ON THE ROAD - Anchorage / Tijuana

I’m now leaving Anchorage, up there in Alaska, this is, as I get a lift with some caravanners, in the meanwhile, we are already reaching Tok, a small town where the roads divide, say, here you can follow further north in the direction of Fairbanks, or, continue on east toward the Canadian border and then go down in the direction of the United States territory. And so, because my driver and his girlfriend actually have the intention of following north, with the purpose of watching the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) from a closer angle, I descend here, at this junction, and so, then, while wandering here in the front of some coffee booth that also sell Alaskan souvenirs, say, Ulu knives, native masks, soapstone carvings, Alaskan totem poles, etc… things primarily created by the Tlingit, the Haida, the Tsimshian and the Chugach Sugpiaq also refereed as Alutiiq, that primary inhabitants of the Prince William Sound area and the outer Kenai Peninsula, I would get a lift with some Canadian guys that would take me across the Yukon territory, and further, once on the border with the British Columbia department, I would get several rides with with a groups of men working in road improvement, men cleaning apparatus left on the side of the road, fixing potholes, remarking the lines on the pavement… and, this is, after some days jumping from van to van, helping the man in their road works here and there, somehow, I would manage to arrive in the Vancouver city, say, a very clean city, actually ranked as one of the most sustainable cities in the world… whatever that means, and say, then, already on the other side of the river, the Fraser river, while standing at some crossroad somewhere at the southern part of the Newton neighborhood, I would get caught by a Scottish-Italian-Irish plumber man that while on the go would constantly say that “Jesus was hippie bastard” etc, and then, once on the border with United States, I would get another ride with two sisters actually coming from visiting their mother in the Vancouver vicinities, now heading back to their father’s house in Seattle. And thus, accordingly, on the go, they would actually disclose that once upon a time they also have been hitchhikers, this is, “Actually, I have hitchhiked through old Europe, France, Germany, all the Balkan area, Greece… and, I ended up living in Turkey during some months…” the driver says, and then, her sister, the co-pilot with red hair, also says, “I have been to central and south America, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, French Guiana, Suriname and Brazil, where I spent an amazing time drifting through the Amazonian forest…”; “me too!” I say. And so, after a brief conversation about the Belize crime scene, we would actually pass Mount Vernon, Conway, and in a while we are already inside the Seattle metropolitan area. This is, we go through Stanwood, Silvana, Smokey point, Everett, Martha Lake, Alderwood Manor, Lake Forest Park, Sheridan Beach and then Lake city, a suburban area already on the top of Lake Washington, and “What is now Lake City…” our driver explain, “has actually been inhabited since the end of the last glacial period by the Duwamish tribe… and say, even the name Duwamish is an Anglicization of the Lushootseed name “dxdəwabsh”, that means people of the inside…" she says, before we actually go swimming on the lake Washington. And so, after leaving them with their business, I go through Ravenna, a middle class residential neighborhood, I go through University district, and then Capitol Hill, a neighborhood packed with hip bars, eateries and gay clubs, plus laid-back coffee shops and indie stores, that’s how they call it. And then in Downtown, I actually reach the Alaskan Way, from where one can take ferries to Kingstone, Bainbridge, Bremerton, Southworth, all on the other side of the Puget Sound. And in the meanwhile, I'm already going through the Greenwood Cemetery in Renton, this is, looking for the Jimmy Hendrix grave, and so, as it goes, actually, by its grave, I make a friend, say, a modern-day traveling salesman that would take me to Takoma, and so, accordingly, while on the go, he would talk about the TSP, this is, the traveling salesman problem, say, "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city? This is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, important in theoretical computer science… plus, the traveling purchaser problem and the vehicle routing problem are both generalizations of the TSP… and, in the theory of computational complexity, the decision version of the TSP, where the L belongs to the class of NP-complete problems. Thus, it is possible that the worst-case running time for any algorithm for the TSP increases superpolynomially with the number of cities… so, actually, the TSP has several applications even in its purest formulation, such as... planning, logistics, in the manufacture of microchips… and, slightly modified, it appears as a sub-problem in many areas, such as DNA