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Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in Belize...

Belize City was a bit like Bluefields on the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua: a seedy place with an aura of decay. But it didn't feel like Central America. The musical lilt of Caribbean English had already displaced the Spanish I'd grown used to, and that Latin timelessness was missing, as were the Spanish colonial buildings and the social hunting ground of the plazas. Belize had a different sort of timelessness: a lazy island grace of rusting corrugated roofs and gap-toothed smiles.

Water taxi engines fired, and we motored out of the dirty estuary and into the sea. Piles of luggage filled the centre of the open boat. Passengers squeezed onto benches that lined both sides. Only three were locals. There were no backpackers; the country wasn't quite cheap enough for them. I was deep behind the lines of White Leg territory.

Three Brits sat in the bow. Their close-cropped hair and angry red sunburns gave them away -- that and the fact that they were thoroughly trashed at 8am. Belize still hosts a small British military contingent. Prior to independence in 1981 it was British Honduras; a centuries-old thorn in the side of the Spanish Main, founded by pirates and logwood cutters. The territory is still shown as a province on Guatemalan maps.

The Belize I saw was little more than a carbon copy of every other overexploited Caribbean vacationland. And it marked the end of my road -- but only for this journey. I knew by then that the terminus of each trip was a fallow period, when the lessons learned broke free and rose to the surface. I needed to think through those lessons of my Central American road before they got buried beneath the day to day routines of home. And so I stopped in Belize not to observe or to experience or to sightsee, but to buy time.

The water was transparent blue, and the tropical sun warmed my face and legs, inducing a comfortable torpor. I breathed deeply of the fresh salt air as we bounced through light chop that peppered my clothing with gentle spray, and I slept.

An hour later I was among coral islands. I jumped out at the wooden pier of Caye Caulker. The next stop was a larger island with roads and cars, geared to wealthy package tourists. I wanted to be able to walk everywhere.

A few sandy roads threaded the little village, but cars had been prohibited. Electric golf carts hummed as they rolled past at pedestrian speed. Wooden stilt-houses were painted yellow and blue. There must have been a time when they were vibrant and cheerful, but they'd since become blistered and cracked. The faded buildings resembled the people in a way: they'd let themselves go in the listless tropical heat. Island girls in calico shuffled down sandy streets with a lazy swirling gait. Rasta wannabes with matted dreds and knit caps loafed by the pier drinking beer and selling weed. The white legs of tourists flashed like ice shards in the sun, with souvenir t-shirts proudly displaying their past travels and origins.

The main strip was lined with open-air restaurants and bars. Trinket shops sold Guatemalan handicrafts at inflated prices. A profusion of dive shops offered packaged SCUBA and snorkel excursions to all the same places. After Corn Island, I couldn't help but feel disappointed.

I found a cheap room at Lucy's Guesthouse on a side street. It took some searching. Lucy was a wrinkled black lady with a ready smile and a low chuckling laugh, and I liked her immediately. Her guesthouse was quiet. The party places were further down the strip. She placed a deep wooden armchair on the veranda in front of my room, and a hammock swung limp in the sandy yard. I knew right away where I would spend my island evenings.

Places like Belize made me feel a little ridiculous. Locals pandered and deferred to white trash North Americans, the bottom of the suburb-dwelling TV generation back home. Down there they're wealthy. Bob and Martha, obese beyond belief, waddle around in tent-like Bermuda shorts; they argue and fight over twenty cents for a crummy whittled handicraft and think their bargaining quite shrewd. It's a microcosm of vapid Western pop culture, consumer cannibalism garnished with quaint dark-skinned locals and musical accents. But the locals all want what the tourists have.

Moments in those places shattered the aura of adventure that had permeated my travels at the far edges of the map. They reminded me of the bland homogenization that's infecting the globe. I couldn't buy in to the illusion of paradise those places tried to present, and I felt guilty to be a Westerner.

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in Bluefields, Nicaragua, on the Mosquito Coast, exactly 10 years ago...

I walked to the Enitel building to place a call before dinner. I hadn't sent a message home in weeks. I expected end-of-world explorer's reports, yellowed clippings of my obituary: Last seen on a jungle boat to the Mosquito Coast.

The line crackled and fizzed. My father's voice was an echo far away, like talking to someone at the wrong end of binoculars.

