As many of you no doubt know by now, I've left Louisiana far behind, left her foul-smelling sewage treatment plants where bodies sometimes surfaced, left her illiterate masses who hounded me daily prospecting me for my soul, left her capital city which has all but lost its culture to both capital-citiness and an overstuffed university that churns out numbers instead of students. I even left her beautiful sunsets created by a mix of sugarcane ash, chemical plant byproduct, carbon monoxide, and alligator farts; I've left it all.

Don't accuse me of sounding bitter. I can already hear the word gurgling way down in your tummy where words are born. I am by no stretch of the word bitter. Louisiana created me, cooked with me in my mother's womb like a soup of placenta juice, washboard music, and late evenings with the smell of mosquito repellent in the thick air.

I was born in a five-gallon steel cauldron amidst last year's crawfish-boil stains. Louisiana will always be my home. She fed me catfish from waters so dirty no dehydrated desert refugee would ever consider sipping them to soothe his miserable parched throat. She taught me to dance in the late-night hours in tin shacks under dim hanging light bulbs to the sound of a fiddle, to the sound of the horn, to the sound of the fluttering wings of the moths that danced under the lights alongside me.

I learned that the inner reaches of a swamp can be beautiful, that the back of an alligator can be comfortable, that the wave of a shrimp boat captain can be meaningful, although some of them are, no doubt, child molesters. In Louisiana, you have to be on the alert for those.

I celebrated with the Devil in a New Orleans' crowd as a float of masked transvestites showered us with plastic beads. I found favor with the Lord when the whicker collection basket was passed down the pew on Sunday mornings. I fell in love with girls whose accents cannot be reproduced anywhere else on this planet. I've met old grandmothers whose dialect cannot be described. I've emptied shotguns into trees and road signs and ponds. I've been baptized over and over again on steamy weekends in the greatest river known to man.

You must surely get my point, I do not in any way regret where I am from. However, my thirst for adventure and my curiosity for what lies beyond those golden sunsets, was not enough for my home state to satisfy. And in the end, one humid saturated evening under oaks blanketed in gray moss, I decided to follow the old sun where it dipped beyond the horizon, much like twelve men followed another Son so long ago.

Off I went into the west, Jack Kerouac-ing it without even knowing who Jack Kerouac was.

I had to say goodbye to my East first. Atlanta, Savannah, Virginia, New York City - they all bid me farewell with fond memories and an open invitation to drop back by anytime. Then it was across Pennsylvania, Lake Erie, Columbus, Indiana, and then the long haul through the monotony of Kansas, and like the above mentioned beatnik writer, J.K., I found myself on the corner of Colfax and Federal in Middle America, under the shadow of the Rockies, in Denver, Colorado.

And dare I say it, for now, I've found my home.

I'm hoping John Elway and I get to become good friends. It's taken me two months to get here, my hair is long and my beard is wise, but this place quenches, in some way I cannot yet describe, that thirst that initially set me on my course.

And you'll see me bouncing around more on the site, helping out poor overworked Brock with articles and other spicy ideas, as I am in my own personal writer's paradise, my sal paradise.

This column will be updated regularly, letting you all know what life is like out here in the city that was the original gateway to the west, and convincing as many of you as I can to join me out here as I create “The Denver Let Your Nips Be Free Nudist Colony 2002”.

Look for some fresh articles, some new characters, and get your submissions in for the new Comics Section (click here to see what that's about), and above all else, watch over Louisiana for me, you who are still there. She means a great deal to me and I don't want to see her already-ruined reputation ruined any further.

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