The Year of Living Stupidly

By David Doyle

In 1987, I was a young man repulsed by yuppiedom and disillusioned with the engineering culture. Inspired by “On The Road”, I decided to quit my troubled engineering job and take a trip around the world, and write about it (I fancied myself as an overseas Jack Kerouac). The hope was that during this voyage, I would relax, find myself, and become a better person. Reality was quite different.

But more importantly, this is the story of the strange, wonderful, and beautiful places and people I experienced, the lovely universe and earthlings who made it all worthwhile.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Doyle
• Release date: Oct 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781495155956

David Doyle

An avid military vehicle enthusiast whose collection includes 10 Vietnam-era vehicles, it not surprising that most of his 100+ published books focus on US military vehicles. In June 2015, he was presented the coveted Bart Vanderveen Award by the Military Vehicle Preservation Association, given in recognition of "…the individual who has contributed the most to the historic preservation of military vehicles worldwide."

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The Year Of Living Stupidly

David Forbes Doyle

Doyle, David Forbes

The Year of Living Stupidly

Copyright January 5, 2015, All rights reserved

First edition

Cover design by Katrina Joyner, www.ebookcovers4u.com

(License notes) ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

AFTERWARD

PREFACE

In the summer of 1981, while an engineering student working for the Navy in Washington, D.C. I happened to notice a book about submarine disasters in the library. The first page I turned to showed the bearded crew of a World War II Pacific Fleet submarine standing on the deck. I don't recall the name of the boat, but I remember well the photo caption saying that the boat was reported missing in action shortly after the picture was taken.

In order to remain incognito, submarine crews avoided sending radio signals as much as possible. That boat probably went down completely unnoticed. What sank it: a Japanese destroyer? A seawater leak?

Millions of people died in that war and in the most horrible ways imaginable, but somehow the thought of a silent boat with all hands on board just vanishing from the face of the Earth really struck me.

When you're traveling around the vast globe and you tell people only a few destination points, most of the time no one has any idea where you are. Sometimes even you don't.

INTRODUCTION

This is the story of the adventure of a lifetime. But this is also the story of a young man stressed and obsessed, who was very good at spinning his wheels, a man definitely not at peace with himself, a man so painfully aware of his limitations that he created them, a man full of energy but no place to direct it, of huge amounts of anger unresolved, revenge uncompleted, a man sometimes too pre-occupied with the world-up-his-ass to see straight; an asshole with a capital A, a lonely and desperate Kerouac wanna-be who, in spite of being weird, had too much yuppie in him to be anything like his hero, a quintessential impatient ugly American, yuptight, caffeine-fueled, an insecure weirdo with hang-ups that even a trip around the World wouldn't cure. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating a little. Besides, a real Kerouac wanna-be would have written this a lot sooner.

But more importantly, this is the story of the strange and wonderful people whom he met ‘round the world, the lovely earthlings who made it all worthwhile. This is a story of his precious memories and his learning to love the world around him, in spite of him.

On the evening before I left San Diego to begin my trip around the world, I rushed up to Mt. Soledad to enjoy the sunset. I arrived just in time; the sun was inches from the horizon. As she slipped behind the clouds on the horizon, she began to distort, first to a bright red mushroom cap, then a funny disc and finally to an intense little line that dimmed ever so slowly and then disappeared altogether. I studied that spot even after the light was gone, as though I'd been watching a good friend's taillights vanish in the night sadly. Goodbye, Sun, I thought, thank you for letting me see another day. See you in the morning.

My older brother Mark lived in San Diego, and I was going to use his house as a point of departure and mailing address. Mark and I had grown up in the Washington D.C. area and had both moved to Southern California within a few months of each other: Mark to San Diego and I to Los Angeles. We were both engineers. Mark was confident and successful and I was the unhappy misfit who moved to the less desirable city because it was more bohemian, more insane, more of a freak show. Now four years later at the age of 28, I was unhappy with my job and lifestyle and taking a trip around the world.

I had worked with engineers, guys my age or even younger, who were terribly serious about everything. They were pursuing the yuppie career track: getting married, buying houses, fathering children, as though they were in a race to do all this before they turned 30. I hadn’t even grown up yet, and didn’t even know what I wanted to do when I did. This was not an early mid-life crisis - it was a prolonged adolescence. Four and a half years earlier, I had driven across this continent: homesick but with excitement and hope. Now I was about to cross it in the opposite direction, almost in defeat. Welcome to the land of disappointment.

