Brain Bucket

Brain Bucket: The Death of Nikolai

ometimes you find a place because you need it. The place doesn’t have to be a physical place. Prisoners and victims find places in their minds to wander. Sometimes it is a house you buy and build a family in. Sometimes it is a group of people. But there is always a certain magic, a mystery to it. A mystery that you don’t want to examine too closely because the act of examination might destroy the very thing that make it so right. I guess I found The Brain Bucket because my life had been tornadoized. As in: my comfortable, happy, uneventful life was suddenly picked up, wadded up and driven through a telephone pole with extreme prejudice. The F5 funnel cloud was my soon-to-be-ex-wife. In the space of a week, I was without a job, wife or possessions. Except for the thrashed motorcycle I traded my equally wretched pickup (plus cash) for.

Anyways...fast forward a year of working shit jobs, living in a rented garage and rebuilding the bike with what was left over after paying a lawyer to do just about nothing but take my money. I finally had the bike on the road. Feeling like a whipped dog, I severed all loose ends like gangrenous limbs and headed away from that gray, moldering city.

The summer was just getting into full swing. The air filled with the scent of ripe, full, summer growth as I crossed the mountains and into the fry pan flats east of them. I wandered for about a month. I camped by rivers and under bridges. I had no map or compass. I just wandered the roads and my head. Occasionally screwing up directions from locals and ending up in odd dead ends and up dirt roads. I fished for my dinner. Once getting a stern lecture for not having a license…but forgiven when the Game guy saw I was actually intending to eat the mess I had made of the trout. I found abandoned houses. I stood on a mesa and shouted curses in the wind.