A friend of mine recently brought the Randonautica app to my attention. I'd never heard of this, nor had I heard of the concept of Drifting or as Marxist philosopher and fellow weirdo-in-arms, Guy Debord calls it: Derive. The driving philosophy of Derive is to break out of your every day reality by taking a trip through the city with no destination in mind. You just observe the landscape and follow the bits and pieces of the city that suddenly jump out at you and catch your eye. You explore. You step out of your unconscious routine and see things in a new way that broadens your perspective and creates a capital-S Situation. It's real post-war European anarchist theory shit that intends to liberate your consciousness from the walls put up by the world's capitalist machinery and it's a hell of a tool for those of us that have sworn an oath to sobriety and can't use psychedelics anymore.
Randonautica takes Debord's theory and applies a layer of the esoteric to it. Using the app, you set a radius on a map, based on your current position, and, using a quantum random number generator, salted with some variables that you choose, and a mental "setting of intention", it places a pin on your map and this becomes your destination. It runs on some of the ideas put forth by The Institute of Noetic Science which you can read about in Dean Radin's excellent book, Real Magic. Being that I love this sort of thing and crave adventure on the regular, I had to try it. So I set out on an adventure on my lunch break, using the app for the first time.
I live out in the sticks and don't really feel like wandering around out in the woods, sure to end up on some psychopath Freestater's property and therefore dodging bullets, so I planned to head over to nearby Exeter since it's a nice town with a lot of room to walk around freely. To choose my starting point, I drew a tarot card: The 3 of Pentacles. I decided that this was directing me to start out at the office where I had my first professional job. From there I picked a 2.5km radius, selected Attractor as the anomaly in the app and held the intention "Treasure" in mind as I generated the pin. Treasure is a pretty broad concept. At first thought, you take it to mean that you're looking for, like, gold or something. But it's often best to keep your mind as open as possible to interpretation since Treasure can also indicate something not of monetary value but of great emotional value. Hell, the entire trip out to the pin could have been a treasure to me. But things definitely got a little weird. Exeter, on its own, is a somewhat strange place. Every year we have a UFO festival, celebrating the occasion of The Exeter Incident and the lives of Betty and Barney Hill, whose abduction actually took place further up north in the mountains but are buried in a cemetery nearby.
I checked the map, plotted a course, put in my earbuds, and started walking. Start to finish, it took me about an hour and a half and turned out to be a really nice walk. I had about a half an hour left of the latest Last Podcast on the Left to listen to, so I put it on and walked out, keeping an eye out for anything that happened to catch my eye as I walked. Typically, I'm the sort of person that keeps their head down. Don't know why, that's just how I walk. So, keeping my head up and being aware of everything around me was a new concept on its own and it paid off. I walked away from the downtown area, as instructed, and kept my path along a road which I've driven, walked, run, and skated a thousand times and in that time, I noticed a lot of things that I hadn't seen before.
At first, I just spotted things that were interesting to me. There was a sticker of a Keith Haring painting, a car stopped at a light with a funny sticker on it, for some reason a garage with a compass over it caught my eye, and a house which was being gutted stood out.
But then I started to notice a pattern. Toward the end of the Last Podcast episode, Marcus started to explain certain things about crows. They're smart. They make art. They'll bring you gifts if you're good to them, meaning if you feed them. It's all bird-stuff, shiny things, but it's interesting nonetheless. I, personally, have a mystical connection to black birds. Crows are my spirit animal. If I could figure out how to feed just them and not end up with a billion starlings, pigeons, and seagulls laying siege to my house like when my neighbor had bird feeders out, I'd fuckin' do it in a second. But back to my walk. I spotted a crow picking at some food scraps in a driveway and then about a quarter mile up the road I spotted a crow-shaped lawn ornament. I suspected that my mind, in its current state of consciousness and under the influence of Last Podcast was drawing my attention to these details and/or manifesting certain qualities of the trip.
Then the episode ended. My musical tastes lately have been trending toward low-fi punk, hardcore, and grindcore: old Napalm Death, Doom, Dr. Know, Insect Warfare; scuzzy thrash: Iron Regan, DRI, Attitude Adjustment, Toxic Holocaust; and brutal, brutal death metal. With the end of the podcast, I switched over to Mortician, one of the seminal mid-90's death metal tyrants, and the tenor of the trip took a weird, dark turn. It didn't occur to me until I reached my destination but upon reflection, the darker, more macabre details I noticed during this time took place as I shifted away from one of my favorite podcasts, one that makes me (live) laugh (love), and toward music that is gross, and heavy, and winds me up. The pace of Mortician oscillates between the characteristic death metal blast beat sections and sludgy, chugga-chugga sections that evoke a feeling of wading through ankle-deep blood and gore. It's real nasty stuff that's a lot of fun if your musical tastes also tend to share the same space in your head with gory horror movies. It's not all blood and guts from here, though. My attention is drawn to a few things that are definitely of an interest to me.
The residential neighborhoods gave way to a space zoned for business as Exeter bleeds into Hampton. The landscape out this way isn't terribly friendly and the sidewalk transforms into a perilous bike path along a busy stretch of road. I passed two spots of interest that are pretty much right across the street from each other.
