My Yearly Letter (or “what has k been up to this year?)

Dear friends,

 

Happy New Year, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and holidays to you! I hope you are in good health, warm company, and fine spirits as this letter reaches you – if so, you’ve beaten the odds; and if not, I hope this helps.

 

I am well enough; certainly in good health and in the loving company of my family, though as for spirits, I must confess those dive and soar as the waves of life roll past. I know that I haven’t written you in quite some time – I can say this safely because I haven’t written anyone in quite some time: it just hasn’t been a part of my life lately. Nonetheless, there is a certain tradition to the end of each year; a sense of finality and closure, and I’d like to do my bit to convey some of the fading wonder of my 2010 to you.

 

This time last year, I was in Nicaragua – a lovely country with wonderful, but far from home and family. I spent my Christmas with a handful of travelers and expatriates on a remote beach on the Pacific shore, throwing rocks into the ocean out of cell phone range, as far from the modern world as I could manage. For New Years I got disgustingly drunk with people I barely knew, making a complete ass of myself in front of a girl I had been trying to impress, and ended up burning a long list of everything I wished to remove from my life in a bonfire – I distinctly remember both “my ties to the country I was born in” and “the baggage of my past” being on that sheet of paper. Judging from my present position, that worked out amazingly well, and I’ve had no further problems in that area.

 

After the New Year, I hitched rides down to the capital of Nicaragua, rode buses to Panama City, and spent entirely too much time at border crossings in an attempt to meet up with a good friend and ride the same plane as him down to Colombia. Being as he had all the details on where we were going, it was only fitting I never saw him. Instead, I got into a late-night argument with a fabulous girl from New York, and we ended up traveling together and dating. (Let that be a lesson to everyone – if she opens the conversation with “Oh my God, are you still on your fucking phone?!” she is a keeper.)

 

Anyway, Natalie and I had a wonderful time, and after I convinced her to blow off her trip to Peru, we did a tour of some of the more beautiful parts of one of the more ridiculously beautiful countries on the planet. Seriously – find someone who has been to Colombia who will dispute the awesomeness of this country, and you’ve found a complete curmudgeon – congrats. America has Natalie largely to thank for rehabilitating her image in my mind: I guess I figured that if someone as great as her could come out of the country, then it couldn’t be all terrible. She and I spent about 3, 3 ½ weeks together, and then out of nowhere she was gone and I was alone again. Following a terribly overwrought airport goodbye scene and a crazy cokehead-driven bus ride north, what else was there for me to do except check into a mountaintop paragliding school for the next month?

 

I almost died there – not a joke at all – I’m a bad paraglider. I ended up in the bushes a few times, draped a glider over some power lines, and on my very last flight crashed into a tree and fell 40-50 feet to the ground. It’s no small miracle that I’m still here to tell this story. Still, it was a legendary experience, and nothing I’ve ever done before or since can directly compare. At the end of February, I said my goodbyes, packed my bags, and the very next morning took off to the airport. There I undertook one of the weirdest transitions in my life – torrential rain delay, 12 or 15 hours of flights (Colombian Airlines are great by-the-by) and then straight into “Snowpocalypse” – a huge blizzard with sub-zero temperatures. Did I mention I flew to NYC to visit Natalie in lieu of coming home? Yeah, that happened.

 

So there I am; torn jeans, pack of smelly clothes, t-shirt with volcanoes on it, and I’ve invited myself to come live with a girl I’ve known for less time than you’ve known the guy at your local gas station. Crazy, right? Definitely – crazy is a good descriptive word for the life I was leading. I got a cab to Natalie’s apartment, showed up extremely nervous she would just see me and slam the door, and instead was treated to a fabulous time with a lovely lady. She’d even “borrowed” a coat from some guy who had left it at a bar – good thing too, or I would have died of cold for sure! As it was, I invaded her life, she took me in with striking hospitality, and we made the best of the cold and poverty. It was a great time, made better by that strange sense of transience that comes from knowing one of you is going to bail out of town at a moment’s notice – As it was, I left just before her birthday. What can I say? I am a classy man.

