I planned the trip only in the sense that there was to be no planning. I would find a map of the United States and figure out which road connected Maine to Los Angeles. I would step onto that road and stick my thumb out.

High times were to ensue.

I was 19 or 20 when I endeavored to hitchhike across the country, replacing the earlier dream of becoming an astronaut. You need to understand math to become an astronaut – did you know that? Who needs it?

The L.A. dream was a grand one. I envisioned wild, drunken nights in roadhouses along the inner expanse of the country. Sleeping in strange beds with strange people, working odd jobs as a house painter or psychic contortionist, nibbling up the country like a rat nibbling on toast.

I’ll give you a moment while you adjust to that image.

As a young wanderer, I was certainly familiar with the works of Jack Kerouac, but that beatnik did not inspire me much. The truth, I was told, was that Kerouac spent most of his time sleeping on his mother’s couch and borrowing money off the poor broad. That’s just no kind of role model.

No, I was more attracted to the fantastic L.A. of Jim Morrison, the Whiskey a Go Go, the Sunset Strip, love-ins, peyote-smoking, mad nights of mind-twisted surf and palm trees. I would wander aplenty and live above a bar, taking frequent forays into the desert for the purpose of mind-expansion.

Get here, as the song says, and we’ll do the rest.

Alas, the dream died when I took a cushy job pumping gas for a station with a sea bird as its mascot. Who wants to thumb to a warm paradise when you’re bringing down minimum wage dumping fuel into the cars of surly, ungrateful people? My dream of hitchhiking glory was curtailed by the siren song of fuel distribution.

Or maybe the cosmic playbook in which my life is written simply had no place for such an errant journey. If you believe the fatalists, whatever is to become of us individually is preordained, unalterable in every sense. That I didn’t make it to the smoke-filled halls of the Whiskey was surely the workings of some Great Creator of Being who thought I was better suited to gas jockeying for two years. It builds character, you know.

And the fatalistic view of things was convenient, because it was easier to blame some corrupted destiny rather than ponder my own shortcomings, like laziness or ambition muted by hooch and late nights in the clubs.

Never let it be said, though, that the grand designer of destinies is not without a sense of humor. After dragging me around the slushy streets of Lewiston for more than a decade and bouncing me off the strip malls of Virginia, the cosmic yuckster is sending me to Los Angeles after all.

On a plane instead of by thumb. For a scheduled period instead of an unmeasured one. With a group of knitters instead of a group of drug-abusing layabouts.

You may mock me all you’d like. Though I’m not sure what force of destiny I believe in, I believe enough to know that if I were meant to make my rock and roll debut at the Whiskey draped in an afghan, that’s what I’ve got to do. Watch for it on the E Channel.

I spend a lot of time these days ruminating about things that happened or didn’t happen the way I expected. That kind of inner inventory occurs, I think, when you have to get real and start crossing things off your great list of things to do. I dragged a long pencil line across “fly to Mars” not long ago and “play shortstop for the Kansas City Royals” went soon after. Those pencil lines are dismal and disappointing, so I don’t make many of them. You’ve got to keep some dreams alive, even the ones that grow more unlikely by the day.

I probably won’t take a shabby apartment above a raucous saloon while I’m in the City of Angels. I probably won’t drink with Hunter S. Thompson, what with him being dead and all, or get into a drunken slap fight with Janis Joplin.

I rule out nothing, though, because who knows what magic blows down the neon-glowing strips of L.A.? Who knows what dreams from the master list might be resurrected, with a little faith and an afghan knit by a group of punctilious women?

I am the lizard king! And man, are my shoulders warm!

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. Visit his Web site at www.marklaflamme.com