The Grand Dragon Will See You Now

I have a simple question for you:

When was the last time you were in a Mexican restaurant/bar in Athens, Georgia, shooting pool and chewing the fat with your friends, surrounded by a mix of college students and hipsters and working-class folks and feeling, as a Yankee, maybe just a little bit out of place, talking about kudzu and the red dirt that seemed to be everywhere, and wondering where you might park your van for the night in a strange city, and when the hell are we all going to the 40 Watt Club, and speculating about where to go next on your aimless road trip across America, when out of the blue the bartender -- a nice guy named Vern -- mentioned matter-of-factly that there was a Ku Klux Klan rally just a few miles outside of town?

Part of me wishes that, when that opportunity arose for me in March 1988, I had driven out to see those robed degenerates spouting their hateful bullshit. Sure, I would've been scared to get close, but also fascinated. Read about that incident in my new memoir, Great/Dismal: My Four-Month Tour of Duty on the Battleship Patchouli.

Get Off the Bus!

The summer after I graduated from college, I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road and thought that Dean Moriarty was the coolest, wildest dude and that hanging out with him would be a non-stop carnival of insane adventure and mind-expanding conversation. He talked and talked and talked about all sorts of way-out ideas, took Sal Paradise (Kerouac's alter ego) to parties, listened to jazz like it was the most amazing thing on Earth and just burned burned burned.

This, I thought, is what I want to do: go on a cross-country trip that is full tilt all the way, meet new people, live on the edge, learn about new places, experience danger. You can read about how my expectations measured up to reality in my new memoir, Great/Dismal: My Four-Month Tour of Duty on the Battleship Patchouli.

As for Dean Moriarty -- known in real life as Neal Cassady -- I learned many years later that he was the kind of human firework who is fun to read about, but not for a guy like me to hang out with. He was a complicated guy who had a messed-up upbringing, sure. And he influenced Kerouac's writing style and featured not only in his books, but in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg. He was one of those characters we all meet on occasion in our lives, who seem like they walked off a movie screen because they're just so manic and funny and smart and loveable and frustrating and selfish that it's hard to believe somebody didn't create them on a written page.

But I would've tired of his shenanigans very quickly if he'd somehow been reincarnated and stuck his thumb out along the highway west from Oklahoma to New Mexico, looking for a ride that would've quickly turned into him taking the wheel and commandeering the conversation and putting my introverted ass into a tizzy. See for yourself, below.

We All Struggle with Something

We name things to help us understand them, and to create a shared knowledge with our fellow human beings. I sometimes get fascinated by language, and trying to figure out how even the simplest of words -- dog, cat, dodecahedron -- came to be. Naming things, however, can put people on a slippery slope. Nobody wants to be defined too narrowly by elements of their character or physical presentation.

Look at me and you might think, "White nerd with glasses." You would be right about that, but there's so much more going on. I play guitar, I love the Red Sox and Bruins, I make terrible "dad jokes," I love Public Enemy and Funkadelic, I love to wander around in strange places taking photos, I have arthritic big toes and a bad hip.

One label I don't mind tagging myself with, though, is person with Attention Deficit Disorder.

More than three years ago, I diagnosed myself with ADD (see November 28, 2018, "ADD Me to the List"). Read the linked post to get the full story on it. I want to reiterate one point, though: realizing there was a name for the collective struggles I had battled my whole life gave me some freedom. I no longer worried that I was crazy or stupid or lazy. Finding the right "tag" for myself was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

In my new memoir, Great/Dismal: My Four-Month Tour of Duty on the Battleship Patchouli, amid the highway hijinks and visits to Graceland, New Orleans and Memphis, the exploration of Albuquerque, the punk rock shows, the flashbacks to college, there is self-analysis. I didn't have as much fun during my adventure as I thought I would, and for years I had no idea why.

During the course of writing the book, I began to put together a better picture of why I struggled, with the light finally shining when I realized I had both ADD and executive function issues. Those two things combined make it difficult for me to plan ahead and stay on task, take things as they come and be more spontanous.

We all struggle with something: hearing loss, flat feet, bipolar disorder, taking care of a sick relative, narcissism, a love of REO Speedwagon. I hope my book will show readers that it's never too late to figure yourself out, and that discovering the name for what you struggle against can be incredibly empowering.

Below is "Cross Bones Style," the only song I know by Cat Power, aka Chan Marshall. She has struggled with mental health issues, so I feel it's appropriate to share her song here.

That's a Big 10-4!

"Convoy," the 1975 novelty country music song that inspired the 1978 Sam Peckinpah movie of the same name, spoke to me as the Lord speaks to Jimmy Swaggart. I was 10 years old and in 5th grade when the song hit the Connecticut radio waves. Kids brought their copies of the 45 into school and begged our teacher, Mr. Cashman, to let them play it on the classroom record player. Sometimes he said yes; we all sang along.