"I'm in this town called Bluefields, in Nicaragua," I shouted, enunciating carefully to make myself heard over the tired wires. "We were out on an island so I was kinda cut off."

"Are you getting enough to eat? Do you have enough money?"

Back home, Nicaragua still conjured images of extreme poverty and revolutionary violence.

I tried to sound tired and hungry. "Well, we drank fifty-cent beers on the beach all day and ate five dollar lobster for supper. Every night we drank a bottle of the world's best rum under the stars. Oh, and there was a shortage of rooms, so I had to sleep between these two European girls." I paused. "I'm getting by."

There was a long silence.

"You still there?"

I heard a grunt. "You lucky bastard."

"Yeah, well I knew this place would be okay when I saw they had ice."

"What do you mean?"

"Ice is civilization."

"What?"

"Never mind."

The line went dead.

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in Panama's Darien Gap...

Banana trees and low bushy plants lined the dirt path that led beyond the village's last tambo. Jungle pathways were never entirely clear, no matter how recently someone had used them. The forest reclaimed everything with a creeping growth that was almost visible. Keeping those vital roadways open meant that each person who passed must absent-mindedly cut back the encroaching growth. The constant ringing of these slashing blows became the music of our march.

Beyond the outskirts of the village we picked our way across a churned-up clear cut of decaying logs, tangled branches, and muddy hummocks, a place where the ochre and black topsoil of the jungle had been laid bare with simple tools. Green brush smouldered in small piles, releasing slow, reluctant wisps of acrid smoke that hung in the thick moist air. This was El Coco's larder.

A solitary man worked the far side of the clearing, painstakingly, by hand. The dull ching of his machete as it cut through thin branches and the heavy thunk as it bit into stumps echoed off the broad leafed plants that hemmed us in.

Beyond the clearing we were completely swallowed up by the green-tinted light of undersea. The machete's efforts were silenced as suddenly as though a heavy curtain had fallen. The forest deadened all sound, absorbing even the soft puffs of our breath.

At first the Embera tried to shepherd me around danger. They guarded me nervously, as one would a toddler taking first steps. But I soon caught them whispering about how silently I contorted around the foliage rather than crashing through the undergrowth and moving it around me.

They hadn't expected it, but I was more at home in the jungle than I was in the village. I'd grown up in the woods, camping with my friend Rob Wilson in lean-tos we build with a hatchet and twine. Studying the forest's silence, blending in with the sights and smells that surrounded me, seeking understanding rather than domination. It was a way of looking at things, a way of moving that we held in common, and it brought us closer together.

Massive outsized trees with wide buttressed roots propped up the canopy, lending the forest the aura of an enormous outdoor cathedral. Vines, mosses and epiphytes hung down in tangled green confusion, living off the larger trees in a symbiotic Gordian knot, as the weak always do upon the strong. It would have been impossible to extract one component without damaging all the rest.

As the shock of that first glance wore off, I began to notice the details: the intricate veins on a leaf's broad canvas; a flower that lent a pastel flicker to the deep sea of green; twigs that looked like insects, and insects that mimicked twigs. Monkeys and squirrels leaped and swung through the mid-ranges, while smaller birds flitted from branch to branch. At our feet, highways of leafcutter ants crisscrossed the muddy path and vanished into the undergrowth, nearly invisible one way but signaling their presence with bobbing green-flags in the other.
 
Whenever the screech of a birdcall pierced the silence, Chung froze and turned his face to the source of the sound. He touched me on the shoulder and extended a slow arm, then whispered a name close to my ear. I squinted to pull the hazy outlines of a shape from a background of shades of green, but sometimes it was so far away that I couldn't even make out the faintest blotch.

In the jungle, everything was wet. The thin soil was forever leaching water that the trees squeezed from the moist air, or the rain deposited in frequent downpours. This runoff collected in hollows, carving miniature canyons that threaded their way to the Jacque and eventually to the ocean. The vegetation was thicker at the edges of streams; it arched over the water in a tightly woven canopy, and damp leaves leached to our flesh like wet paper when we passed.

We forded small rivers, knee-deep, 8 or 10 feet across. Sometimes we crossed slippery log bridges with arms outstretched, and other times we waded through limpid pools, their cool waters flooding my boots and wicking up the legs of my pants.

