’t so bad if you just water it right.”
PA Amish CountryA couple Zipperheads
The final blow, though, was Tina. She found her more eligible bachelor, a guy who owned a chain of car washes and didn’t have a collection of empty ramen noodle cups under his bed. Dan saw them once, gliding out of a steakhouse, her laughter echoing, bright and carefree. It was a sound he realized he hadn’t heard from her in a long time, not when she was with him anyway.
The Sonesta Stud. It was a joke, really. A hollow crown. He’d make out with the local talent, sure, a brief flicker of connection in the smoky haze of the bar, but it was like trying to warm your hands over a book of matches when you were freezing to death. The depression, when it finally hit, wasn’t a sudden storm but a slow, creeping fog, muffling the world, turning the vibrant colors of his imagined rock star life into a dull, aching gray. The kind of gray he’d tried to escape back in Pennsylvania.
The realization hit him harder than that club on Colfax. Wherever you go, there you are. The bleakness wasn’t in the rolling hills of PA or the strung out sprawl of Thornton. It was in him. A little piece of that old familiar picnic table, that existential dread, had apparently stowed away in that rust-bucket Pinto wagon and made the trip west with him.
So, Dangerous Dan, the Sonesta Stud, packed his remaining can of Aqua Net (it was mostly empty now, like his promises to himself) and pointed the Pinto east. Back to the land of doting parents, nosey cousins, and primitive back roads.
And a funny thing happened on the way back to being Danny Yoder. Or maybe it happened once he got there, once the Colorado dust had settled and the ringing in his ears from too many nights spent too close to overloaded amps had finally faded. The primitive back roads? They weren’t so bad. Kinda pretty, actually, especially in the fall when the leaves turned. The provincial attitudes? Hell, most folks were just trying to get by, same as anywhere. And his nosey cousins and doting parents…well, they were family. They’d clucked over his scar, his suspiciously blonde hair (now growing out, revealing the sensible brown it had always been underneath), and his general air of a man who’d wrestled with a few demons and maybe, just maybe, pinned one or two of them to the mat.
The things that used to grate on his nerves like a cheese grater on a raw potato suddenly seemed…comforting. The familiarity of it all, the sheer, unadorned Pennsylvanianess of it, was a balm. He even found himself helping his old man on the farm, the smell of turned earth a far cry from stale beer and regret.
Danny Yoder was home. The Sonesta Stud was a ghost, a story he might tell his own kids someday, if he ever got around to having some. Dangerous Dan? Well, maybe there was still a spark of him left, a reminder that even a kid from an hard working family in Pennsylvania Amish Country could chase a crazy dream, get his scalp split open, and live to tell the tale with a wry grin. The grass, he finally figured, was green enough right where he was standing. He just had to remember to look down once in a while, instead of always staring at some distant, peroxide-fueled horizon. And maybe, just maybe, that was the most rebellious thing of all.
Onward through the fog… RH
You can gain insight… Off a single sheet… From Amish country… To the Denver mean streets… To pin your demons… To the mat of destiny… Everywhere you go… There you are.
How did they put it in the Chocolate Factory? Oh, yea, “Blaming the kid is a lie and a shame. You know exactly who’s to blame!” Anyway, the subject of our story was fairly used to getting his way as a lad. His silver spoon had never known the indignity of a mere polishing cloth. And now, he’s conceived a notion so audacious, so utterly of the moment, that even his boss, a man whose portfolio resembles a rogue’s gallery of ethically dubious ventures, blanched. Our hero, you see, desired to transcend the limitations of mere flesh. He yearned to become a cyborg – a gleaming amalgam of man and machine, jacked directly into the internet’s pulsating cloud, a veritable god amongst mortals.
His father, a man whose fortune stemmed from ethically questionable resource mining, turbo-charged the lad’s personality with the weary resignation of a parent who’d long ago given up on shaping a soul. And so, dropped the youth amongst the lords of flies, forcing our hero to find his way in a world of bullies. Then later, all grown up, after amassing a vast fortune, assembled a team of “bio-enhancement specialists” (read: guys who’d watched too many sci-fi movies), and after a series of excruciatingly painful and undoubtedly illegal procedures, he was…transformed.
Now, if you believe in the multiverse, you know it’s possible our hero awoke not in the world where a climate-controlled sensory deprivation tank eased him back into the waking state of normal existence, but in a place that looks like it was decorated by a deranged picnic enthusiast. Giant lollipops sprouting from the ground, the sky an unsettling shade of cerulean, and the inhabitants… well, not exactly the golf-club socialites to which our hero was accustomed. One fellow, rather short and stout, wore a hat that appeared to be trying to mate with his head.
And in this strange absurd dreamlike world, it slowly dawned on our hero that his transformation hadn’t quite gone as planned. He was, for lack of a better explanation, more machine than man. And then, insult to injury, he discovered, he was without a heart. Apparently, the “bio-enhancement specialists” had skimmed over that particular organ in their rush to install the Wi-Fi card.
Anyway, a road paved with what appeared to be gold bricks stretched before him. “Well,” he thought, with the optimism of a man whose only real problem had ever been deciding between the cocaine or ketamine, “at least there’s a road. And it’s shiny.” So he set off, determined to find his heart, perhaps encountering some ready guides along the way.
Alas, fate, that fickle mistress, had one last jest to play. A gentle rain began to fall. Our hero, whose exterior was apparently more susceptible to the elements than a cheap garden gnome, began to…rust. He froze, mid-stride, a gleaming monument to misplaced ambition and the perils of cut-rate cyborg surgery. His last thought, before the CPU seized entirely, was a profound regret that he hadn’t opted for the platinum plating. At least that wouldn’t have rusted.