 

What ended up happening is that I had placed a posting on Craigslist asking if someone was headed in the general direction of Los Angeles, and would they be so kind as to take a total stranger along with them? It worked better than I could have hoped: five hours after I sent my message, I received one from a man named Matt, who just so happened to be moving to LA. I called him, he sounded exactly like I didn’t expect a serial killer to sound, and that was good enough – the only drawback was leaving Natalie earlier than I wanted to. We had this fabulous goodbye; just like a romance novel really, and then she went off to school, and I went back into to the coffee shop to wait for my ride. Here’s how good this goodbye was – a little old lady came up to me as Natalie faded into the distance and told me that she only saw people part ways like that in the movies!

 

Then Matt called to postpone our departure – he’d found another rider who wanted to pay for gas. I went back to Natalie’s place, killed some time, and managed to delay leaving just long enough to see her coming home from the subway as I went down to the subway to head into the city. It was… the opposite of a romance novel goodbye. We made out on the cold sidewalk for a bit and then I – stupidly! – headed into Manhattan and let her get away again. As it turned out, Matt was running even later, and I was too broke to do most anything. I hung out with my cousin for a bit, and spent a couple more hours casually hiding inside the Apple store drinking cough syrup to keep from freezing and reflecting on how much better my life would be if I’d just stayed at Natalie’s place. Nonetheless, as a legitimate homeless person, I felt that a certain image had to be maintained – I’m sure the real patrons appreciated it.

 

Sometime after midnight Matt and I finally met up and began driving. The other guy – forget his name – and Matt rode up front, and I passed out almost immediately among the strewn books and bags and detrius of a man’s life uprooted. By the time I woke up, we were in Ohio. Illinois? Ohio. With 3 people you can swap drivers from here til next week, and nobody really gets tired of it, so it only took us 16 or 20 hours to get to Nashville, even after detouring to drop off Adam or Steve or Jesus at his family’s home and eat their peanut butter sandwiches. I took a few pictures – the best being a “Florence Y’all” water tower in Florence, and a street sign with Church going one way and Gay the other. Also, Matt pointed out the eye of Sauron on a local high rise. Finally, we found the Music City hostel, and made ourselves at home.

 

Nashville was a treat – country music Mecca, busking musicians everywhere, country dancing, swing bands, and we happened to pull into town right as the biggest college basketball conference tournament I’ve ever personally seen rolled into the city. Every night it was dance parties, every day strange adventures and surprisingly awesome Mexican food. With the foreign travelers and artists and drifters, I felt right at home. Matt and I enjoyed it all so much that we barely made it out of town with money enough for gas!

 

Lacking funds, food, and with my randomly-imposed March 17th deadline fast approaching, we booked it across the country. If you consider the 12 or so hours we spent at the home of the always-hospitable Becky and Seth in Durant as “on pause”, then it took us just under 48 hours to drive from Nashville to Venice Beach, where Matt and I parted ways forever friends. Speaking of friends, one of my best buddies Rad drove wayyy out of his daily life to come pick me up and buy me dinner that first night, and the gratitude I felt I still feel now. A friend will give you ride, but only a true best friend will come pick you up, tell you that you stink so badly that he’s not allowing you to go to a restaurant, and then buy you pizza! I spent the night with Chad and Rad, their respective girlfriends, and the infamous Jake motherfuckin’ Wood, who I’m sure you’ve heard of. If not, you really need to get out there. They took a lovely shot of me passed out about 3-4 hours after my arrival – It was a bit of an adventure!

