“Please don’t think me immodest, but I’m really the best.  When my hands are in shape and my timing is right, I’m the best there is, ever was or ever will be.

“When I was younger, before this layoff that has nearly finished me, I hitchhiked one hundred and twenty-seven hours without stopping, without food or sleep, crossed the continent twice in six days, cooled my thumbs in both oceans and caught rides after midnight on unlighted highways, such was my skill, persuasion, rhythm. I set records and immediately cracked them; went farther, faster than any hitchhiker before or since.  As I developed, however, I grew more concerned with subtleties and nuances of style.  Time in terms of m.p.h. no longer interested me.  I began to hitchhike in something akin to geological time: slow, ancient, vast.  Daylight, I woud sleep in ditches and under bushes, crawling out in the afternoon like the first fish crawling from the sea, stopping car after car and often as not refusing their lift, riding only a mile and starting over again.  I removed the freeway from its temporal context. Overpasses, cloverleafs, exit ramps took on the personality of Mayan ruins for me.  Without destination, without cessation, my run was often silent and empty; there were no increments, no arbitrary graduations reducing time to functional units.  I abstracted and purified.  Then I began to juxtapose slow, extended runs with short, furiously fast ones-until I could compose melodies, concerti, entire symphonies of hitch.  When poor Jack Kerouac heard about this, he got drunk for a week.  I added dimensions to hitchhiking that others could not even understand.  In the Age of the Automobile-and nothing has shaped our culture like the motor car- there have been many great drivers but only one great passenger.  I have hitched and hiked over every state and half the nations, through blizzards and under rainbows, in deserts and in cities, backward, and side-ways, upstairs, downstairs and in my lady’s chamber.  There is no road that did not expect me.  Fields of daisies bowed and gas pumps gurgled when I passed by.  Every moo cow dipped toward me her full udder.  With me, something different and deep, in bright focus and pointing the way, arrived in the practice of hitchhiking.  I am the spirit and the heart of hitchhiking, I am its cortex and its medulla, I am its foundation and its culmination, I am the jewel in its lotus.  And when I am really moving, stopping car after car after car, moving so freely, so clearly, so delicately that even the sex maniacs and the cops can only blink and let me pass, then I embody the rhythms of the universe, I feel what it is like to be the universe, I am in a state of grace.