I'm so fuckin' dirty. Road-bored- we're on the road crossing the ever lush green carpeting of trees that covers Pennsylvania. The flag is shredded down to six stars, just a thin red, white and blue frayed line on the antennae. Symbolic both of our trip across the nation as well as the state of the nation. For as Larry put it, the stongest part still remains the base. We have raged and ravaged every city we have visited, literally tearing up the country, but we still remain, the truck is still running, knock, knock and we are still on a mission, together. And the U.S. although a lot of mistakes have been made and a lot of irreparable damage has been done, once all that is shredded away and we can look back at our roots, as we did in D.C. at the Lincoln Memorial and at the Vietnam Memorial, the basis, the concept of government and the original patriotic spirit is still strong enough to cling to the antennae of the American people. Yeah! More bullshit, please. Thank You.

Remember the children of the trip, baby Isabelle, Larry's stepsister and Wagner's little girl, Sophia. - And Katie, Charles and Robin's little sister - Larry's cousin who led us around Columbia in search of postcard stamps, to no avail.

Don't forget Hambone the tattooed, PCP salesman that pulled us over. Camcorder and handcuffs on his seat, on I-95 headed towards New York.

Don't forget Columbia partying with the girls named Liz and Group Therapy.

Atlanta getting sloppy drunk and hazing the folk singer at Good Ole Days, because he knew no Grateful Dead, no Guns-n-Roses, no Neil Diamond and finally said he could not play knockin' on heavens door, so we left, Larry and I singing Knockin' drunkenly together down the steps into a puddled back alley with the sliver moon reflecting over our bumping shoulders. Across the street to the bar that appeared to be happening, then across another street to another porch bar where we met Annette, Bernadette and Alana from Sweden, Germany and South Africa , respectively. All of them nanny's

D.L. just this last Sunday was TREMENDOUS!!! We left to go and see the tourist edifices that engulf our Nations Capital in the late morning. We parked the beast and hopped a train in New Carrolton armed for battle. Larry wore his black leather Converse sneakers, his Maryland hat, a Woodstock's shirt from Woodstock's in Chico we both worked at and he carried the loaded camera. I wore the black satin shorts - the same shorts that withstood last years Road Dog tour of the California Coast and the Baha coast of Mexico, "Beach by day, drive by night," had been the battle cry. Larry hates the shorts, I have to be careful wearing them as the liner has torn and my sexual organs tend to fall into exposure when attemping certain physcial poses, such as sitting down. My Columbia attained black plastic reporters hat and my Cult shirt completed my armor. My weapon...the cuttingly accupate 12 year old Panasonic auto-stop cassette recorder. We boarded the Metro and immediately converged on Melissa. Melissa's hair was braided into corn rowsthat were loaded with a managerie of threads, beads, feathers and foil? She held woven Mexican hand bag and her joints that joined her extremities to her legs and arms were banded with dozens of bracelets of silver, woven thread and pipe cleaner. She liked the Grateful Dead. She was easy to talk to and by the time we reached the Smithsonian Metro stop she had agreed to blow out going home, again, and hang out with us. She had seen The Who at RFK two nights before and she later confided that she hadn't been home or showered since the show. She told us she was 21, but, of course, her ID was lost. She lived with her mother. We interviewed what seemed to be tons of people as we walked the lawns from the Capitol building to the Washington Monument to the horribly polluted Reflection pool to the Lincoln Memorial to the Vietnam War Memorial. I didn't interview anyone at the war memorial from the first name I saw - Anderson- a chill ran through and kept hold to the point where I found myself reading the names as if they had all been my older brothers, barely concealing my tears. O'Brien, Barbarino, Jones, Billy Ray Parker, Julio Velaquez, Smith, Chang, Davis, Jackson, Quinn, Love. All nationalities, all colors, all from the melting pot of America, all part of what America is and was, all my age, all dead, after being terrified and thrown into a hell they couldn't have ever anticipated from their dinner tables, from their day jobs, their love making, their football fields, their partying. I was scared because I felt the fear that the culture shock must have hit them with before they died. Men my age, an age where life decisions are arriving, choices about morality, reality and philosophies are all swimming to the forefront of our pools that had mainly been used for leisure until we began to be pressured into becoming "men," to sink or swim. And suddenly the decision is made all too clearly - kill or be killed. I felt thousands of souls, floundering souls, at the wall, and it distressed me because its' not their fault, it's not their fault their heads weren't together when they were taken out of this world. They never had a chance. They never had a chance to think, to work out a relationship, to be by themselves. Sink or swim - Do or die that was it. 58,897. I loved them.

We met a girl from Chico there at the wall. She was working at an internship. She was by herself, apparently had other things to do and she floated away as quietly as she had appeared, after being interviewed, of course. We walked around some more, by the Whitehouse, interviewing always interviewing. We let Melissa have a crack at inverviewing but she was awkward, asking Texans were their cowboy boots were and the Australians if they rode Kangaroos. We were headed back to the Metro, stopped at a drinking fountain in front of the Washington Monument, it was a hot day, but not as sweltering as the next two would be. At the fountain we met up with a couple who hailed from Maryland and they boy knew Larry's step brother, went to high school with him in fact and had heard legends of Larry. So, as we all walked across the lawn headed for the Metro, Larry and the boy discussed Doug while I amused Melissa and the girl by denegrating fraternities. "We like to drink their beer and take their women," Larry and I proclaimed in unison. A young man receiving a blue frisbee cracked a smile upon hearing this. "Those idiots," he must have been thinking, "wait until I tell Otto." Otto was, of course, the thrower of the frisbee, and a member of a fraternity at Chico State. Larry and I both recognized Otto and that was the turning point of the day. Big - Hey - Turning Point, D.C. would never be the same.

Finish later, its getting dark. We're still in the mammoth square of Pennsylvania. It is raining , the country side is thick, lush, gorgeous, the road sucks.