sequencing... and so, in these applications, the concept city represents, for example, customers, soldering points, or DNA fragments, and the concept distance represents traveling times or cost, or a similarity measure between DNA fragments… plus, the TSP also appears in astronomy, as astronomers observing many sources will want to minimize the time spent moving the telescope between the sources; in such problems, the TSP can be embedded inside an optimal control problem… and, in many applications, additional constraints such as limited resources or time windows may be imposed…” he says, and then I’m in Olympia, this is, as it goes a guy selling chips actually takes me to Astoria, on the mouth of the Columbia river... and, as it goes, I walk by the pacific ocean all afternoon until it's night, and so, I’m not hitchhiking now, I look up at the stars and I wonder if that is Orion, or Taurus, or the Canis Major, the Canis Minor… and then, there are some shadows twirling around the sky, perhaps inside my head… probably, mythological monsters made of certain unfinished assumptions, but I keep going, faster and faster, and then, in a state of trance, forgetting everything, even who I am and where I’m going... this is, I don’t know how much hours after, I become aware of a great lighting behind me… and, say, wihout looking back, I actually come to see, what looks like a big lorry, now slowly passing on my side, and then, a bit further, as it stops on the side of the road the passenger door straight away opens, as if automatically… and, accordingly, as I go for it, actually, the chauffeur, a man with a toad smile and muscular shoulders, already wants to know what I have in this plastic bag I’m taking with me, and so, “stones” I say instantly, and then, “for what purpose?”; he asks, “nothing…” I say, “it’s just stones I collected along the road”; “Hum Ok, well, and where are you willing to go?”, “There” I say, pointing forward, and as I do it, he glimpses from me to the road and from the road to me with half-closed eyes, a tricky smile, and, in the meanwhile, here he goes, “So… goten’t any proper destination?”; “Hum… no, I just want to go south”; “South, south, but where and why?”; “It’s that… I want to go to the desert… that’s it!”; “Hum, the desert dream… I don’t like desert people, but OK let’s go!” And then, as I sit on his side I throw my smelly socks out of the window, and in the meanwhile he puts his hand into my bag of stones and rummages through it with no shame, this is, he even picks up a couple of them, smiling, smirking at it, and then he throws some of them out of the window and we take off. Further, while rolling, he asks me if I’m a Christian, and I don't know what to answer… and so, then, he throws a quite crumpled bible in my lap and asks to read passages from it while he drives, and I, quiet, here I’m, looking the road, not looking at the big book, and then, I see his hand scratching under his seat, and from there he picks up some kind of pistol and slowly he pull it over against one of the sides of my head while saying, “Open it where you want… choose a page, and, start reading a text from your choice… but, read it well, I want no babble…” And me, seeing no chance in this matter, there I go, opening the big book, and then "When any man from the Israel house…” I’m already starting, “offer a burnt offering or a sacrifice and do not bring it to the entrance of the assembly place, this same man have to be cut off from our people…and... so, if you are proud of your God, and you know his wills and you approve his good things as you are verbally instructed by the law... and you are equally persuaded that you are a guide of the blind... a light for them in the darkness... one who corrects the unreasonable, an instructor of the little ones... and having the structure of knowledge and truth in the law... to you will come the very glory of Lebanon, the juniper, the ash and the cypress…” and here, at this point, the chauffeur is already shooting against the passing trees, and I, making as ignoring, I just continue the reading, “so, in order to adorn the place of your sanctuary, you will have to glorify the place of your feet…”; “and so, you see, men ought be declared righteous by works and not only by faith...'' the driver says now, and then I keep reading “in the same way, wasn't also Rahab, the harlot, declared righteous by her works... after having received with hospitality the messengers and send them off through another door… just as the breathless body is dead, faith without works is also dead... and the priest will have to return on the seventh day and see, if... the plague has spread on the walls of the house… and stones have to be removed from that wall, carried out of the city, and cast into an unclean place... and then, the walls will have to be scraped on the insides…” And then, Ihe continue, “Solomon should have forty thousand horse stalls for his chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen, and these servants should provide food for the king Solomon, and