[Begin Morning Freewrite]

This is hte start of a new day in jeans.  They feel soft.  Cottony.
Strange.  Long and heavy.  Constricting.  Yet -- psychologically freeing.
They fit into a crowd.  They are normal.  Everyone wears them.  I no longer
stand out as a hiker among townies.

I arrived last night after walking to Smethport.  People weren't giving me a
hitch but htey weren't unhappy to see me either.  (At least, I think.)  Old
men are the nicest people around.  Ready to wave.  In Smethport some people
asked me about my journeys and then gave me a ride to Coudersport.  Truly I
am living among good people.  As Steve Newman said.  People are good.  They
just need the opportunity to express it.

My writing has had some ups and downs in the past few days of bussing from
Virginia to here.  I've stopped freewriting in the mornings, but I have had
a new idea for a story.  A plotless story of course.  A character-filled
story of course.  I somehow manage to make meaningless the things that make
modern story telling good.  Plot.  Characters.  Who cares?  These are not
the essentials to my story.  Yet I wonder if I should..... I should practice
with them I suppose, just to see what tools I am missing.

The writing life.... I had an almost Out of Body Experience just before
coming up..  Napping while waiting for Lori to get out of a meeting.  A
shaking vibration in my hands and feet... up my arms....  A buzzing in my
ears.  I sat up and the sounds did not go away.  The feelings did not go
away.  But I became scared and finally awoke from the half-sleep.  I've been
trying for the past several days to repeat that experience, but thus far, no
luck.

writing.  Writing.  writing.  I need to have an experience that changes my
outlook on life.  An experience that gives me some foundation from which I
can string.  Some direction.  But no I prefer the more static foundation.  I
will impart the direction to myself, but I need something from which to
spring.  What experience will it be?  An OBE would be a partial step.
Seeing God in whatever form would be another.  A vision that I held was
"real" rather than a dream.  Something in the world that did not appear to
be caused by known forces....  So many options yet none of them are truly
what I am searching for?  Or ....

There was once upon a time a boy who knew everything because his feet were
firmly planted and he had nowhere else to go but on the path that fell
before his feet.  But the boy stepped of the path and into the void and has
been struggling to gain the momentum to cross it ever since.

[End Morning Freewrite]