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Some call it God. Others call it Truth. I call it the Greyhound. The most obvious incarnation of the universe. Reteaching me patience, humanity, humour, insanity, etc. I begin to foolishly rely on its efficiency. I begin to trust its schedules like a child trusting an alcoholic parent to pick him up after his soccer game. Waiting at the bus station with my eye constantly on the end of the block and soccer ball nervously shaking in my hands. Each and every time I remember that the Greyhound will exceed my expectations in letting me down, even when I expect it to already be an hour late. I simply don’t know its divine plan.

And then, a new and revamped model enters my life. Leather seats, wireless internet, leg room, less stink. And my hope is temporarily restored. It will only be a matter of weeks until I crave what I am feeling right now. Between Portland and Seattle, ass sore as if a paddle was taken to it, stomach growling in competition with the last twenty American dollars in my wallet, eyes stinging with sleep and recycled air. I will always, we will always, humans will always, try to please what disappoints them.

While waiting for my alcoholic enterprise to meet me in Sacramento after soccer practice, CNN repeatedly showed the Presidential address to Congress. Before soccer practice, that is, before San Francisco to Sacramento, I heard the address live. Or at least what I thought to be live. When I heard the exact same broadcast an hour later, Wolf Blitzer’s inflections and Anderson Cooper’s black framed glasses, I began to doubt that it was live the first time I heard it. The thing that was highlighted, however, over top of the President’s empty hope to ‘jolt’ the economy with his ‘Job Plan’, was the imminent terror threat for the anniversary of 9/11. A serious, credible, but not confirmed report. I guess you confirm a report of terrorism once a few hundred thousand people die. The words serious and credible and unconfirmed, obvious shallow shots at uniting patriotic Americans in their hate for the unknown. To further unite them as they remember the event ten years ago that brought them so much closer together with full body scans and up the ass security checks. That is unity.

So I ignored it, got on the bus, and sat leg to leg, shoulder to shoulder with a man praying to Allah, washing his feet on the bus, clapping his hands in a trance-like methodology. The threat to America, washing his feet peacefully on the Oakland to Portland bus. And after him, I was scolded by a firsttimer for having my seat all the way back at 3am. America, where America knows best.

The Godhound continues to amaze me. A bus full of strangers becomes like a bus full of beautiful demigods, parts of the traveling Supreme Godhead that is the Godhound. The man next to me, the God of Destruction, his mustard stained pants and glare out the window through his sunglasses have destroyed several onlookers. The driver, the God of Attitude, drinking espresso and making jokes about gummy bears and bus crashes to lighten the mood through heightened levels of stress. The woman next to me, the Goddess of Entitlement, warning me to never stand up in front of her again, even if it was for the betterment of the The God of Destruction. As we glide through a universe without direction, the fifty-five demigods inside of the Godhound unite to give it all some sort of beauty and purpose.

I never want to leave the realm of the Godhound.

Yeah, I’ll miss the tacos. And the cheap beer. And the gourmet ice cream sandwiches. And using my friend’s Netflix. And telling people where I’m from and them having no clue where it is. And brooding far from home. But with only nineteen (19) days left of free (free…) travel, the clock has run out. Being in California for over a month, I came to feel as if I had moved here. As if my very marketable skills of doing dishes at people’s homes and doing laundry only once a month had gotten me the proper papers to move to the American west coast, the place so many songs are sung about. But, as I knew this entire time, living other people’s lives could only last a limited amount of time, and the time has crawled slowly to its end.

Sometimes you get lost in the ichiban and banana sandwich dreams that cloud the mind so. Sometimes whatever form of ‘work’ that I pretend to do while unemployed makes me feel like I’m actually doing work and that I am in the middle of something I need to fulfil. Then, in the end, always, it is evident that it is just time, and that holding on to your once great dream in the name of ‘work’ or being there for others is just a selfish desire to be comfortable and to continue to eat tacos. Sometimes, no, always, you’ve got to go.

There is a feeling that I get regularly when things are going well. When things are going too well. Caused by my past month of events occurring too perfectly, this feeling, the one of imminent disaster, or at least looming reality, was with me. This disaster hasn’t yet hit, reality may have winked at me yesterday morning, but only to prepare me for her undoubted return, and I had one of the worst mornings of the trip because of it. That is all relative, however, because the worst morning of my trip I was still sitting in a hammock on the beach in Mexico, but mindset can take a beating wherever, whenever disaster or reality decide that he or she want to remind you that not everything is simply an ice cream sandwich in a hammock.