 

However, all adventures end, and this one came to a pretty abrupt close just as soon as I made it back home. Little aside here – by this point, I have had a quite respectable epic adventure. I’ve crossed nations, I’ve changed continents, I’ve flown, I’ve crash-landed, I’ve met a girl, fallen in love, and moved in with her, I’ve made a handful of lifetime friends, I’ve been threatened with arrest and thrown out of very nice establishments. These first 3 months of 2010 have set an incredibly high bar for the rest of the year, no? Well, as it turns out, this is where the whole mood changes, and 2010 becomes the hardest year of my life.

 

If you didn’t already know, my younger brother is Schizophrenic. He’s not only schizophrenic – it isn’t a definition – but it’s certainly something you ought to know about the guy before you meet him, because once you do meet him, you’re going to want that sort of an explanation! Otherwise, depending on his mood and medication level, he’s going to strike you as anything from “slightly eccentric” to “Holy shit.”

 

When I first saw Ken after nearly 15 months away, I wasn’t prepared. At the time, he wasn’t diagnosed, wasn’t medicated, and while my mother had sent me many emails about his declining condition and her worries about him, there just isn’t any way to prepare for something like seeing your brother after his descent into madness. He was a wreck – not at first, when he came to pick me up and drive me home, but 3 hours later, when he began vividly arguing and gesticulating with someone imaginary in the hallway, it became very clear that something was horribly wrong.

 

The whole time I was gone, I had this snapshot of my family just as I had left them. In in, we’re all happy, smiling; I’m trying to shove the dog’s head in my mouth – we’re a normal, happy, family even if Dad takes blood pressure pills and Kyle had seizures as a kid. All of a sudden, we weren’t normal. That snapshot was bullshit. I had just been fooling myself all along. I walked into my family home and it was like a whole other family had inhabited the bodies of my parents and brothers. They were automatons going through the motions and each individually seeking to escape the terrible situation thrust upon them, and to come into that as I did, hopeful, ecstatic, energized to take on the world and beat it – well, it took the life right out of me.

 

To be fair, I was forewarned – my entire homecoming had been orchestrated in response to a series of emails received from Ken, mom, and a trusted friend while I was still in Panama. Actually, that moment I met Natalie – “Are you still on your fucking phone?!” – I was reading a lengthy email from Ken about how the parents didn’t understand him and were conspiring to lock him up in prison. It’s not so much I didn’t know, but really that I couldn’t see the situation accurately from afar – I didn’t want to, I wasn’t able to, I didn’t.

 

I abandoned pretty much all my plans upon coming home – Becky has warned me as we left her house that family problems tend to suck everyone in, and I’d sworn up and down that I would never, ever, for any reason, let that happen to me – driving across Arizona I’d sworn it to myself a dozen times. Yet within 48 hours of coming home I surrendered to the task at hand and started rebuilding. I put away all my photos – I’ve never shown traveling pictures to anyone, ever. Most of them never made it out of my camera except to be copied to my hard drives. My pack is still mostly packed, sitting in a corner of my closet, full of memories and trinkets. I swallowed my stories, let the fire in my eyes ember, and went into damage control – and what damage there was.

 

Mostly, I went into a tailspin. Transitioning from travel to home is difficult in the best circumstances, but going from full-on transience to sedentary life, trading hitchhiking for a desk job, and giving up writing, music, singing, and dancing all at once? That’s just a recipe for disaster. I fell apart, got a data-entry job for the Census, and the next few months are a blur of a job I hated, a home life I hated, and brief gems of home – letters from friends out in the world, free rock climbing with an old friend, and occasional escape to my sanctuary with Chad-Rad-Jake at the new “Boy’s House.”

 

I don’t mean to sound as if I wasn’t happy to see my family – I’m sure that comes across, but isn’t true – I was perfectly ecstatic to see them again, but to see them like this hurt like a sword through the chest. You never want to see your loved ones doubting their own existence, blaming themselves for genetics, or squirreling themselves away to hide from the failing family dynamic. Nobody who hasn’t been through a complete family meltdown can quite grasp how it undermines everything else in your life – we were all spending our days just trying to get up, work, eat, and get back to sleep again, and any day where all that happened without something else breaking was a good day. Looking back from right now, in a slightly brighter but still grim present, I have no clue how everyone pulled through that.

