I didn't stop traveling after the 12,000 mile road trip; nor stop learning.

For those unfamiliar, in the Summer of Year 2012, I road traveled solo for six-
ty days, covering 12,000 miles in the process.  My travels didn't end with the
12,000 road trip, even though I intended it to be so.  I eventually ended up in
the Shenandoah Valley early in 2013, for a couple of months, after a stay in
Pittsburgh.  I then went to the Midwest, in the general Great Lakes vicinity,
and next back to Pittsburgh, only to take an unplanned trip into Florida.  In
fact, my trip to the Shenandoah Valley was due to the death of an individual
whose longevity evaporated, due to a medical condition that accompanied him
at birth. 

The Long Distance Learning Session

In having covered the distance that I did, I learned things that aren't learned
by politicians who show-up at airports, in order to stay in comfortable hotels
and give campaign speeches on what needs to be done in today's world;  in a
world to which they're completely out of touch, outside of listening to lobby-
ists who don't lobby for the common good, but only for self-seeking interests.

Below are photographic mementos of my recent travels, after the 12,000 mile
road trip of 2012.  If time permits, I'll include those one-line lessons I learned
on the road which I wouldn't have learned otherwise.  It's that which the Newt
Gingriches & Rush Limbaughes, as well as the John Kerries & the Joe Bidens
of this world, won't otherwise perceive & absorb.

As a score-keeper's note:  I traveled as far north & east as Boston/Cambridge,
as far west as Oxnard California, and as far south as the Space Coast of Florida.
My travels took me through:  1} Massachusetts, 2} Connecticut, 3} New York,
4} Pennsylvania,  5} Maryland,  6} West Virginia,  7} Virginia,  8} N.Carolina,
9} South Carolina,  10} Georgia,  11} Florida,  12} Alabama,  13} Mississippi,
14} Louisiana,  15} Tennessee,  16} Arkansas,  17} Texas,  18} Oklahoma,
19} New Mexico,  20} Arizona,  21} California,  22} Missouri,  23} Iowa,
24} Illinois,  25} Indiana,  26}Ohio.

If I ever come to have the time do so, I guess that I could state which state had
the best & worst of this, that, and the other thing ... personalitywise.  For now, prudence.

The northeast coast of Florida.

Downtown Saint Augustine, oldest city in the United States.

At port, in downtown Saint Augustine.

The land of the Shenandoah Valley

Metropolitan psychedelia, via sunlight & plate glass, Downtown Pittsburgh.

More psychedelia in the Pittsburgh region.

Progressive Field, Cleveland, in contrast to ...

... Heinz Field, in Pittsburgh

The Space Coast of Florida

The famous race track is on the main highway, in plain sight.

Take note of the palmetto tree in the background

Baltimore trolley

East Florida

Pittsburgh, the land of many technological firsts.

Cuyahoga National Park in Ohio

20 miles northwest of Pgh, along the Ohio River

Gettysburg

Gettysburg was a meditative place.

A Chesapeake area suspension bridge

One of my alma maters: Located at the Gulf coast of Florida.

Add Chicago to the equation

No introduction needed here.

Northern Illinois

                                    Below:  We need to add Wisconsin to the equation, also.

Milwaukee

Same area

Inside a Milwaukee Museum

Three Security Clearance Certificates & Five Letters of Recommendation

To Whom it May Concern,

The following is posted, in order to streamline references and even curiosity.
The five letters below were written by 1} a professor, author, and publisher,
2} a philosophy professor, 3} a publisher and author, 4} a former landlord,
5} a former and present employer who was/is my contacting officer in gov-
     ernment contract, commercial, and residential construction work.   Yeah,
     I'm no stranger to operating the backhoe, skidsteer, steam roller, jack ham-
     mer, target saw, Fein tool, rivet buster, etc.

The three current (in-force) security clearances below are:  1} My FBI security
clearance,  2} my Pennsylvania State Police security clearance, also known as
the Act 114 clearance, and  3} my Act 151 security clearance.  We start with
Jpegs of my 2014 security clearances.
_______________________________________________________________



This is my 2014 FBI security clearance.   It's like all-purpose flour, in that it affirms
the existence of NO CRIMINAL RECORD in any of the 50 states & US territories.
This one has an added significance for me, being that I was in 26 states in the past
two years, staying in Virginia, Florida, and Ohio for extended periods of time, as well
as spending moderately transitory amounts of time in Arkansas, Texas, and California.
I was a polite, lawful, and charming gentleman ... throughout my accumulative 16,000
approximate miles of road travel.