In an attempt to avoid reality from her full frontal that she so badly wants to show me, I will flee once again. All the while wondering if it is considered fleeing if you are fleeing in the direction of where you grew up.

Things that I do not deserve include, but are not limited to, the following: Drinking cold beer poolside in Phoenix with a lime tree providing us with pool toys and tastier beers. Ten dollar baseball games that include free fireworks. Cold water. Sleeping on the floor of an air conditioned room. Families allowing me access to their fridges. Extra spending money.

I said aloud several times this week that I did not deserve the comforts that had been bestowed upon me. That I do not deserve the comforts that are still being bestowed upon me. There is nothing I have done in my life to deserve comfort like this, and luck can only be attributed so far. Somehow, someway, I am living someone else’s life. This is the only explanation that I can come up with. But the good keeps pouring in.

Fishing for compliments is like fishing for fish. Except more desperate and uglier than a lake trout with crossed-eyes. I am not fishing for fish or compliments, nor am I hunting for pity, nor am I gathering my attributes into one place to comfort myself. When we decide that we are not worthy of the good things that happen to us, humility is born. Once we begin to believe that we deserve the good things that to happen to us, then we think too highly of ourselves. We deserve nothing. When we believe that we deserve the bad things to happen to us, then a karma-like philosophy can encourage us to be better. This is a negative man’s attempt at positivity: admitting that there are a series of positive things happening in his life, but denying them as chance, more or less unexplainable.

Using the concept of ‘blessings’ seems like these blessings were well-deserved. I was blessed because I earned these blessings through financial gifts or living a good life. Like a utopian karma that doesn’t recognize the negative. A childlike karma. To credit my own decision making ability would be to knock the decision making ability of others, and to neglect the circumstantial events that change other people’s situations. My decision making is not why good things happen to me.

Self-deprecation: An extreme form of modesty or criticism of oneself, often used in jest. The opposite of pride. Such an extreme opposite that it could be a different form of pride. Neo-arrogance, maybe. But I do it, in my mind, because it is the only way to humble myself. It keeps me honest. Realizing that you don’t deserve the good things that happen to you, maybe it is humility, or a skewed version of it, or maybe it is a lack of self-esteem, but I think it to be an important step in fully appreciating the many good things that happen, and wisely accepting the bad things that inevitably arrive, so as not to allow them to overshadow the good.

Things that I do deserve include, but are not limited to, the following: Male pattern baldness, foot odour, buses that break down, bad eyesight, electronics that do not function properly, consecutive rainy days, a second toe that is longer than the big toe, parasites, painful childbirth, warm beer, loneliness, back pain, moldy bread, lost luggage.

I am intimidated by people that are younger and greater than me. Or the same age. My elders do not intimidate me, they’ve had more time, but it is by the younger that I am frightened. Not threatened, but struck. Their confidence and sociability and stability contrasts so deeply with the uncertainty and introversion and shakiness that defines myself. It causes my being to cower and shrink as it instinctively compares itself to a being of control and coolness. I wonder if these attributes can be shared. Is ‘cool’ a transferable commodity? Is it contagious, like if someone cooler than me spit in my mouth, would I come down with a bout of streptocooloccus? If someone spits in my face with the intention of insult, do I become cooler from the act of humiliation? Making out with someone that is cooler than you are makes you look cooler, but once the swapping of saliva is done, have you actually risen in excellence? Is it hereditary, passed on through strands of DNA?

California and Mexico have a large number of exceptional people. Whether it is the higher population that makes it seem like excellence abounds, or whether the culture here breeds outstanding people, or whether a regimen of tacos, beaches and marijuana is the recipe for excellence, there is a certain distinction that characterizes people I’ve recently met.

Other people’s abilities rub off on you. The negatives more than the positives. The alcoholisms and the curse words are usually first. The dietary habits are often second. Good hygiene and real ambition often comes last, if at all. Product of the environment, or a variation of the monkey-see-monkey-do playground psychology, but habits and actions are transferable with time and exposure. If I spent enough time with young professionals, taking in the ambition and success, I would naturally shed my bushman appearance and talk about how to earn figures. If I spent time with the dealers in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, I would naturally learn the names of the drugs that they shout out at me when I walk down street. But is excellence, more than just knowledge or ambition, is the ‘cool’ transferable?