 

Slowly, it did get better. Ken got a diagnosis, new medication, birthdays passed, I got a job waiting tables, Dad graduated the police academy (3rd time through, those fucking bastards) and on the whole, things looked like they might be recovering. Also, some long-time friends got married, and celebration always helps to bring up the spirits. I mean, Ken did cold-cock me in the eye at one of the weddings after going cold turkey off his pills, and I started my new job with a fantastically swollen black eye, but we got through all that, and it’s been a gradual upslope ever since.

 

Yes, except for Dad losing his job, and my hours being cut so that I had to take a job washing dishes at minimum wage, and Ken’s recovery hitting a plateau, and Kyle’s grades, and Mom’s mental health, and the stolen trailer, and the broken pool motor, and the money trouble, and the arguments, and the silent malaise overshadowing every instant of our lives, it’s been a steady rise to the present. One might even say we’re quite lucky really – most people can’t take another crisis, whereas we’re so used to them that it’s all taken in stride. “Oh look,” one of us will yawn, “While we weren’t home tonight, the peaceful dottering old dog we all love and cherish fell into the icy pool and drown because she was too blind and weak to get out. How perfectly appropriate.” Don’t you wish I was making that up.

 

I think we’ve been cursed perhaps, or maybe pissed off Apollo or some of those Norse gods – not enough sacrificing, or insufficient lamentation. Perhaps life on the shit end of the stick was just too good for us, so we’ve been downgraded to the shit itself. I don’t really know the answer, but I can tell you that ever since I came home, it has been a struggle simply to wake up each morning and not sob myself back to sleep. What kind of person abandons his family to run off and have fabulous, unbelievable adventures while the people he adores fall apart? Who does that, and then, when it’s his turn to suffer along with them, spends every spare moment dreaming of running away again? Pray you don’t have to wrestle those demons.

 

And yet… I can’t bring myself to really believe that leaving wasn’t the best thing that could have happened to me. When I came back home, I was a strong enough person to deal with all the hardship and misery that this year has thrown my way, and still have inner strength to support my family. The old me, the one who never had to live on coffee for a week, the one who never had to fight parasites or crash paragliders or hitch rides from drunk drivers would never have been able to do what I have. Further, if I hadn’t been out of the picture, what’s to say I wouldn’t have just sunk down into the muck with everything else? As it turned out, my re-entry forced a lot of jolting and adjustment within the family – If I had been around the whole time, that unfamiliarity, that different view, would never have been what small help it was to swing things around for the better. Vagabonding forged me to survive, and it has been a welcome source of strength in these trying times.

 

Now, as the year and this letter come to a close, let me share a few future hopes and plans with you, so that we can perhaps end upon a much happier note. The holidays have been fabulous for us – we took a family ski trip in lieu of material gifts, and the change of scenery certainly helped to level out our mood swings. Tahoe is a very gorgeous area, we managed to visit between the massive storms, and the snowboarding, sledding, and horseplay were all therapy to us. Afterward we drove down to Grandpa’s house, did the family Christmas celebration, and managed to get home before family togetherness got the better of anyone. From there, I headed up to Santa Barbara to visit friends, wear a suit, and ring in the new year like a classy individual. It kind of worked – I spent the entire 31st sick in (someone else’s) bed, but managed to rally before midnight, got dressed, and between surprise visitors and good company, it was a great time.