Once a trail met ours, and Ricardo pointed down it and named a hidden village several days away on foot. These were the trade routes of the jungle, connecting fragile habitations, allowing them to share the simple goods they grew and wove to make life easier, or just to pass the time.

It was a necessary network, but after walking for so long in silence, with only the dim light of the forest all around us, the thought of other humans felt sinister somehow. In nature I could be reasonably sure of what I was dealing with. I found the human world of opaque motives much more difficult to navigate.

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in the Petén region of Guatemala...

I stumbled out of bed at four thirty to prepare for the last long distance bus ride of the journey: the hard packed jungle track through the eastern Petén to the Caribbean Sea and Belize City. It was a sobering thought to realize that in another couple weeks it would all come to an end.

The night watchman brought a cup of coffee to my room when I returned from the cold shower at the end of the hall.

"Gracias, amigo. I needed that."

He patted me on the shoulder, shook his head sadly, and went back to the darkness of the restaurant.

I packed and drank the coffee, then dragged my bag to the stout front door that had been locked against the lawless jungle night. The watchman limped up behind me. He peeked out through the small barred window, first to the left, then to the right, as though looking for bandits who might be lying in wait.

"Not yet," he said, motioning for me to follow him back into the darkest recesses of the restaurant.

We stopped at the bar to pour more coffee. I followed him to the patio over the lake, where he sat at a table and watched a Spanish western with the sound turned down very low. I think he sat there every night, watching TV alone in the dark.

"You like?" he asked, pointing at the screen.

"Yeah. I like westerns."

We sat in silence, and the blue light of the TV flickered over his tired old face and his sad glazed eyes. What an eternity it must be, passing a lifetime in that way.

The bus pulled up at a little after five. The watchman let me out and shook my hand with a weak, dry grip.

"Safe journey," he said quietly.

He shuffled back inside and bolted the door against the night with a loud click, then watched me through the little barred window with a face marred by jail shadows until we pulled away.

I felt sorry for that lonely old man, living in a jungle backwater with no hope of ever having enough money to leave, and probably nowhere to go even if he could. Stuck in that same dusty place, always watching others go but never leaving himself.

Those who sit and wait, they also die.

[I'm on the road in the United States at the moment--my apologies for the infrequent blog entries. Will be back to normal after 7 days]

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in the Peten region of Guatemala...

The light through the window lay across my chest in a square pattern, broken by the lazy sweep of a ceiling fan. It was a picture straight out of Joseph Conrad; a movie version of a malarial sickroom. I appreciated the exotic image and knew it would make a great story, but it wasn't so cool with no one there to see it.

I was hundreds of miles from home, in a backwater jungle town. No one knew where I was. There was no one to help me if I got worse, but I was too sick to care.

My room had been built inside a restaurant, facing directly onto the tables. It was as though they couldn't decide which to build--a guesthouse or a restaurant--and somehow ended up with both. There was no window to close, and music came in through the screen at full volume, torturing me with its relentless, insistent, empty-headed beat. I cursed the staff, damning them to a hell of foul hangovers, an eternity in a machine shop, or perhaps the ravages of tinnitus. But I was too weak to complain.

My illness intensified during the interminable rolling night. The fever's auguries brought on lifelike hallucinations that flickered across the overheated theatre of my mind. I saw the faces of people I hadn't thought about for a decade: people I'd gone to high school with, people I'd known as a child. I walked through old neighbourhoods and incidents, through expired hopes and dreams, seeing it all at one remove. Fitful dreams blended with disconnected reality, and I completely lost track of which was which.

Two days later, I emerged squinting into the copper twilight of Flores. After a bland meal of rice, vegetables, and water, I sat in the wooden chair in front of my room to write.
I put on my walkman to blot out the restaurant's background noise. I was still pissed off at the staff, still offended by their constant clamor that intruded upon the silence of my inner world. The memory of their shouting voices and my aching head was still a fresh offence.

A worker passed by my chair and noticed the empty tape case.

"You like Maná?"

I nodded. He launched into a heartfelt rendition of Rayando el Sol, looking me straight in the eye the entire time, obviously pleased with the clarity of his own voice. His directness made me uncomfortable, and it took all my effort not to blink and look away.