My 2014 Pennsylvania State Police background check security clearance.

This is the Act 151 security clearance which scours a data bank in
addition to the Pennsylvania State Police one.  So, there you have it,
five letters of recommendation and three security clearance certifications

Now for the letters of recommendation:

Concerning the following letter, Duane Locke is the founder of the Immanentist
school of poetry (which has nothing to do with the Immanentist School of Philo-
sophy.)  Duane become a Renaissance scholar and then was published over two
thousand times.  He's also a recipient of the Walt Whitman Award and Edna St.
Vincent Award.

Philosophy Professor's Letter of Recommendation

Alan Britt was/is a widely published Immanentist poet, as well as publisher of Black
Moon Publications.  Even though each name mentioned in the letter was correct, the
quantity of the writings involved was exaggerated, unless you count the package of
 my unpublished works that he read during that same year.

At present, there are approximately 200+ articles, exposes, tutorials, poems, statistical
summaries, and charity organizations' news releases posted online which bear my name
as either sole writer, co-writer, or sole editor.  The posts vary in subject matter ranging
from economics, to Poli Sci to taxes to modern church corruption, to Occupational &
Environmental Medicine,to military history, to modern poetry, to a few other subjects.

I even had some of my military writings placed on display in a humble-sized British
museum, for educational purposes.

At the time the letter below was written, I was in government contract construction
work and not in journalism.

Landlord letter.  Telephone number digits, his former town of residence, and even
his email address were whited-out, for the sake of his privacy.  He was a psycholo-
gist who treated the drug and alcohol abusers of a certain major airline.

Work related:

International High IQ Society Certificate

                       One such induction/membership isn't sufficient.  But, when you add to it an
                       induction into the Phi Sigma Iota language honors society and a few literary
                       credits, it helps in the credential department.  No matter what, I'm no genius.

Meanwhile, Beneath the Strawberry Skyline

by Steve Sleboda and Pat Pontillo
(Steve wrote the even numbered stanzas)

The ace of spades held deeply within a conspiratorial sleeve
floated downward, through the mass of clouds that pushed
the continental plates of a strawberry skyline
into a dark gravity that once held the moon over an ocean's balcony.

The maps lay frozen under camps of the enemy where friendly fire grew wings.
Spotted birds delivering porridge to the ancestors weep tears of a frayed greenery.
Courage scampers across borders of arrogance, in pockets of disgust & fame.
There was a sound coming from the well, along with a light only the cricket knew.

Tracer bullets at midnight and then pistols at dawn, followed by flash bulbs firing off
in the minds of the survivors who see encores of the tragedy in a theater of fear.
A distant solitary planet, posing as a star, clears a granulated sky
during another cricketless night.

There are no borders to conceal the glow coming from the starless distance.
Energy given to the language where voice is a sand dune
and where thought has no spike under its tongue,
as it grapples with the snail in the mirror.

Gravity turns its head back toward the scene of the accident
where, within its perimeters, rain puddles reflect the pulse of red lights.
Everyone crosses the Do Not Cross line in a disheveled motion
that resembles a mud dried trench coat which once sat under a Christmas tree.

The owl lands in the oak above the tarp covering the memory of cloth.
Trying to find a priest in this century is forbidden and will not be tolerated.
Deliveries to the warehouse out back startle the innocent one.
Let's call it a day and welcome homeless a new generation of dissonant strangers.

Eyes of Blue Seas

 I once felt your steps,
as we walked past the midnight crossroads of the stars.

Upon occasion, in a crease of the same crossroad night                                                                                   open wounds would silently reflect the sky.
Once upon a time, the sky predictably opened
and silver watches fell out of pockets of time.

During daylight hours, upon the same terrain,
birds of smoke suddenly dissolved upon crashing headlong,
into a faintly familiar slate-blue sky

The cracking of wooden percussion instruments
in a broken processional rhythm
generated a slight vibration
and then an apprehension,
which caused a mountain lion to turn his head and walk away.

Yet, the sound that you hear in the distance
shouldn't be any cause of concern for you,
because it is nothing more than collective voices
crossing a battlefield, crying out loud "Mine! All mine!,"
atop the rumble of mechanized war horses racing to their riders' deaths.

