Rough Living: Tips and Tales of a Vagabond

Sometimes life intervenes to save you

This week’s story marks a pretty huge transition in my life. As you know if you are a paid subscriber and read the absolutely bonkers things I was doing in 2000-2001 period of my life - I was on my way to dying of a drug overdose, going to prison, or worse. Things were not good for me. Life intervened. I don’t really believe in things like angels or guardian angels - but when I look back, it seems pretty clear that there was some sort of cosmic intervention in my life. Everything changed after this.

One aspect of this site is to share my work as a writer through the years. For example, I’m sharing the audiobook version of Notes from Nowhere (2020) in weekly installments (episode 1 here) for paid subscribers. I’m also sharing some new and experimental (and quite explicit and graphic) fiction with paid subscribers on another day - Here’s the first part of The Ghosts of Intimacy.

Today, I continue with a series of posts are from the first book I wrote, Rough Living: Tips and Tales of a Vagabond (2003 & 2012 revised) Here is a link to Part 1 of this series - the Introduction. In a sense, the success of this book set me on the path I’m on, or the failure of this book - depending on how you look at it.

In the paid subscriber section - I offer further content that is either too valuable or simply too shameful to share with free subscribers- as well as links to where you can get the full PDF versions of the book for free. I’ll offer commentary on the parts of the text we cover. In addition, paid subscribers have already gotten valuable updates on new ways to do things more than two decades after first publication because keep in mind, I wrote this in 2002 so much of it has been absorbed by the world and some of it simply doesn’t work any longer. The world has changed dramatically since that time. We may not see it clearly, like a person who looks in the mirror every day and doesn’t see themselves aging - but the change is profound. This is one more reason to become a paid subscriber - you will get the value of modern perspectives and tools. Your subscription will pay for itself.

Don’t worry though, free subscribers will always get pieces of the original 2003 text itself, delivered weekly. Share it with a friend. Allons-y!

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China Luck 


I called my brother about a week into 2001.He was disappointed that I was living in my car. 

“It may seem cute at 29, “ he said, “But it won’t be so cute when you’re 50.” I thought about Aquillo... no he wasn’t cute, but he was definitely better than some lonely and jaded stockbroker living in a mansion. At least to me. 

“I just don’t like the culture we have here.” I told him. 

He thought for a minute and then said, “You should go to Asia. It would do you good to see how other people live.” 

I agreed with him, it would be good for me to go to Asia. I’d always had a fantasy to climb Mt. Taishan, a holy Taoist mountain in China. Sure, Asia would be great. Neither of us bothered thinking about how a homeless, unemployed guy manages to travel halfway around the world. 

He said it and I agreed with the result being a decision on my part to go to China. If I saved my unemployment checks, I figured I could be in Beijing in early March. I wasn’t doing a real good job of 
saving so far, but I figured once I had my traffic fines paid off, it would be easy. 

As I drove to Bellingham the moon was rising over a mountain and being reflected onto a lake. It was a huge oblong yellow disk like a Chinese painting of Tao. I knew it was a good omen and knew I would stop at the casino and win enough to pay off all my fines and give me a head start on the travel money. 

"Ah ha! That’s how I’ll get to China.” I inherited an addiction to slot machines from my grandfather. 

It’s easy to rationalize a reason to gamble. I thought about the foolishness of spending half my $38 (all the money I had in the world), but I figured I would only spend $18 on the dollar slots and then I would leave. 

I was doing okay, up to $39 from my starting $18 and then I started losing. I stopped at $23 and figured I should walk out a winner. There was something about the slot machine that told me to get another $18 
and go for it. I lost for three pulls in a row, then hit the double diamond gold and won $800! Grandpa spent a lot of time in Asia too and I figured he was helping me out. 

The first thing I did was to pay off the remainder of my fines. Next I bought breakfast and a Lonely Planet guidebook to China, and started to visit travel agents. It looked like I would need about $1500 total to make the trip work. 

I drove down to the beach and got a little fire going and one of Jesus’s reformed heroin addicts came and filled up all the quiet with so much Jesus mumbo jumbo. It seems like Jesus saves a lot of addicts by replacing heroin with himself. 

I’d rather see a Jesus freak than a heroin addict any day of the week. 

I could hardly believe all my fines were paid off and I still had money towards my ticket. I left the beach with the intention of going to the casino again, telling myself, “I’m gonna win a $1000 this 
time.” I prepared myself mentally on the ride down. I knew I would win. I played another $20 in the same dollar slot and about 15 minutes into it, I hit the $1000 jackpot. The luck of Jesus must have rubbed off that junkie and on to me. Really, I hit it. It felt so surreal.. .1 knew it was because I’d decided to go to China. I got back to Seattle and called a discount travel agency. Crazy. I had enough to get my ticket the next day and put away $500 towards the trip. I bought a 6-month round trip open ended ticket to Beijing and a cassette and textbook to help me learn Mandarin Chinese. 