I am proof that it is not. Exposure to excellence has simply inhibited my ability to respect it. Being around selflessness has only given me the shame of my growing selfishness. Being around the ‘cool’ my entire life has done nothing but open my eyes to what cool is and how I do not qualify. Even if I spend the rest of my life in California, I will never reach ‘cool’.

I have warmed up to that idea.

The Greyhound Class. The newest division of people that the Canadian Federal Government will soon recognize as its own income group. Slightly above the poverty line, but below the air travel line, these often inbred travellers use nothing besides the glorious Greyhound, because they mostly have no choice. Harmonicas in the back seat, machetes in the front seat, and a handful of aggravated grandmothers in between.

I spent my last two hours in America planning Mexico and stealing internet from a McDonalds in downtown Houston, and I arrived in America to do the same, this time at a Burger King in El Paso. When in Rome, hang out in the worst possible eateries that exist in the world. Or so the saying goes. I best not mingle too far above my tax bracket, especially when I plan to dive right back into the mire of the Greyhound Class in a few short hours.

The buses in Mexico rival first class airlines in Canada. The only thing I didn’t get, at least not courtesy of the bus line, was an ass massage. Free Spanish lessons, free tour guides, cheap burritos delivered directly to your seat, five hour border delays. The world could use two Mexicos, and zero Americas, I recently decided. For the bus travel alone.

So I have made the switch from first class bus travel with free bootlegged movie showings, to join the newest level of poverty, The Greyhound Class, and I have committed to two months of their disgruntled assistance. The Discovery Pass. Five-hundred and fifty dollars worth of unlimited Greyhound glory, well into the month of September.

In 2012, the Harper Government will provide their only tax cut for the poor, specifically for those who traveled more than 200 hours on the Greyhound in a span of six months. They call it, the ‘Smells Like A Can Of Gasoline Tax Cut’ which you can find on line 116 on your income tax return form. No receipt is necessary as proof, simply a grungy t-shirt, balled up and placed in a plastic bag, mailed to 24 Sussex Drive.

I wrote this on a balcony in Zacatecas, Mexico. Here is proof:

When photography becomes solely a means to prove that an event occurred, or to prove that a person attended an event, it becomes desperate. A desperate attempt at remembering an object, a time, or a place, as if your memory or your word wasn’t enough to give witness to the fact that you had been there.

The feeling of obligation to take a photo, simply because it is something that people would usually take a photo of, is absurd. That feeling, like when you see a dog with a hat on, or a tree eleven metres wide, or monkey picking his nose, or an Asian man with a beard, is wrong, regardless of whether or not it would make a great photograph. I hope that my photography, as well as my words, do more than simply document events in order to prove to readers that I was in Mexico. It should be done for more than just to prove to myself that I wasn’t just watching Breaking Bad in different hostels throughout the country. It should be done to share the sights and ideas that were present at the time of travel. To express a mood or a feeling. Proof is not a feeling.

The point-and-shoot. Bar photos and 8 megapixels of iPhone Instagram wonder, are proof catchers. Great dumps, Sharpie drawn caricatures on passed out faces, spelling mistakes in newspapers, quick happening moments, all need to be caught, stored, and filed, but only if they are done without that desperation of notoriety. Proof that I was at a bar last Friday, proof that I did indeed see the Royal Couple wave mindlessly, proof that I have a rash, is a desperate exhibitionism. Proof is desperate. Desperation is ugly.

Proof, whether of a murder, the existence of God, the absence of God, or who took the last cookie, is desperate. That is not to say that the proof is unnecessary. A detective trying to prove a man guilty of a crime is desperate for evidence. A believer trying to prove the existence of God is desperate so that his faith is well-founded. A nonbeliever searching for proof in the absence of God is equally as desperate. Proof is not a part of the great idea of sharing. It is exclusive and lonely.

I constantly try to prove to myself that I travel well. That I see everything I can with the least amount of money. I take photos to prove that I did see many places in my travels, as if it really mattered anyway. I am desperate to feel good about sitting around in hostels and spending money on beer, while everyone I know works and struggles through life. And I feel ugly because of it.

The times I feel most comfortable with my travels is when I do it without trying to prove anything to myself, to my fellow travellers, to the unfortunately employed back home. The times I feel the best, is when I am sharing ideas, feelings, moods, photographs, beers, meals and stories with friends here and there, without the desperation of proving something.

I will now prove to you that I am having a good time and living my days to the fullest, by going to find some tacos. They always make me forget about everything else. Forget about the soulless and distressed need of proof.

The proof is in the tacos.