Memoir of a Suburban Hoe-Bo

(Memoir, 92,000 words)

Stuck for an idea for his next novel, a young writer lives an alternate lifestyle in Melbourne, Australia.

Where others live in a house, he lives in a van.

Where others have a spouse, he has open relationships.

Where others work 9-5, he works 5-9.

His alternative lifestyle also includes hitch-hiking, sex parties, meditation, astral projection, and other experiments with his spiritual consciousness.

He'll do anything to get him to the edge; get him the high .. and maybe, just maybe, give him something to write about.

Is this lifestyle just his way of liberating himself from the conventional and help him become a successful writer? Or is he trying to get away from a shadow in his past that started from a creepy hotel room experience when he was eighteen and is starting to catch up to him..

Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night, I don’t feel like I know the answer to everything, I feel I am everything; and in an instant that feeling is gone.

I would lie back in bed and stare out into the darkness. My father might have been pottering around downstairs; my mother dead from cancer two years earlier; my sister somewhere, my brother somewhere else. I was an aspiring writer in my early twenties and I wanted adventure. An opportunity to travel to Perth soon eventuated via a family friend who was a truck driver that travelled the Melbourne, Perth, Sydney round trip. If I were to die in the desert, or just live there and not come back, that would be ok. I was frustrated that the play I had written the previous year at university didn’t fire like I wanted it to. People didn‘t really get it and I felt like I had failed. I also felt like I didn’t want to live. It wasn’t just about the writing; something was tearing me up inside. I wanted to go to the desert and scream my insides out and collapse and roll in the sand and sweat and feel insanity of the ugliest kind. I’d always wanted to hitch-hike at some point in my life, and I planned to after I was dropped off in Perth. If I was to be murdered on the side of the road, so be it.