I went to the library and used the internet to apply for jobs teaching English in China. I found four and applied to them all. Wednesday I had a response from the New Bridge Language School in Beijing. I was hired. I studied up on China and felt completely whacked on the side of the head. Was this really happening? 

Books were beginning to pile in every comer of the bus. I knew that I was leaving for China in three weeks, but five or ten dollars for books seemed much cheaper than thirty or forty dollars in a bar or casino. I had woke up that morning with nearly a quarter inch of ice on top of the blankets I’d put over my sleeping bag. The coldest morning of 2001 so far. Jammed into my shoulder blades was a book I’d picked up the day before Yankee Hobo in the Orient. 

Something intrigued me about John Patric, the author of the book. I thought he might even be the elusive J.R. Bob Dobbs who founded the farcical Church of the SubGenius. I needed to take my bus to my mothers house in Redding and figured I would drive through Florence, Oregon where Patric had made his home. The combination of the cold and the book prodded me into action. 

I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get my visa in time to go to China. Weird ideas of having brownish babies and starting my own race of bums, tramps, and hobos had been going through my head for days. Why not? I had to think of the fact that I might fuck up in China and get executed.. .so what...? 

In my mind, I was a super hero waiting for the right moment to spring upon the unsuspecting world. I was stressed out like a crackhead in a squad car and I had virtually no time to look for Bob Dobbs and 
Frying Pan Creek. I quested after a warm dry place to keep my books. 

I wanted to be a Hobo Joe with a place to go when the road grew too weary. I wanted to be a vagabond errant with a space that wasn’t invading the space of someone else. I wanted to gain some control over 
my existence again rather than letting letters, visa’s, and money determine my course of action. 

Hopalong Tom kept saying he was glad to know me cause when the Chinese cut my head off he’d have a great story to tell. 

It was strange to suddenly look at my backpack and realize that that would be hold all of my possessions for the next who knew how long. I laughed when I realized I had timed my departure perfectly to coincide with the end of my unemployment compensation in Washington State. 

I got ahold of the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco. The woman and I had big communication problems from the get go. Finally I found out my visa had been sent out to me the day before. All it took was her hanging up on me three times, spelling my name slowly fifteen times, giving her the same information over and over and persistence. 

As my grandfather used to say so charmingly “Sweet oil and persistence will get you in a snakes ass.” I don’t know why you’d want to go there.. .but if you did... 



The drive down the coast was great. I stopped at my Aunt and Uncle’s for a day. . My Uncle was proud of his latest achievement. He had been getting liver spots on his head but didn’t want to go to a 
dermatologist. Instead he used sandpaper to sand the spots right off his noggin. His wife told me he appeared at the top of the stairs near the kitchen asking her to help him with one more spot, meanwhile blood was pouring from his head. His eyes swelled in reaction to the cuts or the Neosporin he had smeared on his head. By the time I got there, he had the smooth bald skull I remembered as a child. He was talking about opening a clinic in Mexico. Joking. I think.

Breakfast was a weird hodgepodge of dirty jokes, banter, and huevos rancheros. My aunt gave me a sweater before I realized it was my uncles and she hadn’t asked. I was putting it on when I saw the look on his face. “Is this your sweater?” I asked. 

“Is that your sweater?” He asked back. 

Neither of us wanted to answer so we nodded sadly. We knew from experience there was no going back. She always did this. He told me about a picture my cousin once painted for him. He treasured it 
and a neighbor came by and admired it. As he got home from work, the neighbor was walking out with it and thanked him. 

I spent one day in Florence looking for John Patric or his place on Frying Pan Creek, but no one had heard of either of them. A woman in a bar suggested I go to the museum, but it didn’t open until the day 
after the next. I didn’t have time to wait. I would have to find out more about Florence, Oregon when and if I returned. 

After that it was onward to Redding and back to Seattle where George Hush and Lee Vamile Oan dropped me off at the airpot. As my plane took off from Seattle, a 7.3 magnitude quake struck the Puget Sound. It literally was while the plane was taking off. I only found out because it was all over the terminal TV screens in Vancouver as I ran to catch my connecting flight to Beijing. It shut down the airport for days. 

I had left just in time and had no idea what the future held in store for me. The earthquake felt like the devil making one last attempt to claim my soul, but I got away. At least that time.