"Want to put it on the stereo?" he asked.

"Sure, if you want."

Soon all the workers were walking around singing the songs I'd been listening to since Nicaragua. It was like inhabiting the edge of a musical. The dam of reticence had finally burst--mine and theirs--and their curiosity spilled over. One by one they came over to talk to me, completely abandoning the customers on whose tables they were supposed to be waiting. They only went back with reluctance when the bartender hissed and jerked his head towards the patio, to be replaced soon after by another eager conversationalist.

The waiter who put on the music came back later to return my tape, and we talked until closing time. At one point I pulled out my wallet to buy a drink. It was a brown leather billfold, badly scuffed, the stitching held together with filthy surgical tape. I carried it on purpose, as a lucky talisman and as a bit of a ruse. It looked so bad it was beyond theft. That was my theory, at least.

"That wallet is very old," he said, frowning and shaking his head.

"Yeah, but it's okay. I'm kinda fond of it."

He pulled out his own wallet, emptied it carefully, and handed it to me.

"Please, amigo."

"I can't take that," I said politely.

"Please..." He pushed it into my hands with finality. I didn't know what to say. How could I explain that I had two brand new leather wallets at home, pushed to the back of a drawer, still fresh in their boxes? And how could I tell him I carried this beat up ruin because none of his countrymen would want to steal it?

I finally accepted it, with reluctance. I couldn't cause insult by refusing a gift that had been offered honestly, in comradeship. I was deeply touched by his generosity. In a country like that, in a poverty stricken jungle backwater town, a poor Salvadoran immigrant waiter pitied me and gave me the wallet from his pocket. It was the non-clichéd equivalent of offering someone the shirt off one's back.

I encountered such generosity everywhere I went in Central America. If people thought I was a rich tourist they sometimes tried to fleece me, but if they thought I was poor like them, or if they had established the slightest personal connection, they shared of what they had, freely and with no thought of reward or gain.

It was so far from the image of that place that existed in North America. Those who sat at home in their comfortable air-conditioned houses, filtering the world through the TV news, expected robbery, conniving dark-skinned locals, sneak thieves and revolutionaries. They couldn't imagine that these were people just like us. People with their own hopes and dreams. Kind, warm people who were always ready to extend the hand of friendship, if only you could summon up a smile. I've rarely encountered that sort of openness in the so-called First World.

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in the Peten region of Guatemala...

Overgrown jungle pathways linked the main ruins of Tikal, transforming predictable sightseeing into something approaching exploration. I walked quietly and breathed deeply of the damp jungle air. Birds called from the canopy and troops of spider monkeys chattered in the distance. Smells of humid earth and decaying vegetation filled my nose. The intense heat of the flatlands wrapped me in a clammy blanket that I wanted to kick off.

 The outer ruins lay as they were found. Walking there alone, it really did feel like I had just discovered the site after centuries of tomb-silence. The ruins hinted at stories long forgotten and enormous tracts of time. Jagged heaps of dislocated stones crumbled under probing and strangling roots. An enormous tarantula picked its careful eight-legged way across a shattered inscription. Whole buildings slept undisturbed beneath a living blanket of tangled growth that was slowly reclaiming the city.

History was digested there. The very land consumed it. Jungles exist entirely in the present, and purely in the physical. Their geography doesn't allow for abstractions. The jungle misuses nothing because it values nothing. And the jungle never tells what sleeps beneath the trees.

Compared to the half exposed ruins on Tikal's outer limits, The Great Plaza felt like a prop. Tourists wandered around armed with video cameras; Hawaiian shirts flapped; guides radiated fake cheer into the stifling heat. I had to stretch my imagination to the breaking point to block them all out.

 Luck was with me. Some strange conjunction caused all the tour groups to leave at the same time, and none came to replace them. I scurried up the tallest temple, my shoes chuffing on dry rasping stones, to the edge of the platform and the small chamber with its black missing tooth of a door. I looked down on the plaza and imagined myself a Mayan high priest, standing before throngs of people, arms outstretched in benediction or in warning. A bloody heart beat spastically in my hand; I could feel it, just as I could feel the reverberations in my ribcage of the hoarse roar of the crowds below. My arm dripped blood and gore. The temple was a stage set and I was deeply absorbed in my role. The ghosts of the plaza turned to watch with approval, and I felt with my fingers their very touch upon the stones.