 

My next step (which I’ve actually started already, since I’ve been slacking on writing this letter) is to take a leave from my job, fly to New York City to see Natalie again, then hitchhike to Oklahoma to live with Becky and Seth and write a book of my adventures. I’m looking forward to the coming year – with the family slowly recovering, I feel comfortable enough to leave again, and I’m looking at a job teaching English abroad. Travel and adventure seem to be my calling, so I’ll be doing as much of that as I can while I’m still able. I will have to work hard – I don’t have much money – but I’m confident that I can find what I’m looking for if I keep searching. For now it is enough to be back on the road, living out of a bag, and unsure of what tomorrow will bring. I hope that you all are living the lives you desire, surrounded by loving people, and happy with your present. If not, it is never too late to change your reality, and I hope that you do not settle for a life that does not fulfill your dreams.

 

I would love to hear from you, so if you ever have the chance, call me, email me, write me, skype me, facebook me, instant message me, (that’s still a thing, right?) send me a carrier pigeon, or send me a smoke signal. We live in the future – it has never been easier to contact each other!

 

Until next we cross paths, -k

Schizophrenia

I feel obligated to write something – anything – on here to explain how this blog went so suddenly from stories and observations about the world I was so excitedly exploring, to well… nothing. No posts except infrequently, and pretty poor-quality ones at that. It isn’t so much that I’ve given up on writing, but lately it has become difficult for me to write anything that I feel is worthy of being shown to other people.

 

I discovered in traveling that there are experiences which cannot be fully conveyed to anyone who did not experience them. One of my biggest problems is that while I can tell an entertaining story, or write an essay that provokes the reader to think, there simply isn’t a way to telegraph the feelings and raw emotions of some of the experiences I have had without going and doing the same things – even then, you’re likely to run into different people and do different things, and so your adventures will be different than my own. On some level it works, because most people don’t want to have the realizations that come with watching small kids huff glue to stay warm and knowing you could fix the problem except that you’d rather keep traveling and not adopt and raise a street kid, and even if you did, that’s still only one in a million. Trust me when I say that the self-discovery that comes out of walking away from someone else’s problem when you could actually fix it is one of the more unpleasant I’ve had. I’m hard on myself for details, for accuracy, and for trying not to preach, but when I try to write stories about my adventures of the past year and half, I run into an even bigger barricade; one which has prevented me from giving any serious effort to writing about my life of late.

 

I came home in mid-March of 2010, stumbled into my familial home, took some pictures, shared a few stories, and passed out. Between then and now, my life has been divided into work, looking for work, and taking every effort to keep my family from falling apart. What I hadn’t realized in my time on the road, and what they had been too kind to tell me, was that my younger brother George (what my 2-year-old self wanted to name him) had descended into the living hell of schizophrenia, and that this horrible disease had been eating my family from the inside ever since I left. By the time I returned he was holding full conversations with people none of the rest of us could see, drawing massive amounts of graffiti and nonsensical (to me) scribblings on every surface available to him, and had convinced himself that his destiny lay in becoming a professional skateboarder and rapper. He gave up on personal hygiene, developed phobias about sunlight, trimming his nails, or cutting his hair. He’d become nocturnal; sleeping until mid-afternoon and refusing contact with the rest of the family until my parents and youngest brother had gone to bed. At this point, he would emerge from his room, make a hell of a lot of noise, cook some strange meal (an entire pound of pasta with no sauce) and then go off to skateboard around the neighborhood until dawn, after which he’d go back to bed, and the cycle would repeat.

 

