Amazing that hearing AC/DC sing the exact same song as when I last stopped writing must have inspired me to pick up this journal again. Maybe the Devil really does work through their music. The American Flag is torn in half and shredded to the last inch of its' life, but it still clings to the antennae of The Beast as we are mowing down I-85 on the way to Maryland from Atlanta.

Yes, we deviated to Atlanta for three days and it was more than we could have ever anticipated. Journeying through the city with Marty, Larry's cousin, who knew the history and square footage of every skyscraper in the downtown area, we took breathtaking glass elevator rides and even snuck on the roof of the Hyatt some 30 odd stories up. Larry and I went to the 10th floor of the PeachTree and swam in the convertible pool. I just went straight up to the hotel detective, who had been eyeing us suspiciously for some time, and asked him where we could find the pool. You can get anywhere or anything in America with an attitude and a smile.

We played basketball and fired off some I burnt my hand. The next day we went to White Waters, a park with tubes of running water designed to project humans through and out of them.

Our first night there, we had come from Larry's uncle's house in Columbia. We went out to The Underground and drank on Marty's friend, Jack's tab.
- Shit piles up when you don't keep hacking away at it. -
4th of July was terrific, it's all on tape. The girls from Germany, South Africa, Sweden, Philadelphia, it's all there.

We saw an elderly man at an off ramp just an hour ago here in North Carolina. He was dressed well, a clean shirt and suspenders. His hair was cut short on his head, silver. Beside him were two good size suitcases and he was standing in the merging lane with his thumb out.

After leaving Florida and just shortly after finishing my last entry, Larry and I were cutting through Waycross, Georgia to get back onto the 1. As we pulled out from a stop light to turn there came an electrical pop and the dash of The Beast burst out with smoke like the end of a low budget magic trick. We pulled into the ever-present 76 station that just happened to be at our immediate left and surveyed the damage. The station was closed and the passersby in Waycross seemed rather entertained at the sight of two Californian Bohemians in a road ravaged International Scout attempting to solve its mechanical difficulties.

I asked a few people about the location of an auto parts store while Larry grumbled and cussed at the bellowing entrails of The Beast. Then, as luck would have it, Charlie, the owner of the station pulled up and opened the shop where he gave us a single white wire, the perfect vein to channel The Beast's electrical blood through it again.

Larry, the steel handed surgeon, replace the vein and in no time at all, maybe a half hour, a potentially full-on car fire was converted into a minor inconvenience and we were on the road again, surging ahead of the trailing storm clouds.

As the dusk settled in and the clouds increased in size and blackness, Larry came to the realization that we no longer had any headlights. His rewiring act hadn't made that one necessary connection. We pulled off to the side of the road and commenced tearing the dash apart once again. The side of the road was composed of lush green trees, tall grasses and mud as all of the Georgia I saw was, interupted briefly by small towns called Waycross and Baxley and Swainsboro and Alma.

Inevitably, Larry was half under the steering wheel and half hanging out of the car wearing only a pair of shorts, in the dark when the storm caught us. Rain. After a good deal of struggling with a project I couldn't have begun to understand, a police car arrived. Randy, was a sergent with the Alma Police Department, out on a call about a runaway horse, "If I see it I do and if I don't, I don't really care." But, Randy helped us out by escorting us back to Alma and pointing us into a closed recycling center that had an awning under which we could finish our wiring-rewiring job.

The recycling center lot was an amazing study in the human phenomenon of cruising. As we worked on The Beast, several cars, maybe 7 different ones total, pulled into the lot and swung around back onto the main strip of Alma. I interviewed a few of them, mainly asking them why and one fellow driving a truck simply replied, "Well, hell its just a turnaround spot in the road." About 5 highschool age boys in a brand new, white Cadillac, `89 model, stopped to tell me there just wasn't anything else to do in Alma. They were cruising the strip and drinking "slow gin". I know they swung by us at least 5 times.

I tried to stop some girls but instead I got a drunken Georgia Peach stiff arm from a brunette hanging out of a later model Chevrolet who screeched, "Hale Naoh!" at my beckoning in a glorious southern drawl.

Larry worked an absolute miracle on the wiring making a jimmy-rigged breaker box and connected the lights and we were headed for Tobie Drucker's house, Larry's uncle, in Columbia, S.C. by 9:00 at night.

We arrived at the Drucker home after a virtual clinic in map utilization demonstrated by Larry, at about 4:30am. Too polite to go to the door at such an ungodly hour we slept in the truck in Tobie's driveway to be discovered by his son, Charles, in the morning.

We were unfamiliar vagrants sleeping in the driveway as far as Charles knew and were reported as such to Tobie. After identifying ourselves we flopped on the empty beds in the girlish room of the 16 yr. old daughter, Robin, and we slept until late in the afternoon.

Larry's father arrived and we all went out to dinner at Zorba's, an Italian restaurant.

9 black women sat next to us in the restaurant and Larry and I struck up conversation with them much to the dismay of all the white patrons in the restaurant, including Larry's family. We pursued the conversation, partially to realize its shock value, but mainly because one of the ladies, named Mary Jane, demanded attention with her loud and playful personality, her rows of gold rings and her generally attractive stature. They were all related, the ladies. Out shoe shopping for one of the ladies' upcoming wedding. At the end of the dinner we were tempted by Mary Jane to meet her at The Starlight for dancing later, but we never made it. We slept.