Journeys with Steve

Editor emeritus experiences U.S.'s many faces

By: Steve Markley

Posted: 1/30/07

There's a chance you might remember me.

No, not because you took me home from a bar to hook up and instead I vomited in one of your dresser drawers and passed out on your kitchen counter (although, that may also have happened as well).

The truth is I used to write for this little rag, The Miami Student. Once upon a time, I was an editorial editor, drunk with my own power and overwhelming sense of purpose, but then I did something incredibly stupid - I graduated. Now, instead of all that prestige and glory, I'm just some shmuck with a bachelor's degree, who would have an easier time finding a nuclear missile in Iraq than a real job. You might ask yourself, what does a crass, untalented, and (let's face it) effeminate college graduate actually do? The answer is nothing … by which I mean everything.

Less than a week after receiving my diploma from the man who once publicly accused me of rolling back the Enlightenment, I struck out west on a feverish, dizzying eight-month cross-country road trip that left me broke, enlightened, dead and reborn.

More than 12,230 miles, through 29 states and one Canadian province, I scoured the North American continent, dissecting its endless maze of highways, byways, back alleys and seedy bars. I worked as a boat wrangler on a lake in Wyoming. I climbed the second highest mountain on the Teton Range and urinated from the summit. In Vancouver, I ate dinner with a homeless man at four in the morning and heard what it felt like to be in the depths of crack binge. In Portland and Reno, I hunted down childhood friends I hadn't seen in 13 years. I stumbled blindly through a nightclub in Vegas, where women massaged each other in cages and took baths in the middle of the dance floor. In the Arizona desert, I taught a group Navajo high school students about Bruce Springsteen. I slept in my car. I stayed in shady motels where whole families of four lived out of a single room and tired men in shirts soaked with oil pulled the shades closed after returning from work each day. I watched the sun rise in the desert and gazed in awe as a train blasted through the dawn inches from my face. Through the empty miles of New Mexico and Texas, the bayous of Louisiana and Mississippi, the shuttered windows and stray garbage of New Orleans, I drove and drove. I woke up in a hotel room in Jackson without any memory of how I got there and took a stool softener as a recreational drug in Chapel Hill. Through South Carolina and Virginia, Philadelphia and New Jersey, Connecticut and New York, I saw a thousand sights I never before dreamed and met a thousand people whose lives I never before imagined. Then I ran out of money.

Upon returning to Ohio I was faced with the prospect of living at home as I got my life back together. Because this thought was only slightly more appealing than attempting to abort my own colon with a coat hanger, I decided to move back to my old stomping grounds of Oxford. I called up a buddy, who shall be referred to here only as "Phil," and told him that since he was also a post-college disaster, we should get an apartment and be useless to society and depressing for people to talk about together. "Phil" has higher aspirations than myself, as he is planning to find himself a rich wife this semester - one who will set him up for life while fulfilling all of his fantasies (for "Phil" this only means finding a girl willing to wear some type of Ohio State sports jersey while they fornicate - as for him seeing a name like "Ginn" or "Oden" during coitus is the equivalent of a methamphetamine and Viagra cocktail delivered by syringe directly to his genitals).

Luckily enough for you, Miami, while my personal life may be in shambles, and everyone I have ever loved is no longer returning my phone calls because they can clearly see the self-destructive downward spiral of depraved glory I've begun, you need not worry: Your fix of Markley will be sated. Aside from my travel memoir, a tome I shall call A Land I Saw in My Dreams: One Hedonistic College Grad's Personal and Political Journey Across the Excoriated Landscape of the American Dream in the Final Years of the Reign of Bush, there is the brand new Web site www.stephenmarkley.com, where beginning Friday, Feb. 16, my column will continue.

Why start your own Web site, you might ask? Aside from the vanity and narcissism, you might add? Putting aside the fact that almost no one knows who you are and outside of about 16 of your college friends and your own mommy, no one cares what you think about the Iraq war, gay marriage, or anything else, you may adjoin?

The sad fact is the Web site and bi-weekly column are not for you - although I do hope you become a faithful reader - they're for me. I sit around all day with these thoughts of greatness running through my head - everything from rage at the Bush administration (of which I have a lot) to jokes involving professor Mike DeWine and uncircumcised feral dogs (oh man, that is a good one). I guess like Henry David Thoreau, Maya Angelou and Bill O'Reilly, I simply have too much genius to not let the world in on a little.

So check out the site, Miami. Tell your friends, tell your parents and I'll let you in on a little secret: It was somewhere in the empty wasteland between El Paso and San Antonio that I thought of how hilarious shooting meth and Viagra into a penis could be, and decided that somehow, someway I needed a way to share that with the world.