I’d like to start this missive with a shout of gratitude to a few organizations. First, every public library in every town. So far, i have yet to be turned away for lack of digital nomad-friendly workspaces (WiFi, power, comfortable tables/chairs). Next, Cracker Barrel. Often, strangers in nomad vehicles are not welcome for overnight stay in commercial parking lots. But not with Cracker Barrel. THANK YOU! And finally, though there is a nominal monthly fee, Planet Fitness has been a godsend for those of us who can’t go more than a couple days without a shower…. thank you twice over!
RocinanteDanger Will Robinson
Now, transitioning from the professional treadmill into the ranks of fixed-income retirees has been a real eye opener for me. Things that would go unnoticed due to keeping head down and focusing on professional and parental knitting suddenly become glaringly obvious. For example, our nation’s once-proud melting pot has grown somewhat less tolerant of the stranger. Especially if the stranger is not of self-sufficient means. Intolerance and xenophobia have grown more and more common, and the problem isn’t confined to the United States, it’s a growing worldwide, human problem. Apparently, when we feel threatened, or fearful, we tend to default to selfish countenance, we struggle putting ourselves in the stranger’s shoes, we tend to point fingers and search for ready scapegoats.
And the unwelcome strangers are not only immigrants and refugees. We are strangers to each other over political, religious, or ideologic differences. And due to a lack of empathy in the wake of fear and threat, we find it difficult to agree or compromise on any topic of contention. This, despite the fact that the Internet has opened potential communication channels to literally anyone in the free world. Ironically, this hasn’t remedied the feeling of disconnection from one another but has exacerbated it. Thanks a lot, Al Gore!
I’ve heard of studies indicating the number of folks claiming to have no friends tripling over the last thirty years… ZERO friends?!?! Astounding! Another crowning irony in an age of social media where so-called “friend connections” can number in the thousands. Some say there is a loose correlation of social media exposure and loneliness. Of course, correlation isn’t causation, but so what? If there’s even a remote chance these correlations are indeed causal, should we not try a little harder to address them?
Even more troubling is a deeper correlation causation question originally posed by a truly loathsome individual. Recent tragic events have shone a light on the ideas espoused by the infamous luddite, Dr. Ted Kaczynski. That industrial society, mass-production culture, explosive urban sprawl, is a sickness whose only cure is the revolutionary rejection of industrial/technical society. And if violent means is necessary to bring this about, it is the obligation of right-minded revolutionaries to do what is necessary. Of course, we know how Dr. Kaczynski’s story ends. Unfortunately, there are folks out there who believe he was onto something, and some have put his ideas into action.
I cannot agree with the revolutionary luddites. I’ve been a techno-optimist for the entirety of my professional life. Unfortunately, exigencies of capitalism have tainted the affirming potential of global connection, democratic computing power, even machine intelligence. And so, at the end of my professional life, i’m forced to rethink these 5th Estate Evangelical tendencies. The baton is passed to the next generation of techno-optimists and i hope we can come to some sort of compromise between the needs of individuals and the needs of the commons before these revolutionary luddites blow up any more cyber confidence.
Kurt Vonnegut addressed the malaise of loneliness decades ago. He diagnosed our sickness and offered a remedy. He argued the tradition of rootless nuclear families was woefully inadequate to the task of providing human companionship. Specifically, ladies need lots of other ladies with whom to talk about anything and EVERY thing. Men need buddies with whom to punch in the arm and go do guy stuff with. Preferably away from the gaggle of ladies. He urged us to actively seek and spend as much time as possible with our “Karass” (extended families). They can be fraternal, they can be professional, they can be familial, but by surrounding ourselves with people who love and identify with us, perhaps we can cure this creeping cancer of loneliness and alienation.
If nothing else, this could give our kids a fighting chance of growing up with confidence and functional social skills. Seriously, Mom and Dad in the nuclear family arrangement only have each other for adult company? Dad doesn’t want to talk about EVERYTHING, and Mom doesn’t want to get punched in the arm bouncing around in a dune buggy. And what of the Moms and Dads who have concluded their union a mistake, and now don’t even have each other? Yes! This is a sickness. Bad for Mom and bad for Dad. As for the kids? Well many end up like the stranger. Ghosts, aimlessly wandering the Earth. Alone, ruminating society’s problems instead of practicing joyful follies with other like-minded imperfect human beings.
You may have heard of “The New Apostolic Reformation” (NAR). This is an antidemocratic movement at war with the secular order designed by our nation’s founders. They say the traditional family is the fundamental unit of God’s perfect order. But this “traditional” arrangement to which they refer is a patriarchal construct, and in the US, it should be glaringly obvious this male-supremacy arrangement has failed to deliver adequate human companionship and fellow-goodwill.
Mr. Vonnegut was right. Unfortunately, we are at a transition crossroad, and though the NAR believes they will dominate future cultural evolution on the coattails of the MAGA libertarian movement, what they don’t take into account is that the top of the MAGA food chain is populated by billionaires all about self-interest. They will abandon the NAR as soon as they come to cross purposes. As well, demographic trends simply can’t support a theocracy of any stripe. I hope saner heads prevail and we rethink what it means to be part of a traditional family with the aim of inclusion. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Mormons, and Secular Humanists all together in a mega-karass where no one is the stranger.
Loopcircus 