The burden of taking care of George fell to my mother, because my father was working 12-16 hour days at a location an hour away. This meant that for over a year, my father was more or less not present in his family’s life. My mother, in addition to her full-time job, had been attending support meanings, reading dozens of books on the subject of mental illness, and trying – largely in vain – to get my brother the assistance he so desperately needed. This left my youngest brother Randy to pretty much fend for himself at 15 years old. His grades crashed, his interest in school also, and he buried himself into video games as a coping mechanism for the terrible life he had been thrust into. Our extended family’s help and advice has been limited – one aunt and uncle offered George a job and a place to stay part of each week, but he couldn’t do the job and eventually cut ties with them as his paranoia led him to believe they too were trying to control him. (his biggest fear in life is that people are out to control him, and he will go to great, self-destructive lengths to avoid these perceived attacks on his sovereignty.) Yet incredibly, all these strange behaviors, screaming fights, and George’s descent into madness were kept largely from me, the exception being occasional tearful emails from my mother, casting herself as the over-reacting mother. From my end, George wasn’t doing great, but in our communications he was distant and sullen, not crazy. Like all of us, I simply didn’t want to believe that my brother the athlete, the architect, the wonder kid could possibly be mentally ill. We all deluded ourselves, internalized the problems, and the whole family sank silently. Coming home was such a shock, because having not seen the transition, George’s condition was intolerable. Here I was, my clearly not-sane brother before me, and I’d been off having the time of my life for a year.

 

The guilt that comes from this is indescribable. I should have been there. I could have helped. I would have made the difference. If not for my self-centered adventures, I could have stopped his slide. It’s all shit; in case you were wondering – my presence here would not have made the difference then any more than it has now, and I am confident that I would have done a far worse job than I have if not for the perspective and strength I gained in traveling. Had I stayed, I would have been in the same condition as my family at the time of my return – soul-bruised, vacant, and hopeless. It doesn’t matter where guilt is concerned – the knife still digs into my chest when I think of their suffering concurrent with my happiness, separated by a few thousand miles and a yearning gulf of uncaring bliss. When the pain and suffering breached my isolation, and brother, mother, and friend all asked me to return with a few days of each other, I did what any good son would, and came home to investigate for myself. By that I mean I flew to Colombia, got a paragliding license, flew to NYC, and hitched a ride cross-country with a now-great friend Matt. I took my time because even faced with the distress of those I loved, I misunderstood the urgency in their words – George was coherent in his communications with me, so how bad could it really be?

 

Life-shatteringly terrible, as it turned out.

 

My original plan in coming home had been to stay here only for a matter of weeks, a few months tops, to visit the family, say hi to old friends, aid George in whatever was ailing him, and then victoriously take off again – to overseas, to live with new friends, or to reunite the wonderful woman I met and fell in love with in Colombia. (I swear, Natalie, I will write our story soon enough!) That plan, like any, never survived first contact with the enemy. My family members did not even speak to each other in my first few days back in the country. They did not interact except at the most basic level of survival communication, and each seemed trapped in a world of isolated unhappiness. Seeing the dire straits of my family I could not help but to abandon my own interests and save the people I love.

 

I have been remarkably unsuccessful in this – good intentions cannot cure mental illness – and to this day George suffers delusions, heightened unpleasant senses, and cannot separate real from fantasy. He lives in a world all his own, surrounded and tormented by demons the rest of us cannot imagine. At times he shakes loose, and for an hour, a day, my brother is back with us – in certain situations, surrounded by lifelong friends and doing activities he has loved his entire life, he will appear almost as I remember him from all those years ago. Then something will shift; his entire body language will slump, his voice will change, and he will be another person altogether. He is gone again, and until another surprise reappearance, the person we must deal with is not the one we love. His other self, the one that we most often see, is angry at the world – we are all assholes, we are crazy, we are the enemy seeking to control and destroy him. If not for us, he would be able to live free, take charge of his own destiny, and fulfill his rap/skate dreams. We hate him, we are obsessed with him, we have nothing better to do with our lives than to destroy is, and that is our purpose in existence. All of these are things he has yelled at my mother and myself within the past 50 hours. He cannot make eye contact, he cannot face the people he is speaking with. His hair – ratty and matted to his head – hangs past his nose now, and he moves stiffly, robot-like, with everything coming from the shoulder and hip joints. When he is like this there is no point in talking to him – his denial of his own problems runs so deep that anything, the slightest comment, will drive him into fits of rage.