Six months before, I was on an educational leave, in an engineering master’s program. I started out excited, but became stressed, depressed and disillusioned by the engineering culture. I watched a low budget documentary film entitled Whatever Happened to Kerouac?, because at the time, Jack Kerouac was a complete enigma to me. I was moved by the film, particularly recordings of Kerouac’s prose in his own voice. There was such a beauty, a rhythm to it. I was comforted by a feeling that had been missing in my world. I enjoyed the interviews of Kerouac’s wacky, funny friends, impressed that William F. Buckley had the utmost respect for him, and saddened by the thought of Kerouac committing slow suicide with alcohol and dying at the age of 47. I immediately began reading On the Road, and became completely inspired, consumed. Kerouac and Neal Cassady became my heroes; I wished that I could go back in time to the late 1940’s and hang out with them. And then a friend suggested I buy an air pass and take an around-the–world trip. Now it was decided. I would write the overseas version of On the Road.

I looked up to my older brother for guidance and stability. We were very close. I was about to start a journey alone. I was going to miss him terribly and I was dreading the farewell the next morning and having to run errands in L.A. before hitting the road. L.A., the city I loved and hated with equal passion; the city I loved but only on Friday and Saturday nights, only at peaceful 3:00 a.m. on weekdays, only on sunny Sunday afternoons in the wintertime.

Thursday, April 9, 1987

The morning was entirely devoted to irritating last minute preparations. Mark's office was on the north side of town, on the way to L.A.. I arrived there mid-afternoon. Mark met me in the lobby and we headed out to his car and stood side-by-side leaning against the trunk. I began shedding tears. We were next to a giant office window, which was tinted so I couldn't tell if anyone was watching. The sun was ever so bright.

So this is it, eh? God, I'm so happy for you, Mark said, This trip will do you a lot of good.

I guess, I mumbled, tear-choked, I've been stressed lately. Excuse me... it doesn't feel good right now, but once I get rolling, once I hit the road, it should be fun - I hope.

Oh yeah, you'll come back cocky, relaxed, with a tan. We chatted a bit more. Six months - this'll be the longest we've been apart in years, Mark noted, tearing up a little, Mumble, mumble - listen to us. Well, I'm afraid I have to get back to work; can't cry too much - have to go back in there and face the macho engineering world. The thought made me cringe. It brought me back to days at the rocket engine factory that I’d just quit: hot smoggy summer afternoons, feeling morose for whatever reason, walking into the merciless, ugly factory, being greeted by the smell of machine tool cutting oil and the sounds of blowers and air compressors. Oh God. I was amazed at how depressed I could get even in sunny Southern California.

We exchanged final goodbyes as we hugged each other. I watched and waved as he entered the building. Why should I be so sad? I thought, This is supposed to be the longest, most wonderful vacation of my life? Didn't I really want to leave Southern California? What am I running from? Will I ever be happy?

Thus began my drive to L.A. After I’d been on the freeway a few minutes, I thought to myself, For a desperate and lonely soul like me, traveling is my only escape. The road always comforts me. Oh, but how un-like Kerouac I was: an uptight engineer (technically a yuppie) -- ugh, how terribly constipated, stodgy, and suburban. Why the hell did I go into engineering anyway? I’d been an artsy child, drawing cartoons in high school. But it was late in high school (inspired by Mark) that I developed an interest in science, and then pursued aerospace, and then mechanical engineering.

During the drive, I did what I did best: self-pity and reflection. I thought about my pitiful engineering career at the rocket engine factory, how much I disliked my limited job, how I so wanted something more technical, but how I had been such a strange and unproductive rebel that I became a company-wide pariah. I thought about how I desperately wanted a girlfriend but never had one because I always showed off or came on too strong. I felt defeated, bitter (I certainly had no shortage of anger at the world). I needed a new beginning more than ever. If this voyage results in a little road kill, so be it (especially if it’s the old me!).

But then I needed someone to blame it on, so I thought about how much I disliked most of the senior engineers and managers at work, how I couldn't stand the thought of ending up like them: boring, limited, narrow-minded, dead-end people; only able to talk about engineering and materialistic things like houses, cars, hot tubs and marathon grass, divorced and spending all of their time at work. As my dad would say, they were limited; they were like truck drivers except they had college degrees. Work, overtime, Saturdays at work, emergencies at work that they pretended to hate but actually loved, pot bellies, gray and thinning hair, by-pass surgery, death! AAAAAAARGH! I thought about my former boss, an awkward nerdy engineer who was also a bully; he’d been a sergeant in the Korean War who had kept that sergeant’s mentality and style thereafter (i.e., he treated us like privates).