every one should come on his table... each one in his month... and nothing should be missed... the offerings plus the barley and the straw for the horses ... and the food for the steeds… all should be brought according to his commission... and God will continue to give Solomon wisdom and understanding to a very great extent , as well as broadness of heart... just like the sand that borders by the sea...” and then, as we are reaching Eureka, the chauffeur says “Heil heil Solomon! Heil heil Rahab the harlot! Hail hail the horses and the steeds of Solomon… we will make a stop here, I will pay you the lunch my boy coz I very much have enjoyed your reading!” And so, once at the restaurant, the driver goes and installs himself on the bar, side by side with other lorry drivers, and I can hear, they are actually sharing their stories about the road, about certain kind of creatures wandering through the highway, about this or that traffic inspection, and as they talk they drink big cups of beer and laugh at stupid jokes about the Solomon’s wives, and then, I leave them and install myself in another room, a room where there is no people, just a TV talking to the walls, and here I’m, look at the screen without really paying attention to the content, thinking about something, and then, at some point, a guy in a blue suit with a bow on his nick appears swinging on the screen, from one to the other side, while on his back there are huge images of the brain blinking, and then, he starts a speech that goes more and less like this “Human beings have an autonomic nervous system that is actually comprised of three separate subsystems… the parasympathetic nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system and the enteric nervous system… The enteric nervous system has been described as a kind of second brain, which communicates with the central nervous system through the parasympathetic… via the vagus nerve and sympathetic nervous systems. However, vertebrate studies show that when the vagus nerve is severed, the enteric system continues to function… and so, we now know that the enteric system is not just capable of autonomy but also influences the brain… In fact, about ninety per cent of the signals passing along the vagus nerve come not from above, but from the enteric system… and that is why many consider it as a backup brain centered in our solar plexus… this is, our gut instincts are not fantasies but real nervous signals that guide much of our lives...” and while I hear this assumptions coming from the TV set I’m also aware that there is a big mess on my back, one the other room, the truck drivers laugh and yell because of something I'm not interested to know, and so, I turn back my attention to the screen, again, and it continues like this, “It is our vagus nerve that provides the gateway between the two parts of the autonomic systems.... thus, the vagus nerve acts as a bio-informational data bus that routes impulses going in two directions… and, since the vagus nerve acts as the central switchboard it should be understood that, impaired functioning of this nerve can lead to many kind of different problems…. like, for example, some neurological diseases actually come up from the guts spreading to the brain via the vagus nerve… and… “It's scientific, it's scientific” loudly says the bartender on the other side, “You all can see the truth now… the shit, yes, THE SHIT you have in your bowls will produce some part of your thinking, yes-yes, think about this ladies and gentleman's…” and then, a whole conversation about shit comes up in the restaurant, from all directions. But, I ignore it, and then, I put my attention on the screen again, this is, the guy in the bow tie and blue suit keeps going like this… “The vagus nerve is the commander-in-chief when it comes to having grace under pressure… Plus, we can say, that, the autonomic nervous system is composed of two polar opposite systems that create a complementary tug-of-war which allows our body to maintain homeostasis inner-stability... this is, the sympathetic nervous system is geared to rev you up like the gas pedal in an automobile… it thrives on adrenaline and cortisol and is part of the fight-or-flight response… and, the parasympathetic nervous system is the polar opposite. This is, the vagus nerve is the command central for the function of your parasympathetic nervous system… and so, this is, the vagus nerve reflexive responses can backfire and turn it from comrade into saboteur… and so, that’s why the vagus nerve is known as the wandering nerve, because it has multiple branches that diverge from two thick stems rooted in the cerebellum and brain-stem that wander to the lowest viscera of our abdomen… touching our hearts and most major organs along the way. It meanders all the way down, into the belly, spreading fibers to the tongue, pharynx, vocal chords, lungs, heart, stomach, intestines and glands that produce anti-stress enzymes and hormones like Acetylcholine, Prolactin, Vasopressin, Oxytocin... influencing digestion, metabolism