 

One of my greatest fears in life is that he will attack my mother or youngest brother, and I will not be there to fight him off. He has twice assaulted me – once in our home, and another time at a good friend’s wedding. I still have the scar from that second attack, my right eye does not open the same as it once did, and I suspect the injury is for life. On his bad days we all barricade our doors and let him rage, because he is an adult, and the rights of parents and family over the mentally ill in this country are non-existent. He has no control of his mind, and yet no one, not the police, our insurance, his school, nor his former doctors will grant anyone the ability to protect him from himself. In this manner, we are given the choice of throwing our own kin into the streets to survive as a crazy homeless man, or to keep him at home. There are no other options until he harms someone to the point of going to jail or a mental facility. We have no money – we have spent many thousands of dollars on medicines, doctors, mental care experts, and there is no cure forthcoming. For a while now he has been medicated, but one of the first things that comes from his medication is an overwhelming feeling that he doesn’t need the pills to control his life. Thus he hides them, refuses to take them for days, misses his dosing schedule, and the meds feed another part of roller-coaster emotions. While unmedicated he is a danger to everyone around him, but while he continues to take his medication on so erratic a schedule he risks permanent harm to himself, and amplifies the wild cycles of his mind. His manner is hostile, his behavior erratic, and his attacks on myself and others leave me little choice but to assume the worst – he will hurt someone one day if he is not stopped. As there are no authorities willing to deal with him, our choice as his family is to keep him close to home and both protect George from the uncaring world, and the world from the insane George.

 

There is no clear path left open to us now – those diagnosed schizophrenics who are caught early and take their medication consistently can oftentimes recover, but for those who persist for years in denial and rebellion against their own minds the hopeful prognoses fade to semi-invalid or death. A full quarter commit suicide – the same proportion which recovers completely. My brother’s condition was discovered when my father and I bailed him out of jail a year and 9 months ago. Talking with his roommates at the time, he had been bad off for many months before that as well. With the medical insurance games and exorbitant fees of private practice doctors, we did not have a diagnosis until some 5 months ago – likely too late. Certainly George has not responded well to the treatments or medication, and his current behavior, while less physically violent than before, is still volatile to the point of grave concern. He has driven away his friends, lost every job offered to him, is on the verge of being kicked out of the local community college, and has convinced himself that his own family is plotting to destroy his life. At this rate, I do not expect him to survive another year – indeed, my mother and I spoke just yesterday about our (previously separate and unspoken) fears that each day will be the one where we discover he has killed himself.

 

There is no way out of this without abandoning my family. My parents are close to divorce, Randy clings to me as a rock of stability in his shattered life, and everyone seems to need my love and advice on a constant basis. They all need me, and in my heart I can feel only hate. I hate San Diego. I hate living here, I hate the people here. I hate the way that this whole world has turned to ashes in my hands. I hate that I cannot help, cannot save, can do nothing more than comfort the people I love as we all spiral downward. We are trapped behind George’s lying brain’s filters – our outstretched arms are obscene gestures to him – our words are horrible to his lying ears. He is trapped in a hell of his own creation, and his powers of creation are so great that all who come in contact are sucked in as well. I find myself simultaneously dreading and hoping for his death – at least then he would not have to suffer so. At least then we could try to recover. I know there is no happiness here, that there may never be happiness again – for any of us. There is no one I can speak to about this – not without paying money I do not have for a counselor whose job is to listen. I don’t need a prostitute.

 

Just as there was once a gulf between myself out in the world and family here at home, so is there now a gulf between my former self and my present. I have never shown traveling photos to anyone, I have never told my story to a friend. I can feel myself putting all those happy times into a little mental box, locking it, and abandoning my dreams. I am being ground into powder my this life, and soon I will be nothing left.