It was what I'd been seeking in Panama City when I followed the trail of Henry Morgan. Back there my preconceived agenda had blinded me to subtle emanations, because I hadn't yet learned how to listen. But in Tikal I glimpsed, however briefly, a new way of sightseeing, one that involved "thick" or "deep" time, a peek into the distant past fuelled by wide reading and that rare conjunction of having the entire stage to oneself. I felt somehow that the Road Gods had blessed me, had rewarded me for my ceaseless struggles, for my honest efforts and my faith. It almost never happens in today's world of budget travel and accessibility, where everything has been made so easy, interpreted simplistically on big wooden signs to cater to the lazy and the unimaginative.

The great monument builders of the world must have been motivated by the suffocating weight of time. They watched as the creatures of the jungle died, decayed and vanished back into the earth with nothing to show that they had ever lived. The monument builders knew that, though their flesh would pass, the carved stones they left behind would last through the ages.

So many people accept their presence in this world as a given. They plod along in the same well worn track as all those before them, driven here and there by impulse and instinct in a sterile Pavlovian existence. They live nine-to-five lives, affecting no one and changing nothing. The world is no better or worse for their having existed. They leave no trace; like a song they just fade away.

The very idea horrified me. I wanted to change something, to leave my own small footprint in time. A Mayan reminder.

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in Guatemala...

Guatemala City lay far below me, shrouded in the valley's pre-dawn silence, as I wound down the corkscrew highway from the highlands. My head hung in half-sleep, swaying with the motions of the van. I dozed on and off until the bright lights of the International Airport finally blazed me into wakefulness. The other two passengers climbed out. I moved to follow.

The driver shook his head. "Not you."

We left the airport and drove through smaller, darker roads. He stared straight ahead in tight-lipped silence. I wondered briefly if it might be another attempt at robbery, a predator's skilful culling of one sleepy straggler from the herd. I doubted it, and anyway I was too tired to care. It was pointless to worry.

We finally turned down a narrow street and drove past the hangars of several small air companies. It was a normal road with painted lines and street signs, except that small planes were parked in the driveways as though in some sort of futuristic subdivision.

There were no people in the buildings we passed. No lights. The driver stopped in front of a hangar and got out. I got out too. He took my pack from the back compartment of the van and set it on the ground, then drove off without a word of explanation. I stood in the pre-dawn silence of the deserted neighbourhood and watched as his cracked taillights faded into the empty night. White showed through red where the broken plastic had fallen away.

I seemed to be in the middle of some vast industrial wasteland. As I stood there in the dark, I felt time wobble and reality loose its grip. I sensed the beginning of another surreal experience.

I walked into the hangar and looked around, seeking a clue that would tell me what to do next. Two twin-engine planes were parked with their doors and luggage wells open. I debated firing one up and heading off on my own, but finally decided against it. A light was on in the office but no one was there. I spotted an electric kettle on the table beside a jar of instant coffee. I filled it from a bottle of water on the floor and plugged it in.

Just then tires crunched on gravel and headlights swept the hangar. I walked out with my hands in my pockets and leaned against the edge of the big doors to observe this new development. As in Nicaragua, I fully expected things to get a little stranger.

It was another shuttle van. A stout American woman in matching Tilley clothing was unceremoniously abandoned in the same way I had been. She stood watching in confusion as her ride drove away, looking remarkably like a herd animal caught in the open, sniffing the air for lions. I stepped out of the shadows. She sucked in a quick startled breath before tentative signs of relief crept to the edges of her face.

"Is this... is this the plane to Tikal?" she asked.

"I think so," I said, with the slow cracked voice of morning. "You must be my copilot."

She stopped in mid-stride. "What did you say?"

"I think it's do it yourself. Kinda like a rental car. Anyway, there's no one here."

She flinched as a shrill whistling suddenly came from the office. "What's that?"

"Coffee's ready."

Passengers trickled in as we prepared our drinks. The staff eventually arrived. We milled around sipping coffee as they weighed everyone's baggage on a rusted old hand scale.

"Are you going to Tikal?" the woman asked me.

"Yeah. Are you?"

"I'm on a package tour. A guide is supposed to meet me at the airport."