I was to stay the night at the apartment of two women I knew: my friend Laura and her roommate Boo in North Hollywood. I arrived after both of them had gone to bed, so Laura woke up to let me in. She had already made up the sofa-bed.

Friday, April 10

I was woken by the sound of the coffee grinder doing its thing. While the coffee was brewing, Laura squeezed the oil out of a can of tuna and was pouring it into the cat dishes as she sang in an ovarian voice, Tuna juice! Of course, the cats were right there with their tails pointing straight up. They were just the cats for Laura: the strange looking and aloof grayish Sarah, and Fowles, the dorky black pinhead neutered male. She had adopted them as strays, of course.

I had been madly in love with Laura a few years before. She wasn't the quintessential California goddess, in fact she was plain, but she had a cute smile, a very warm soft body and she was incredibly feminine and sexy. Watching her in a bathrobe in the kitchen of her funky little apartment, tending to her kitties, I thought of how wonderful it would be to sleep with her, to make love with her, to wake up next to her (if only she'd felt the same way about me). The three of us had breakfast together and then at 7:00 the girls rushed off to work, bidding me farewell and good luck.

My morning errands landed me in Santa Monica at midday, so I visited Will Rogers Beach and after a tedious and hot search, found a parking spot. On the breezy sand I felt much better, staring at gorgeous women in bikinis lying about. Walking down the beach, I noticed in the distance a concrete storm drain with chain link fencing on it. As I got closer, I saw a sign that read, Contaminated Water, Avoid Contact. It was quintessential L.A.: a hideous structure spewing out what I imagined to be downright sewage. I padded carefully across the soft wet sand and then jumped across the disgusting stream itself. L.A., you're so ugly sometimes, but at least you're honest about it.

In the evening, I stopped at another Santa Monica beach, to walk to the water's edge and gaze at the ocean, before heading east on Interstate 10, the Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway which goes straight across the country and ends up in Jacksonville, Florida. The sun had just set and there was a thick fog off the coast. I stared into the huge dark wilderness, another continent thousands of miles away, lonely mysterious ships able to just disappear, distant fog horns. Months from now, I would cross this ocean on my way back here. Circumnavigation, wow.

Then I started the journey east on Interstate 10, east past the dark skyscraper center of downtown L.A.. I watched it slowly pass by. I felt like the Blade Runner, leaving the war zone, relieved, but a little sad and nostalgic. What a place of extremes: an absolute hell of high blood pressure, of uniquely psychotic criminals and of disgusting brown sky; but a fascinating haven of hedonism and special weirdness, a unique place in a class of its own. I'd had an awful lot of fun there. I continued east past places like West Covina, smoggy Pomona and the cow shit belt before turning north on Interstate 15 and out of L.A.-ness altogether, out of the toxic chemical wasteland, the violent snarl of humanity, the Western Dream gone sour, the alleged desert of everything. I was tempted to go south instead and head to San Diego since I missed my brother Mark so terribly.

When my favorite radio station died out, I pulled off the freeway and telephoned Mark. It was chilly out and there was absolutely no moon. Throughout the conversation, I stared at a red Budweiser sign in the window of a liquor store closed for the night: a single red line surrounded by complete blackness. At that moment I felt so bleak, so empty, so desolate. I said goodbye sadly to Mark.

A little further up the grade and I was officially out of the madness. My car was a small, boxy, unglamorous, standard 4-cylinder Pontiac Sunbird that had no luxuries. But it had just the right drive train to enable it to cruise for hours at 80 miles per hour, a real highway machine, just the thing for a road animal like me. The car glided uphill at 70 mph with ease, engine running at just the right temperature, up, up and away. Freedom. Space.

Getting tired, I passed Barstow on Interstate 15 and pulled off the freeway at Yermo where a campground had been advertised. It was a typical K.O.A. type of set-up that cost $13 a night to put a sleeping bag on the ground and use the toilets. There was no one in the guard shack and an uninviting sign announced 2 a.m. accounting and threatened prosecution for non-payers. No thanks. Just down the frontage road and right at the freeway exit was a large dirt lot where a bunch of motor homes and 18-wheelers had parked, sleeping. I rolled out my sleeping bag next to the car and fell asleep immediately.

The wind picked up later that night and blew dust into my face, mouth, everywhere. At one point, the flapping of the sleeping bag against my head made me dream strangely that I was sleeping in the gutter, right in the muck in some ancient Himalayan city, of a huge furry yak sniffing at my hair and following me at a constant distance, making mooing and grunting noises as I crawled slowly away, terrorized. I crawled, in real life, into my car with no reclining seats, to sleep sitting up and destined to wake up with a sore neck. Wow, the excitement of exotic places to come.