and the relaxation response… so, the vagus nerve uses the neurotransmitter, acetylcholine… and if our brain cannot communicate with our diaphragm via the release of acetylcholine from the vagus nerve then you will stop breathing” and at this point the face of the presenter is getting red, like if he was choking with his own assumptions. And then, he keeps going, stuttering a bit, “Botox is a toxic substance that has the power to damage the nervous system and shut down the vagus causing death… and, it's interesting to note that... the heavy metal mercury blocks the action of acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter that passes the nerve impulse from the vagus nerve to the heart muscle… Both acetylcholine and the nerve receptors in the heart muscle contain thiol proteins… and so, when mercury attaches to the thiol protein in the heart muscle receptors and in the acetylcholine, the heart muscle cannot receive the vagus nerve electrical impulse for contraction… and the result is… Mercury accumulates in the heart muscle and heart valves, causing damage by attaching to thiol proteins. So, now we can say, that, the frequently observed rocking and swinging behaviors in autistic individuals may reflect a naturally occurring bio-behavioral strategy to stimulate and regulate a vagal system that is not efficiently functioning… And so, they told me to say that, nowadays, people have been highly contaminated with mercury used in dental amalgam which dentists routinely place only inches from the brain… Moreover, plus than three thousand tons of mercury are put into the atmosphere each year contaminating the entire biosphere of our planet, but the government, nonsensically, seems to worry more about CO2 emissions from coal-fired smokestacks instead of the huge amount of neurotoxic mercury in the atmosphere…” and at this point, in the screens placed on the back of this blue suit guy, a disturbing red sky comes up, and there are false teeth dangling amid all this red sky, and then the blue suit guy disappears in the middle of all it, and then, some publicity about toothpaste follows. Thus, I leave this room and there I go, now wandering through the gambling area, still thinking about this vagus nervous thing, which, they say, may be affecting the connection of the heart with the brain and triggering indolence and autism… and then, I go through the gambling room, where all the truck drivers are installed now, still talking about shit, and me, now covering and uncovering the mouth with the palm of my hand, making this sound like the Indians do in westerns movies, and so, as I advance doing it, they keep tell me to shut up, but I don’t stop, and so, in a jiffy, some of them are already coming after me, and thus, to defend myself, I even have to do some acrobatic steps, an improvisational thing, and then, there I go, jumping through an opened window, soon landing on solid ground, and on the following, already advancing through the parking area where dozens of trucks are parked, and, as I keep wondering in the middle of them, looking for a way out, I’m actually being chased by rabid dogs, and say, in the meanwhile, I actually manage to mount on the sidecar of an old Harley Davidson motorcycle and there we go, leaving this area now... there we go in the direction of San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles... And thus, while advancing by the pacific ocean, at some point, I would actually get another ride with some kind of a history teacher on-the-run that keeps saying things like this, “The big problem of America nowadays is that… today’s master discourse is completely trivialized, desecrated, say, on equal footing with the media that all the time nothing more does than, ridiculing society through hypocritical hyperbole…” and again, “the problem of America today is…” he says again and again, and then, after passing the border, I actually would continue on foot, following on the side of the motorway, and then, after going through an inhospitable valley, actually, I would come to pass some mounds of heavy rubbish with some fig trees around, and then, on the side of it, I even manage to enter some illuminated caves... and, thus, as I get inside, actually, I come to find the illuminated statues of Santa Morte, the Virgin of Guadalupe and San Judas Thaddeus. And then, already out again, while going through another valley, by this time I come to catch sight of a man walking in the middle of the shrubs, this is, there he goes, a small man with a tray on his head… and without knowing why, there I go too, already advancing after him, but keeping some distance, coz, I don’t want to be seen. Thus, as it goes, after a while we are already arriving at the suburbs of Tijuana. And then, while walking on the beach, I actually get flanked by a series of guys pulling carts full of wood, and so, as they keep getting closer and closer, one of them is already telling me, ““Ven-ven con nosotros Señor, ven a tirar tus moneda al fuego y leeremos tu destino…” one of the says, and there we go.