By the end of a wet spring and dawning of a new summer, and my computer was set up to connect with the world, I emailed my editor in New York the first hundred pages of my third book. I was proud of my work that outlined my intentions and turned more into a primer on how to live life, than a book on the misgivings of Mrs. Beermann’s ex. I knew what I had to say and I knew what I was saying. The book drove hard at the falsehoods of society and took down civilization when I was driving hard by it. I spoke of an easy, friendly life on the bumpy road of befriending, feeding and fucking only total strangers. I cleared my head of all the exchanges and rules of off-the-guide-book; anonymous living and I even convinced myself it was a good, new way to live. My editor emailed me back what I’d hoped: complete enthusiasm to read one hundred more pages. I asked her about Campbell in one delicately written text, but she knew nothing about him except his last movie-opening box office had done well.

Although I settled in Helsinki, in a house that was comfortable and full of friends passing through, I never called or emailed Campbell. I found it better to finish the book and not distract from it with sedentary relationships, insincere banter, calendars and options, all those trivial things I was condemning in my book. Besides, the scenes from my back door overlooking the cold harbor, the sounds of hungry animals, languages, the wind burned faces and hands of the townspeople kept me moving between the days, weeks and months happily knowing I was loved in Helsinki. Still, in the end, I stood alone leaning against the double doors overlooking the cold city. I stood for many mornings, intricately memorizing the city below.

It was early in the morning on my last day in Helsinki. The bright morning stood just outside the horizon waiting and I imagined flying above the city, all alone, waving good-bye to every inch of its beauty and spreading my hand out to accept the diamonds floating on the water. It was an early travel day to Germany, and I reveled in the glory of sending my editor the last hundred pages while en route to Hamburg. I would stay there for a few weeks and then catch a rail straight onto Prague where I would live during the final months of pre-publication work on the book. I rolled along the city street towards the harbor station fighting the urge to say, “I will come back here again someday.” The truth is I don’t know if I will, or how I even got here. The truth is I tend to make more right turns than the many impulsive lefts I took, to get here to my beloved Helsinki.

I settled onto the boat and found the editor’s changes waiting for me to handle via email. Apparently, fucking a total stranger was not something new. According to my editor, they’re doing it all the time in Manhattan. While I was working, the cold water passed by and in a large crowded boat, I stepped out onto the platform that seemed equally as crowded. I walked to a nearby hotel and slept without dinner. Hamburg was welcoming and warm with its friendly people and busy attire. I spent the last few weeks of bookwork in a cranky, old bar with talkative Germans sharing the old with the new and they had good wii-fii.

My editor sent smile symbols in our last emails, our last paragraphs, our last signatures and sentiments to commemorate the end of my hard-fought book I’d written. In the end, my third book, A Road Less Graveled, was a bomb blast out of my soul onto pages barely holding the cruel and stabbing words. Yet, I let it go away from my fair zone to aim its challenges at others, so a new world, a new way to inhabit the Earth, could begin. Instead of permanency, prevailing as it has for so long, I set these necessary ideas free to attempt to start a world war between the nomads and the sedentary.

In the end, I finished Graveled in Hamburg in a hotel lobby café and not in Prague as I had expected. There would always be a certain amount of symmetry to notice from here on, as I felt the first battle lost to the war Graveled had challenged in me. I tried to plan the birth of the book; I tried to rank permanence above impermanence. So, I set no course for Prague and spent several days in Hamburg walking amongst German buildings, all the time feeling a gloomy wind blow when thinking about pulling up a brand new empty page. I ate cold rough-chop and hot rough-chop and even had it as a sandwich with thyme tea available in almost any café. Hamburg was a great place to be for a time and I sat in a warm bar speaking with a young German university student about many things and thought it time to set rail for Prague the next day.

I arrived in Prague on a glorious day, warm and sunny. The people were friendly as I checked into a hotel and went about finding an apartment for rent. The rooms were cold and unaccommodating with a real pre-war, no luxuries feel, just a living room usually with no windows, a bedroom, and a kitchen on the right. I walked all day using a map, finally tired of it, ate alone in the hotel restaurant enjoying the lights of the city.

I spent another day looking for an apartment in the downtown area of Prague, and the one I finally chose overlooked the Vitava River from the kitchen window, a kitchen that also had a bathtub in it. I had not noticed that the radiator was in there too, until it started to get cold. I noticed the kitchen was the central room in the flat, as the days passed. The computer, television, phone, tub, radiator, and now the bed, were all in the kitchen with room for a table. It reminded me of what the early days in Greenwich Village were like, with everyone living like beatniks, playing guitars and espousing poetry and revolution sitting on a mattress in the kitchen just like me. I lived in the kitchen a lot. It turned out to be the perfect, warmest place to sit on a mattress, leaning up against the refrigerator, and using the computer and phone to argue with my editor over the legal and artistic obligations behind the new book.

Part III of Hello Pressman, Tomorrow!