Saturday, April 11

I woke up after not enough sleep, and indeed with a sore neck. I ate a hearty breakfast at the nearby greasy redneck diner, and headed out across outback California on Interstate 40. The sun and the open road cheered me up, made me feel like I was beginning an adventure, which I needed because my own life felt so unadventurous. My dad was a World War II veteran who became a CIA officer and station chief, but what was I?

It was remarkably desolate even for the Mojave Desert: light beige earth, distant beige mountains, sparse sagebrush, a few little Joshua trees, no buildings, few cars. I got to the hot city of Needles, crossed the Colorado River into Arizona and left the freeway headed for Oatman, a mining ghost town recommended by a lady at the sheriff station in Barstow. It was a rough little dirt road, and I saw almost no one on it. It was overcast but hot and a little humid - a strange sort of stuffy feeling. I reached Oatman and stumbled into what looked like the world's biggest Harley Davidson convention: biker wanna-be's. It was so crowded there that I abandoned any thought of stopping. The little side road ended at Interstate 40 at Kingman and I was on the big road again with a straight shot to Williams. The road slowly gained altitude; it was getting cooler, more and more evergreen trees, prettier and cloudy. At Williams I turned north and drove to that most sacred of American shrines: the Grand Canyon.

It was foggy and drizzly when I arrived at the South Rim - I could barely make out the North Rim and the bottom of the canyon was hazy and eerie. Patches of fog slowly, gracefully brushed up against the cliff to my right. I was speechless; I couldn't remember being quite so awed in my life as I stood there hypnotized by the sight of this mysterious and misty abyss, the size of which is almost unimaginable. I worshipped it for a while and forgot about my sadness and irritation of the last few days. What an idiot I was to worry about such little things, to feel so sad. In my selfishness, I had lost track of the fact that I was merely a fly speck, just an insignificant subatomic particle in the great cosmos. This is what it's all about, I thought. I was at the gates of heaven; I was staring God in the face.

The next order of business was looking for a place to spend the night. All the park campgrounds and nearby hotels were booked, and since the weather forecast for the night was 36 degrees and possibly rainy, I needed shelter for the night. Luckily I stumbled onto a motor home park that had one teepee available for $13. I lay in the quiet teepee, staring peacefully up at the breezy opening in the top before falling asleep. Having not had a decent night of sleep in days, I slept deeply for 10 hours with the sleeping bag zipper open slightly, in spite of the cold.

Sunday, April 12

Fortunately, the next day was absolutely gorgeous: clear and sunny, so I got to see the Grand Canyon that way too. Once again, I was dumbfounded: the immensity of it, the intensity of it, the incredible depth of it. Great crags, great fortresses of rock with shoulders sloping down to the next level, vast wavy plateaus, the sharp river gorge way down below, which is an impressive wonder by itself. There was even one quarter-circle of rock called the Temple of Isis, appropriately named. Such a wealth of color, and everything. One of the richest places on Earth. Two billion years of tender loving care by the world's greatest artist. No wonder Henry Miller, who seemed to hate everything else about his native America, wept at this sight.

After a few hours of enjoying and photographing the wonderful canyon, it was time to go. I was to spend the night with a friend, Trevor and his wife Uli in Albuquerque - many miles away.

When I finally reached Interstate 40 it was mid-afternoon and Albuquerque was some 300 miles away. The drive was so long that I almost felt I was in a trance, hours to ponder the cosmos and everything in it. At sunset I was crossing the border into New Mexico, and before long, I was passing Gallup with the Route 66 song playing in my head.

The Federal Government had just allowed states to raise the maximum speed limit to 65 miles per hour and New Mexico was one of the first to change. For the first time in my life, I cruised at 70 miles per hour without even the slightest worry, up and down the long, lonely grades, in a sort of rhythm on this clear pristine night with a full moon for hours non-stop in this trance. Express. I ate up mile after mile; I felt fantastic. Since it was late on a Sunday night, I was one of just a few cars on the road. This time it felt kind of neat to be alone. I really loved New Mexico.

Finally, I reached the last crest and found myself overlooking the Rio Grande valley and the magnificent city lights of Albuquerque. It was exciting to see for the first time. I was warmly received when I arrived at Trevor and Uli's. They hadn't seen me in years and since Albuquerque was a remote city, they didn't get many visitors.

I spent the next few days relaxing, sight-seeing, enjoying Albuquerque, visiting Santa Fe, and meeting up with Trevor and Uli whenever possible. Their neighborhood had a look and feel about it that was very different from anything I’d experienced before.