Most of my fellow passengers looked to be on package tours. They had an aura of timidity about them. As Martina would say, there were a lot of White Legs around.

A worker leaned out of the office door. "Please to come in."

We formed a line in front of a chipped wooden desk and handed our tickets to a secretary, who typed a passenger manifest with our names and passport numbers on an old black manual typewriter. Sharp cracks echoed through the hangar as she henpecked the keys and struggled squint-eyed with the spelling of foreign names.

"I haven't seen one of those for years," I whispered.

"Is that carbon paper?"

I gave her my ticket. She handed me a boarding pass with my name freshly typed in smudged ink.

There were fifteen passengers. The staff must have known us all by sight. Even so, a stewardess would wait outside the door of the plane to tear the stub of my boarding pass when I climbed in. Things had to be done in a specific, established manner, and that was that. Like the Keeper of the Bathroom Door on the long distance bus in Panama, they took it all very seriously.

It was nearing departure time. The closest plane had been loaded with luggage, but it was still sitting in the hangar. A long bar had been attached to the nose wheel. I waited for one of those little electric carts to come and move it. Needless to say they didn't have one. Three burly guys in t-shirts lifted the bar and pushed the plane out onto the road. Looks of surprise turned to mild horror when the workers jump-started the plane with a car battery.

"I've flown all over the world and I've never seen anything like that," the woman said.

I scratched my chin. "You know, I'm surprised those guys weren't instructed to hum like an electric car as they pushed. So that we could all pretend to see one."

We boarded the plane and it trundled down the road in a roar of propeller wash. Thankfully it was too early to encounter other traffic. I thought that we might take off from the street, but we drove to the international airport and borrowed a runway.

We climbed to cruising altitude and leveled off. Far below, rugged mountains gradually gave way to jungle flatlands. The Petén stretched as flat as a dinner plate all the way to the bejeweled Caribbean--a tangled wilderness threaded by nothing but a couple lonely dirt roads. From so far up, the trees looked remarkably like broccoli.

The American lady was seated across the aisle. She reached over and nudged me. "I think this plane's Russian," she said.

The plane looked new but she was uneasy, as though "Russian" were synonymous with the safety record of Aeroflot.

I pointed at a button beside the overhead reading light. "Did you see that?"

"Push to summon crew."

"It'd be easier to just reach up and tap them on the shoulder."

We were interrupted by the pilot as he turned around to pass out drinks. He was sitting at the stick preparing coffee.

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented...

I had finally come to grips with my task. I pondered the question of how to turn living into something more than just existing.

Time is our worst enemy. Youth seldom considers time; it seems so endless. But youth is characterized by hopes and dreams, and old age is too often the realm of unrealized hopes and dreams. What's in between? Is that where I found myself at that moment? Or is there in fact no in between at all, just the sudden shock of realization that it's all ending and you haven't even begun?

With knowledge of the name and nature of one's adversary comes the power to take direct action. Here is the fork in the road. You can throw up your hands in despair -- it's all for nothing so why bother -- or you can grab Time by the throat and squeeze as much as you can out of it by way of experience. Both choices are equally valid. In the end it's all for nothing. Time is the predestined winner. The game is fixed. But I think the path of Experience is the more heroic of the two.

To pursue the path of Experience is to squeeze the most out of Time. The time-obsessed have no patience for triviality. I'm constantly amazed at how we nickel and dime our lives away on useless details and inane things: obligations, manipulations, pointless babbling phone calls, make-work projects for the sake of form. We bleed ourselves to death with a thousand tiny paper cuts. Refusing to drag around those anchors is a significant step towards finding freedom. Cut away the sandbags and your balloon will soar.

Busywork obscures the important things in life. The meaningful gets lost among the trash. Like a sculptor, we must cut away the unnecessary to reveal the minimalist core within. This includes cutting away unnecessary people: those relationships that drain you, those people who pull you down. In doing this, some will call you selfish. They want something from you. Their method is manipulation through guilt. You assume obligation; it isn't automatic.

Western society has lost touch with the vibrant core. We live our lives at second hand, through movies and TV. We've become middle class people made cowards by our possessions. Our lives are geared towards comfort, swaddled in narcoleptic routine. We've become afraid to live deeply, and so we live vicariously through fictional characters instead, and through the exploits of others. But that isn't living.

