The Dykespot: Adult Identification, Vibrations, the First Leg, and a Poopy tale.

The Journey begins. #Peace #goodvibrations
— Brian Dykeman (@dizzyke) June 17, 2015

For a few people I’m sure it felt like I left town rather suddenly.

Fact of the matter was, I was drastically late in my evacuation. I left almost two and a half weeks behind my subjectively proposed schedule. I suppose for the most part that was on account of my misinterpreting how long it would actually take to accomplish the obstacles I put in front of myself. Apparently I can’t anticipate how long certain things take to complete. But interestingly enough, it also came down to a lack of energy, over-commitment; thanks to getting hired onto a new job the same day I quit my last job, and my peculiar need to do things a certain way.

(Look to my meticulous attention to detail when it comes to certain aspects of car maintenance in previous posts as an example.)

That said, I finally arrived at my first defined destination as of the evening of June 22^nd, 2015

The legs of my Travel weren’t all too long thanks to the family members that welcomed me into their home along the way.

To them I am extremely grateful.

I write this with wholehearted nameless acknowledgement of those that opened their home to me because I was also met with negative vibrations in more than one instance, not even three hours into the journey.

I set out on this journey with an astute awareness of my age and the responsibly associated with the pressures I feel and understand in our current culture; or at least in my mind, that come with ‘being’ an adult.

(It’s a large and running theme and philosophical problem that is present in a lot of the work I have yet to release to the world, and in turn, I really wanted to personally address the problems I have with it within my own personal commune in life and with this journey; as I consider it an issue and over concentration of my mental constitution. It often contributes to seeming dramatic hindrances in my life.)

To address this I decided to make a point of taking myself out of my comfort zone, not just in quitting my job, moving out of my home and storing all my things so as to leave and travel, but in how I was going to approach doing all those things. Typically I would simply locate my destination and make as direct and expedited an effort to get there as possible. In some cases that would translate into a twenty hour or more drive without resting, to which, I would then rest for a day or so to recover.

And for what?

Well, an overall desire of not putting a person out is my typical concern, especially since people generally go out of their way for a guest when they have one and it isn’t my desire to have people do that.

For me, I want to have as little of an impact on people’s as possible, showing no indication of having been or being present. In my mind it is the least I should do when bringing myself into someone’s life. This can be difficult because so many people angle to be gracious hosts, seemingly putting there every day life to the side in order to try and take on an effort to also entertain guests during their stay.

Speaking for myself, it seems like a huge inconvenience.

Sidebar:

I once got an out of the blue request from a person I had only just met to help them by way of picking them up at the airport because their ride to where they were staying had fallen through and they had no money for a taxi.

Inconvenience One: It was some time after ten o’clock at night and as I had just gotten off work, I was already in bed about to fall asleep. I had to get up, get dressed and…

Inconvenience Two: Portland International is about a 45 minute drive one way from where I lived.

Anyway, I know bad things happen to people all the time and picking someone up and driving them somewhere wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

Upon picking them up I came to find out not only did their ride fall through, but so did their place to stay. The next few minutes of the drive turned into a conversation about how tired they were and letting me know not only did they need a floor to sleep on but they were in town for a court date the next morning. They didn’t know what they were going to do. Things just kept getting more suspect by the minute and without a destination for me to drop them off at, the drive was basically now aimless and the discussion on his end was ironically avoiding directly asking if they could stay where I lived, leaving it open for me to provide an invitation.

Inconvenience Three: Living with my sister and her husband, not only would I basically be putting up someone that was still a stranger to me, it was putting my sister and her husband into an awkward situation. Nobody likes to walk down stairs in the morning to find a stranger laid out on their hide a bed. And waking them up after midnight to explain the situation isn’t the easiest thing to do either, especially when those people get up very early to go to work.

Needless to say, I got in contact with my sister and we decided it would be alright to let them stay.

So, after going for McDonalds so they could eat something, setting up the bed in the Living Room and determining we had to be up in the next four hours to get them to court in Beaverton on time; I’d be dropping them off in downtown Portland and they would figure it out from there.

