Keith Haring Journals (6 page)

Today we got to Interstate State Park and camped and met people and sold T-shirts. Tripped. Met people going to see the Grateful Dead in Minnesota. The Grateful Dead in Minnesota! We’re going to see the Grateful Dead!

I found a tree in this park that I’m gonna come back to, someday. It stretches sideways out over the St. Croix river and I can sit on it and balance lying on it perfectly.

Today we awoke at sunrise, walked out of the park and hitchhiked to Minneapolis. We saw the school. It’s so big! Giant studios and facilities for silk-screen, etching, lithography, sculpture and giant sun roofs. They have a big library with “Pioneer” receivers, tape decks and a large selection of music (even Frank Zappa). We saw the downtown area and a really modern mall that I can’t begin to describe. We got a dorm apartment for two nights for $10 and bought Grateful Dead tickets. (Only $5.50 apiece and it’s not sold out yet.) Also I met people that go to school here and asked a lot of questions and got a good idea of what this school is like.

The Dead were great. We saw the people we met at the campsite, sold T-shirts, got high. The Dead even did an encore from
American Beauty
, “By the waterside I will lay my head, listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock my soul.”

After we left Minneapolis, we took a bus to 1-94 and caught a few little rides and then a truck ride all the way to the border of N. Dakota where we ate three cheeseburgers and drank some beers. It was all farmers and when I went to the bathroom they all talked about my hair . . . Rednecks! Then we got a ride from a pilot who likes Bachman Turner Overdrive and then a truck ride into N. Dakota.

I am in Miles City, Montana, sitting in the sun. Thinking about the Grateful Dead, ’cause the last ride was 77 miles of AM Radio. Suzy said my hair looks like there are dead animals living in it. At least they’re dead.

You have to stand
before
the ramp in Washington, so it was real hard to get rides. So we went down onto the Interstate, illegally, and finally got a ride, seconds before a sheriff came down the ramp. This guy is going all the way to Sacramento. I’m in his car now. We drove till around 10:00 last night and then stayed in a motel, watched
Paper Moon
on TV and took showers. Today he bought us breakfast in Medford, Oregon, and now we’re on our way to Sacramento in a ’62 Chrysler with a dome dash and plastic slipcovers. It’s a really neat car. Also, he is blind in one eye and has a cataract in the other and the radio doesn’t work right ’cause he spilled a glass of Coke down the front of the dash a few years ago. But we’ll get there . . .

Yesterday we woke up, got out of the tent and there were cows standing 20 feet away just looking at us. They kept coming closer and closer till they were right in front of the tent, and Suzy is saying, “Hurry up, they’re gonna charge us,” so we hurried up and left and hitchhiked to I-80 and got a ride in a van and then a ride with a guy named Peter who took us to Berkeley. The school is really amazing. Better than Minneapolis, and not even comparable to Ivy. Then we went by Rapid Transit (space transit) to San Francisco to a place to eat and sleep for free advertised in an “alternative” Yellow Pages we found in Berkeley. The guy who ran it was gay, I think, and his friend took us to Polk Street, where we saw more faggots than I saw in my entire life. It was weird, but we got fed well and no hassles. Now we are at a laundromat and we’ll head for Santa Ana.

We went to Newport Beach today. It was nice. I wish I could live here . . . It’s like N.J. shore. I got high and met someone from Boston and from Michigan.

I am sunburned. We saw the ocean today, one month after seeing the Atlantic Ocean.

Yesterday me and Suzy took a bus to Disneyland. What a trip! It was like another world. We did everything we could possibly do in nine hours. I expected it to be a letdown after seeing it on TV and hearing about it, but it was better. Except the castle is only about three stories high and it always looks gigantic in pictures. We went to the Haunted Mansion two times.

We are camped in a National Forest (for free) in the Rocky Mountains. We put our tent up last night and drank Coors this morning and we woke up and there was snow everywhere! I got up and walked farther down the creek, and found a good place to make a shelter. It was snowing. This is the nicest place we’ve been to yet. Last Saturday we were getting sunburned at Newport Beach, and now we’re in snow! I built a shelter out of pine trees and we put the tent under it. Now I am sitting across the creek from our tent drinking a beer and getting high on the scenes. Rocky Mountain High!

We slept under a train bridge last night and woke at sunrise and signed the bridge along with the other people that had slept there. We got a family ride that was very comical, and then a ride to Des Moines, Iowa, with a really neat guy who had tame raccoons.

Now I’m on the North Side, and Suzy is making French toast. This is the end of the first part of my trip. Or should I say the beginning of another “trip.” Through all the shit, shines the small ray of hope that lives in the common sense of the few. The music, dance, theatre, and the visual arts; the forms of expression, the arts of hope. This is where I think I fit in. If it’s alongside a creek in the Rocky Mountains or in a skyscraper in Chicago or in a small town called Park City, Utah, it is always with me. Art will never leave me and never should. So as I go into the next part of the trip I hope it will be more creative and more work involved and less talk and more doing, seeing, learning, being, loving, feeling, maybe less feeling, and just work my ass off, ’cause that, my friend, is where it’s at!

It’s the Image I’m seeking, the Image I see when the man in the mirror is talking to Me.

—Graham Nash

As I sit here and write I feel comfortable. It is somewhat unusual to feel comfortable in Washington Square Park. There are so many different ways to experience the phenomena of the city. A given situation can have an unlimited number of different effects on a person’s thoughts, depending on the state of mind and attitude. Something that affects me today will not necessarily affect me tomorrow. Nothing is constant. Everything is constantly changing. Every second from birth is spent experiencing; different sensations, different interjections, different directional vectors of force/ energy constantly composing and recomposing themselves around you. Time (situations in a visible logical progression) never will and never can repeat itself. None of the elements involved in the experience of time will ever be the same because everything is always changing. Physically humans are constantly changing (cell division) and one is never in the same state of existence mentally or physically.

The physical reality of the world as we know it is motion. Motion itself = movement. Change. If there is any repetition it is not identical repetition because (at least) time has passed and therefore there is an element of change.

No two human beings ever experience two sensations, experiences, feelings, or thoughts identically. Everything changes, everything is always different. All of these variables merging, interacting, destroying each other, building new forms, ideas, “realities,” mean that the human experience is one of constant change and, as we label it, “growth.”

My source of amazement comes from the fact that most living human beings build their lives around the belief that these differences, changes, don’t exist. They choose to ignore these things and attempt to program or control their own existence. They make schedules, long-term commitments, set up a system of time and become controlled by their system of controls.

People don’t want to know that they change.

Unless they feel it is an improvement, and then they are all for “change,” and will go to great lengths to “make changes” or contrive situations or force a change that is unnatural. There are so many aspects of this one concept that it is hard to write them all down.