The condo complex wouldn't be notable for anything were it not for the fact that this is a pretty new property that was built on the grounds of an old cement factory. Just prior to the construction of these condos, the cement factory stood empty and unused and was the eventual resting place of an old friend of mine from junior high and high school. We drifted apart and eventually lost contact with each other but her name appeared in the newspapers several years ago having been murdered by her husband and left to rot in the cement factory, her body partially burned in a half-assed attempt to hide the corpse's identity. Directly across the street from that grisly location is the old county court house where Pam Smart and her teenage co-conspirators were tried and convicted the murder of her husband. The county court has since been moved and that building is mostly doctor's offices these days.
I'm about a half a mile out from my destination. I keep my eyes open, but this stretch of road isn't good for sight-seeing. It's mostly a stretch of doctor's offices and about a thousand dentist offices. I see the number 23 a bunch of times but that's about it. I don't much care for walking out this way because cars are flying by and there's not much between me and them but I do eventually get to my destination. I stand near some electrical station, which seems to be casting off crazy waves of electromagnetic energy and the app is having a hard time positioning me properly but after a time, I come to a conclusion that I'm pretty close to the destination which, according to the map, is near a body of water just a little ways off the road. So I step into the wooded area, feeling a little weird as I'm just this lone dude in glasses and a hoodie walking into the forest in a reasonably settled area, near a middle school.
I don't find a treasure in the obvious sense, but I do find myself in a strange liminal place. I'm brought back to when I was a kid and would often follow the trails through the woods behind my house. Forests are strange places. There's a wild energy to them that is definitely apropos for the surroundings. I'm not that far off the road where cars are driving by at a steady clip, but this place is silent. The earth here heaves upward in sudden rises before declining sharply. There's a tree which has fallen over, but unlike the other fallen trees, this one seems to have bent over time, never actually falling over, just sort of giving way to gravity as time passed. And then I crest a hill and find the spot marked by the destination. It's not exactly what I'd call treasure.
There are feathers all over the ice. Some sort of bird was definitely killed here. I spend some time looking at the feathers and they don't really look like any of the usual birds that you find around here at this time of year but it eventually dawns on me that I'm probably looking at chicken feathers. A lot of folks around here have chickens that just kind of wander around freely. Usually, they don't stray too far from home but this spot here on the ice isn't really near anywhere. There are some residences nearby and it's definitely possible that at least one of them has chickens. So, the presence of a slain chicken out here isn't really the weird part. What stands out to me as really strange, though, is that a spot on the ice where a lot of action seemed to take place judging by the tracks in the snow and the feathers all over the god damn place is that this spot seems to have been baited. There's evidence of chicken feed on the ice but nowhere else. There's another quality of this scene which strikes me as weird. There's not a lot of blood. I find a spot on the edge of the edge where some the snow is stained with blood and there are spots here and there but the scene around me is telling me a weird story that suggests that someone, a person, dropped some chicken feed and then either lured a chicken out there or brought it and left it, where it was eventually attacked by some sort of predator. The lack of blood could suggest that the chicken either managed to get away or may have even been carried away, possibly by another bird. We do have big raptors out this way and I've seen them dining on other birds in the past.
After spending some time exploring this strange scene, the ground seems to shift under me and I hear cracking and realize that I'm standing on ice and that it's had about enough of my weight and won't stand for it any longer. Gazing at the map, I take note of a business that is pinned nearby and also really close to the destination pin and wonder if there's something to that. I started a marketing agency with a couple dudes recently and we're looking for work. It's possible that this business could use our services. Haven't followed up yet, but who knows? I decide to walk back the way I came, which kind of goes against the driving philosophy of Derive but there's basically two ways back to my car and the alternative to walking back the way I came was to walk along a busy corridor of traffic and businesses and I'd really rather not. As I walk, it occurs to me that this trip took a bit of a dark turn and I wonder if my current mindset, influenced as it is by the constant assault on my eardrums by brutal death metal, has anything to do with it. So I try an experiment. I switch the music to Weird Al and make my way back to the car. Having seen all the sites on the way out, nothing really jumps out at me on the way back but I do notice three things:
Every polka medley has the same structure and ends on the same kind of outro.
Two corgis in someone's yard chase each other around and it's cute as fuck.
Trapped in the Drive-Thru is a work of utter genius.
My mood improves immensely and I head back home feeling refreshed from the experience. I wasn't really looking for anything, in particular, and treasure is broad enough to satisfy my expectations for this trip. I crave novelty. I'll often do things just to have the experience or have an adventure. Sometimes having an interesting story to tell is all I want out of something. I treasure those times, like I treasure this one now. Whether or not anyone actually reads this is a question mark but I get to tell the story and I'll definitely tell it to my friends and recommend that they try it out, too.
I love your writing style and felt the thrill of adventure as you took us on your quest. I've downloaded the Randonautica app and have found myself on similar, surreal journeys. Thank you for sharing this with us and showing us there is something very magical about "seeing" the world through wide open eyes. (thanks also for the music mentions...I'm off to explore them now...)
I love your writing style and felt the thrill of exploration as you followed your quest. I've downloaded the Randonautica app and have found myself on similar surreal adventures. There is something magical about opening your mind and really "seeing" the world around you. Thank you for sharing your journey. (and the music)