At that point I asked them if they needed anything before I went to bed and they assured me they were going to pass out as soon as their head hit the pillow.

That sounded just fine to me as I was still apprehensive having them there, no sooner did I make it to my room and lay down to sleep myself did I then hear them begin walk to the bathroom.

“Okay, they need to use the bathroom.”

The water was then turned on in the bathroom and after what seemed like five minutes was still running at a pretty good clip.

“Okay, they’re one of those people that run the water so you can’t hear them pissing.”

After what felt like another five minutes, the water was finally shut off and they could be heard walking back to the couch.

No sooner did I begin to fall asleep again, once again they went back to the bathroom, turned the water back on and spent about half as long as the first time in the bathroom.

Once they had returned to the couch I went downstairs to ask if they needed something.

They informed me they had gotten sick, but they were okay now.

Asking again if they needed anything and being assured they were alright I turned in for the remainder of the early morning.

The rest of the event was pretty straight forward, waking up early and dropping them off in Portland for their trial.

It wasn’t until about a week later that my sister asked me if there had been a problem in the bathroom. I had completely forgotten/decided not to check about the person telling me they had been sick. I asked my sister what the problem was, as long as the guest had had the water running I figured maybe there were traces of vomit somewhere on the sink that hadn’t been seen or cleaned up.

Little could I have imagined apparently my sister had gone to the empty the waste basket in the bathroom and found not only was there some toilet paper in the basket but there was also some sizable pieces of skat in the basket along with it.

I couldn’t believe what she was telling me so I went down to the bathroom to see for myself. While my sister in all her nursing experience had already cleaned up the left behind refuse, sure enough there were stains on the cloth waste basket liner my sister had made for the basket. After making it a point to ask my sister why in the world she would make a cloth liner for a wastebasket, after all you never know, at some point someone might… you know, throw some skat in there for some inconceivable reason. There were also some jokes aimed at whether she was sure her or her husband hadn’t made the mess; maybe she or he sleep walked… or were sleep crappers… with foreign bathroom practices and had up to this point gone undiagnosed as a ‘Sleep Crapper’

While I have no frame of reference to pass complete judgment as to why someone wouldn’t flush said substances down the toilet; people do after all drop used toilet paper in waste baskets in foreign countries, even though the person that stayed over wasn’t from a foreign nation, as far as I knew, and it wasn’t just used paper they threw away, my overall focus at that moment was to bear witness to the figurative murder scene my sister said existed in the bathroom.

Little did I know my sister had put the wastebasket back in such a way said poop stain on linen trashcan liner was hidden from sight to anyone sitting on the toilet or entering the bathroom. The way she made this possible was by having the tarnished area facing out leaving anyone that might go to grab the basket with the high probability of grabbing the basket were the… skat stain was on the liner; my own fingers were only minuscule units of measurement away from touching it when I pulled the basket it out to see for myself.

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Anyway, back to my perception that dropping in; although maybe that’s the wrong way of phrasing it in certain cases, on people presents them with an inconvenience, I decided to try and put that idea to the back of my mind, as my ideas aren’t always universal, and open myself up to being more present and accepting of the world around me. While I have no idea how to ultimately address certain facets I feel are sometimes a deficit to character, I figured putting myself in situations I’d usually feel uncomfortable with might be a good way to get out of my own way and to some extent possibly address life in a different way.

So,

Instead of pushing through and not staying with anyone, I decided to make a point to stop at various times, if not to meet with and stay with family but to maybe even stay with strangers, i.e. via couchsurfers.com or at the places I stopped along the way.

Thankfully, this week met me with many positive vibrations from certain long not seen relatives.

Even though I was also met with vibrations not so pleasant from others, I simply let those things occur and moved past them.

Inevitably following the positive and the random worked out for the better than just shooting straight through. This led to not only having several drawn out and in depth conversations I would never have gotten to have had I pushed through to my first destination, it also lead me to explore aspects of the world I have long been uncomfortable with and tried hard to avoid and wasn’t expecting to encounter.

Following the tracks…