Flashing king snake

My brain may have slowed to a crawl, but it's mobile enough to flash the goods, though they're not very good goods. But they're free, and that's worth something of value.

He had been told crawling would get him nowhere. Defiant, though not standing, he crawled. Across the Mississippi he crawled, across the Huey P. Long. Into the Great Plains he crawled, and through the dust and devolution of Texas and the New Mexican plateau. The ticket taker at the International UFO Museum and Research Center considered him mad, but he was a paying customer and all paying customers in Roswell were mad and thus he was allowed to crawl inside and out. The gift shop, however, was quite the frustrating experience, though he did manage to score a plush grey for his on-again, off-again girlfriend, so perilously close to off because of his determination to be the next world traveling oddity of Ripley's, believe it or not.

Making his case at the San Francisco branch, he was laughed off the premises and crawled onto a trawler about to head out for sturgeon. Ignoring the surgeon general's warning, he lit a Winston and bought off the skipper with a few packs, even proving his worth as a makeshift counterweight in the fight to lift those feisty fish on board.

With the thanks of captain and crew, and a delicious meal to boot, he crawled on shore, sneaking his way, via Solid Snake-inspired crawling (sadly, without a cardboard box) onto a cargo ship bound for mainland China. The hold held many goods, though he was not able to read Chinese. The vast, floating warehouse could have contained the bodies of Triad victims for all he knew. Since a noxious stench never appeared, he understood that whatever illegal shenanigans were likely going on, at least he wouldn't pass out from the fumes.

The astute reader will no doubt be wondering how he survived such an arduous trek across the unforgiving seas.

Rats are tastier than you think.

Disembarking in Shanghai, there was -- surprise! -- no sight of Madonna as he crawled the famous burg, deftly avoiding rickshaws, gunplay in the muddy streets, roving bands of angry Maoists, patrons stumbling out of opium dens, scattered ronin from across the Nihonkai here for a quick score and other Oriental stereotypes as he steadily made his way into and across the vast, agricultural interior and north to his ultimate destination, leaping (crawling, actually) greatly forward into the realm of the horse lords where he continued to crawl.

And crawl.

And crawl.

And crawl, the thickening callouses upon his hands and those straining his tender knee joints furiously weaving burrow after burrow into the ancient earth, uncovering a long-dried riverbed over which he crawled and crawled and crawled and then crawled one more time, a thin, reddish trail in the sandy silt howling that he had at last found his treasure of iron and bone, the grave of the great Khan himself.

As his ex, and the world soon found out, crawling took him everywhere, including the pages of National Geographic and everyone knows where that inevitably leads: hookers n' blow n' crawling, lots of crawling.