Perhaps, just perhaps, we can run against the currents of destiny's thunder
and resist the temptation to wash ourselves away in the rain.

Maybe, just maybe, we can avoid the pox-marked road
that lead to the scratched-out address of ruins
once written upon splintered street posts
that lines rows of storybook fields.

Possibly, just possibly, we can veer away from the obvious
and go in the direction of what was first seen so very long ago,
during leaf droplet dawns, by eyes of blue seas.
______________________________________

A Candelabra of Tail Lights

If a picture's worth a thousand words, then one poetic image is a chapter in a saga.
Imagery filters the distortion and static of modern life.  In as much, you sometimes
need to exercise the other circuitry within you beyond the mechanical/numerical
wiring of charts and graphs.  It prevents you from easily falling for deceit.  Upon
using the other circuitry, you discover that there's a universe within each one of us.
It's one of those discoveries that will change your life.

Stationed discretely,
beneath the midnight crossroads of the stars.
Standing vigilant,
precisely in the middle of night.

Here is where winds converge.
In the periphery, swaying twigs snap.
Soft geodesic spheres in the moonlight
take flight off of a dozen dandelion stems,
while brittle tree leaves scurry past an open field,
only to get caught in the long swooping stems of blackberry brambles.

These leaves,
now dried parchment,
no longer tell the story of autumn.

Meanwhile, the remaining dust of vacated anticipation
intersperses within a patch of crash landed may apple leaves
which remain attached to their dilapidated stems
in the dried puddle of moonlight.

To the east,
a half moon slowly sinks into a silhouette of tree branches,
all the while carrying within its crescent a slate black moon.
Meanwhile, at the bottom of the hill, on a road near the woods,
ghosts of fog bounce off a procession of auto headlights.

Overhead, a long winged jet passes
                                            slowly rising out of sight
                                                                         slowly becoming gone.

                                                  II
A newly arrived wind,
one having traveled through several time zones of emotions,
secretly etches lines on the face of an unlocated phantom
who stands concealing its thoughts,
while slowly bleeding into the night.

While streams of neon-tinted blood reach my feet,
memories begin to burn into the form of photographic negatives
transposed upon the planks of a 1960s wood burning set.

Each of the recessed memories is like a stilled reel frame
that once melted upon a fiberglass movie screen
during school hours, when the projector was stopped,
while its light bulb remained lit.

I do not want to forget loss
like a liar who stages his own amnesia
and then changes his identity within a pea & shell game
of relabeled file folders.

I cannot give tacit approval for damage left in disrepair,
by walking blindfolded past a world of cold ruins.

Nor must I block the traffic of emotions
which take an off-ramp to an intersection of uncertainty,
in preference to following a candelabra of tail lights
along a securely marked highway
traced with red felt-tip ink upon a glove compartment's road map.

                                                III

I reach out into the air
and touch the raised dots and dashes of a familiar destiny,
mounted along the sill of a spacious sky.

Peace illuminates at my finger tips.

The streams of my interior instantly dilate and flow
toward the direction of infinity the same way in which they do
at the unexpected voices of unseen cardinals
heard in the middle of a snowscape on a blinding afternoon.

As I step,
the distant murmurs of assassination crinkle and crumble.

The curses of the envious dry on their branches
and fall to the ground like the bolted iron emblems of tyrants
that crash into gravity at the end of an allied invasion.

Watch dogs sit and wag their tails,
having scratched the barbed wire from their collars.
                                                  
I inhale the echo of a forest's past leaves,
while getting touched with an impulse
by one of nighttime's unseen winds
that blows through blond wheaten grasses,
en route to the nearest town,
inviting me among the trees
whose branch tops of heated maroon
outline the November horizon by day
and exude the coming winter's touch by night.

As I make my approach, the instinct within the depth of night
suddenly falls into my hands, ready to flow at will
into the hands of a distant forest or nearby town.

Join the stars and immerse yourself
into that which is objectively wonderful,
and speak the snow which replaces the summertime bats
that flew around street lights in the middle of the night.

You are now free to transform into the objective of your love
within the deepest blue tint cast between a red hilltop tower light
and the compass that the paperboy left behind at the outskirts of infinity,
the night his mother died.
____________________