The song sparked my interest in CB radio. I loved the crazy lingo -- "pregnant roller skate" for a VW bug; "bear in the air" means a police helicopter; "brown paper bag" indicates an unmarked police car -- and even bought a book about it so I could learn and use it. Sometimes when using my walkie-talkie with friends, I picked up trucker conversations and was thrilled beyond belief.

During this same era, I watched "Movin' On," a TV show about truckers, starring Claude Akins and Frank Converse. I was also completely and totally in love with the "Smokey and the Bandit" movies during this time. When I was 14, I watched "BJ and the Bear," a TV show about the trials and tribulations of a trucker and his pet chimpanzee.

At the Big E when I was in junior high school, I bought a metal belt buckle with a semi-truck on it.

You get the idea. I was into big rigs.

I never would have guessed, when I was 12 years old, straddling my yellow three-speed bike by the side of the main road that ran through my town and giving truckers the "blow your horn" signal, that 10 years later I'd be a free spirit, too, bombing down America's highways in a van with three buddies.

Read all about my trip in my new memoir, Great/Dismal: My Four-Month Tour of Duty on the Battleship Patchouli.

Get in the Van

Part of me wishes I didn't ever have to get out of the van. -- Dave Brigham, 2021.

I got in the van, just like Henry Rollins. I got in the van and I liked it -- stomping on the gas pedal and making that V8 growl, sitting in the passenger seat and watching America fly by, reading a book in the back seat and thrilling as the miles away from home piled up, listening to Nancy Sinatra and the Fifth Dimension and Willie Nelson on 8-track.

I got in the van and wished I was as cool as the dudes I read about in custom-car magazines when I was an awkward teen who never thought he'd take a road trip....

I got in the van, and I would do it again in a heart beat.

Read about my road trip in my new memoir, Great/Dismal: My Four-Month Tour of Duty on the Battleship Patchouli.

Please Buy My Book! (Does This Headline Make Me Look Desperate?)

For nigh on a thousand years, I have been working on and talking about my just-released road-trip memoir, Great/Dismal: My Four-Month Tour of Duty on the Battleship Patchouli (see May 5, 2016, "Here's An Excerpt from My Road-Trip Memoir").

I hit the road with three friends in February 1988, traveling in a converted handyman's van. From Connecticut we traveled down the eastern seaboard, and then on through Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, before entering the southwest. We ended up in New Mexico, where we lived for a few months. In 2008, I wrote about this journey on a predecessor blog; in 2011, I began expanding my story into a book. That book has now been published.

Why did it take me 10 years to finish the book? That's par for the course for me. My first book, (C)rock Stories: Million-Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity, also spent a decade in development. I'm not the most disciplined writer, that's for sure. But, as I discovered part-way through the process of writing my new memoir, I have ADD (see November 28, 2018, "ADD Me to the List"). That means I struggle to stay on task and organize my thoughts on paper, and I can get easily frustrated when I find things to be difficult.

Great/Dismal underwent a lot of changes from the initial draft all those years ago, to the one I hope you'll consider buying today. Because of my ADD (and executive function issues), I also procrastinate like a true professional. So it's not like I spent 10 straight years working on this book. I would leave it alone for weeks, sometimes even months. And even when I worked on it, sometimes progress was painfully slow. Also, I took my hands off it for a while, sending it to friends and family, seeking their input (see May 15, 2013, "Out of My Hands...for Now").

"What's the book about?" you might ask. It's equal parts Jack Kerouac's On the Road, detailing the adventures my three friends and I had while running amok in America (and also the boring parts), and Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor, with its nod to classic-era disco as well as new millennium club music.

Wait, that last part's not quite right.

It's a mash-up of Kerouac's famous book; John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley; the Rough Guide series of travelogues; the very tamest of Charles Bukowski; and a mid-life journey to self-discovery. I write not only about the four-month odyssey I took with my friends, but also about the various inspirations for the trip (National Lampoon magazine, the aforementioned Kerouac, a few free-form trips I took at the end of my college years, etc.). Additionally, I flash back to college and spend a chapter analyzing why I struggled to let my hair down during my adventure.

It's the most intimate thing I've ever written, which is another reason that I took so long to publish it. I don't like to talk about myself and my struggles, so this is a big step for me. I hope that if you buy it (and actually read it) you will connect with some part of it, whether the stupid stuff my friends and I did on our journey, or the struggles I had during the trip. And please let me know what you think, whether by posting a comment here, sending me a text or email or a Facebook message, or writing a review on Amazon, where the book is also available (along with other online retailers. You can also order one via your favorite indie bookseller).

Thanks!