I think we are in rats’ alley/Where the dead men lost their bones.

T.S. Eliot

The last time I was lost was just a few minutes ago. But getting lost in the shower, besides being plain stupid, doesn’’t engage the modern reader. What they crave is something deeper, something that tickles their amygdala into gear.

Perhaps being existentially dislocated isn’t what the editor had in mind when he decided to create an issue build around "the joy of being lost and all the ways they’re taking that right away from us." That said, let’s stroll down memory lane, where blind alleys are a dime a dozen and there’s little room for maneuver where the facts are concerned. Who needs facts in a world built upon the questionable engineering of the primate frontal lobes? Where was I?

Being lost is an art. It takes skill. I say this because every dimple-brained redneck in an oversized RV now travels with an uber-high-tech Global Positioning Device attached to the dashboard. This makes locating the nearest Wal-Mart parking lot a cinch, which is a good thing if Wal-Mart parking lots are where you call home. And if you do, you’re not alone.

Don’’t laugh; America’s retired, retread, and just plain weird now trek across the fruited plains in grand style, their possessions secure inside grandiose rolling mega-wagons the likes of which would’ve blown more than a few minds back in the good ole daze before Wagon Train reruns. Can you imagine Gil Favor in a 30 foot expandable RV with satellite dish and 5.1 surround sound? For that matter, does anybody remember Gil Favor? If not, consider yourself lost. "Rollin’’, rollin’’, rollin’’, keep them doggies rollin’’……."

Being lost is an art. It takes skill.

I say this because every dimple-brained redneck

in an oversized RV now travels with an

uber-high-tech Global Positioning Device

attached to the dashboard.

Have you ever wondered who invented the compass? It’s believed the magical instrument popped out of the mind of a Chinese wizard a couple of centuries B.C.E. (side note: what idiot came up with the moniker B.C.E.? Before what current era? Isn’t every era current while it’s happening? Why not begin the calendar at the murder of Julius Caesar? Or the dropping of the A-Bomb on Hiroshima, signifying the beginning of our ability to seriously screw up the entire planet, not to mention each other.)

And it’s of particular note that the compass is suspected of having its origins in the service of the fine art of soothsaying. Funny what a little magnetism can do to get the juice flowing, especially when the chicken bones fail and the Ouija Board won’’t make its grand entrance for another 2,000 years. (You do remember the Ouija Board, right? Never get lost without one.)

The proverbial question is: Are we better off having discovered the compass? Or the handheld GPS device? Or whatever the latest techno locator is supposed to provide us? Do we experience the complexity of our surroundings more, or less, knowing that a Park Ranger can pinpoint our location to within 5 meters inside the most treacherous recesses of the darkest swamp? Does Davy Crockett seem to you like the kind of dude who needed to know exactly where he was on a map in order to find the Alamo? On second thought, what was Davy smoking the day he charted a course for yonder Alamo? Maybe he was lost…………

Call me a suburban cowboy with the time warp blues, but it’s hard to make the claim that Homo erectus asphaltus is making progress where personal geography is concerned. We’ve become so dependent on mediated reality, that being lost now indicates a psychological state, rather than one’s knowledge of where they are on a topo map. Making a wrong turn on a freeway is the new equivalent of being lost in the wilderness. Standing in our own backyard, gazing at the deepest reaches of space, we feel utterly discombobulated. One of America’s greatest writers, Walker Percy, likened us to being Lost in the Cosmos.

Perhaps the most insidious form of being lost is having no sense of place. This existential infarction is the realization that we don’t know diddly squat about our own surroundings. Bioregionalism notwithstanding, most Americans can’t name more than a few plants growing within a mile radius of their home. It gets fuzzier when the task is to identify trees, neighborhood avian species, or reptilian critters. Forget insects, unless they bite or have a bad passion for crumbs. In the Dimformation Age, Nature is a pre-produced televised flicker on the Discovery Channel. Living color acquires a whole new meaning as the tube becomes our second brain. A Blue tailed skink is living and in color; a TV is a machine with a crowd of executives on the other end, making high-stakes decisions about exactly what’’s going into your neocortex after the next commercial. We’ve become lost without a talking head pointing the way.

Perhaps the most

insidious form

of being lost

is having no sense of place.

We live vicariously in these heady times of cyber funk and download frenzy. Virtual chat rooms are full of people who can’t carry on a conversation with folks living a few doors down the street. We can identify the fashioneer who dreamed up Nicole Kidman’s wedding gown, but haven’t a clue who made our own clothes. We aren’t sure where our water comes from, or where our shit goes (hint: downstream). Our food is about packaging rather than soil, rain, and photosynthesis. Convenience has become more important than nutrition or carcinogens. If you asked the Man on the Street to identify the source of his breakfast cereal –– he’d be lost.

A well-known comedian recently decided to put being lost to the test. Hitting the streets, he asked passersby if they could answer a few simple questions concerning American history. Illustrating the extent of our culture’’s state of bemusement, the answers came off as amazingly disoriented.

Here we go:

Jay Leno: What’s the National Anthem?

1st American: I pledge allegiance to the flag.

Jay Leno: How does it go?

Answer: If we had some music……..

Jay Leno: Who landed at Plymouth Rock?

2nd American: Umm……. The Mayflower, the Pinto, and the Santa Maria.

Jay Leno: What President was named Tricky Dick?

Answer: Umm…… Bill Clinton?

How quickly we forget. When asked what the Boston Tea Party was all about, one woman replied that a gang of Bostonians had too much tea aboard so they pitched some in the river. "Oh say can you see…….?"

You reckon Smokey the Bear ever gets lost? Probably not, considering the number of handlers he’’s subject to. That and the fact that "Smokey only appears at large, public events." Or at least that’’s what his website says. It must be hard to get lost at a large public gathering. Although being lost in a crowd is an old euphemism for the isolation so common amongst the urban majority of the human condition.

Many years ago I was privileged (some say cursed) to apprentice with a character known far and wide as The King of Alabama. Think of every clichééd Southern icon, add a touch of home grown juju weed and bootleg whiskey, a photographic memory, military training (sniper), and a jigger of cosmic third-eye mojo, and you begin getting the picture. Although, after a decade or so, I never did get the whole picture.

At any rate, what follows is the crux of the King’s gnosis, at least as far as I could decipher it. Feel free to have it tattooed on your forehead for future reference: "Find the ordinate and the abscissa." By that, he meant that if you truly know where you are, you know who you are. Which might sound goofy until you take the time to measure the teaching against your own life.

Do you really know exactly where you are on this blue green planet? Do you understand what it takes for the Universe to keep you ticking 24 hours a day? When’’s the last time you questioned authority? Is that person staring back at you in the mirror somebody you trust? How much time do you spend in the present? ("Hey Ethel, what the hell’s Mudd talking about now? Ain’t we always in the present?") Before you answer, turn off the chatter and do some cloud watching.

Ultimately, the art of living is to be the architect of your own life. And knowing your coordinates puts you on the proverbial map. What sounds absurd turns out to be a tricky and challenging proposition, requiring de-socialization in search of the radical (root) you. Our atavistic forebears knew exactly where they were. We’’ve just been scammed out of our skulls on behalf of growth, progress, and the glory of eternal commerce.

You could say we’re lost and don’t know it. Which is the worst kind of being lost there is.

Salut!