Leave the papers in the pile unshuffled, unstapled. Someone else will do it. And if no one does and they slowly turn to ash, their true importance will be revealed because not a fucking thing will change. The world won't end. But when Time is judged the victor of your lifelong duel, your world will end. It's your choice what to make of it. Do you leave a legacy of paper in tidy piles, or a rich store of experience that vanishes when you do? Only you can decide. You have only yourself to answer to. In the end the clock will win.

Life can't be lived by other people's rules, not society's and not religion's. The great philosophical discovery is that there aren't any answers. We put too much import on the questions anyway. We die and the dream dissolves with a hiss. We have an interval and that's all. All our moments, both significant and insignificant, will be lost in the mists of time. The Judgement Day question has nothing to do with morality. It is, in fact, "Was your life meaningful?"

This life is so tragically short, but we let so much pass by. We obsess over trivialities. We take on guilt and unhappiness through self-imposed judgements and labels. None of those things are real. Judgments and labels are so much smoke in the air. In the end nothing really matters much. You'll regret the things you didn't do more than the things you did.

The heroic path is to live! No regrets. No apologies. Roar at the top of your lungs and punch a hole in the sky! Cry hot salty tears and pull out your hair at the sheer cruelty of time! Laugh and love like a thousand Zorbas! When your light goes out let it end with a flash, not a fizzle.

'Live' is an active verb, not a passive one. Don't plod through life in the Third Person. Claim this brief life as your own and live it.

Sometimes opportunity really will knock only once.

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented...

From The Philosophy of Zachary Peoples:

 Page 12: "I dunno, man. Philosophy's interestin', but I think that what you believe has to come from inside yourself, ya know? No one can teach you how to examine and make sense of life. Anyone who thinks so, well, I feel sorry for 'em."

Page 23: "I believe this is the only life we can be sure of. I live my life as best I can, I treat people respectfully and try to experience all I can or all that appeals to me. If this is it and I spent my life as an accountant and got a pension, I'd feel pretty shitty about myself. Of course there's reincarnation, 'cause matter and energy are never destroyed, right? But as far as me living again as a hedgehog so I can think about how I fucked up, I doubt it. I hope there's an afterlife and a heaven where I can play ping pong with Jack Kerouac all day, but I doubt it."

Page 34: "I don't see my life as any more valuable than that of a drunken bum. I can see a bit of him in me and me in him. If you look closely you can see that kinship in everyone. Some people on this rock really need to try that."

Page 40: I try to live a righteous life, I don't bother anyone. I help folks when I can and try not to cause any major trouble. I think I'll get through those pearly gates anyway, if they exist. And if God doesn't wanna let me in 'cause I didn't do it all in his name, then I don't wanna be hangin' around the arrogant bastard anyway. Besides, all the good conversations'll be going on in hell."

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in the highlands of Guatemala...

Something had been nagging at me during my entire interlude in Antigua. I wasn't sure what it was, and so I waited for it to reveal itself. I did magic tricks for the children of the vendors, the tricks Zack had taught me on Ometepe. I read books and wrote in my notebook in the sun. With my dark tan and Nica shirt, I blended in well enough that a tourist with a Spanish phrasebook asked me for directions to the post office. I simply waited like that until, one day, I finally realized what it was. I cannot abide time.

Time is the measurement of our consciousness of approaching death. As I sat there in the plaza surrounded by all those stone reminders, I realized in the depths of my being that death was approaching me at a relentless, unstoppable rate of sixty seconds each minute, sixty minutes each hour.

This realization didn't frighten me; rather, it solidified my resolve. The Road had taught me that I could slow down the approach of death by packing more into each moment. Full moments are timeless. When in their thrall we're outside of time, no longer measuring our death, staving it off. It struck me that this was the true meaning of eternal life. Eternity isn't a function of adding an infinite number of years. It's a result of slowing time, of lengthening those moments in between and learning to live there.

Every time I heard the ticking of my watch it reminded me of my heartbeat--that when it stopped my life would be over. But I knew if I stopped time instead, if I learned to live in those moments "between ticks", my life would truly begin.

As we cling to the past, we feel the death of the world.

I threw my watch away and I resolved to live.