 

Last night I dreamed the happiest thing I have felt in as long as I can remember. I was on the road, in the back of a truck, riding to I-know-not-where. Around me were friends, and we were riding off to some great adventure, laughing and singing into the wind. I took my phone from my pocket, threw it into the road, an explosion of plastic and glass and circuits. We all found his hilarious. Later, sitting around a campfire, I took my passport from my pocket, thumbed the pages, threw it into the hungry flames. Next my photos, of family, friends, a life I no longer wanted. Journals went in, my laptop too. My companions sat silently as I did this, and tears of joy flooded down my face. Afterward, I sat and faced the dimming fire with my wet face, finally free of myself.

 

Do you see what I am getting at here? Do you see where my mind goes? There can be no happiness for me when those I love are in such pain. Coming back here, I though the solution was to help them, to free the ones I love from their chains. Now I see that is impossible, and that I am chaining my body alongside theirs. My only hope lies in flight; in abandoning everyone I have ever loved and beginning anew in another life. I am not even the same man I was when I returned, and certainly that carefree, happy, traveler would hardly recognize me. The few people I still talk to honestly are unanimous in their assurances that what I am doing is noble and good, and will be worth it in the end, but I have lost any faith I once had. My brother is not my brother any more. My family is shattered, without hope, without help. Our friends have their own lives and worries, and as our problems deepen, they bow out one at a time. We are alone in a way I have never been – even being actually alone is less lonely than to be the problem family, the one who brings everyone down. I am sure that the only responses this gets will be good-natured, well-intended missives of help and support, but my own doubts are so deep that it all comes to naught.

 

So you see, writing a book about adventures, love stories, and happy times is quite impossible when the whole world is on fire, and there in no one there to help you put it out. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to put on a fake smile and pretend to be happy for the benefit of others – a man has to make a living somehow.

 

Reality and Perception

When it comes down to it, at the end of your days, no religion, no ideology, no faith or government or science or technology will save you from your own shortcomings. There is no heaven, no hell, no Gods, no afterlife, nothing NOTHING no one who can truthfully claim any power over you – you are your own master, you must own the consequences of your actions and the path of your life.

By you of course I mean me, because I can’t write your circumstances but must instead come from my own perspective on reality. There are people born into near-slavery, there are those whose lives are forever marred by some external variable, (be it circumstances of birth, a masked gunman firing wildly into a crowd, or any sort of unpreventable tragedy) many who can’t claim full responsibility for their positions in life. Even they, for all that the world throws at them, still most accept that their lives are their own property. I am not arguing that victims must find fault in themselves for their terrors suffered at the hands of others – nor am I arguing at all really – I am trying to simply state a problem that has been bothering me for some time. This problem lies in our human tendency to take positive aspects of life as our own while discarding our bad bits as the fault of some other – it isn’t true, and if we were to be honest with ourselves (honesty being a desirable attribute in its own regard) then we would remove some part of the blinders we each wear as we face the world every day.

On the one hand this is terrifying, because almost every one of us is lying about some aspect of ourself. We take certain bad things we have done or harsh consequences we have suffered and pin them upon some “other” in order to assuage some of our guilt and bad feelings. The hurt was due to another’s actions, the failure resulting of sabotage. Responsibility is painful and forces the mind inward, toward flaws and misdeeds and failings – far easier, far more acceptable, to find something else to take that hurt, and salvage what we may.

The problem with this is that it is simply untrue – unless someone came into your life and forced you under pain of death not to succeed, then your failure can only honestly be taken upon yourself, worn as a mantle – not carried as a cross – for only then can we hope to learn from our actions. How can one possibly hope to see her own life truly if constantly veiled by misconceptions of her own history? How can a country for that matter? How can a people?

The small lies magnify, go cancerous as they become the foundation for our own realities. “I lost the job because my boss is a lying asshole” covers up any personal fault, and in doing so primes a person to commit the same mistakes, large or small, that led to the first lost job. Worse, we have to commit to these lies, else we risk cognitive dissonance, and so each bit of evidence falling outside our narrowing field of acceptability must be discarded, rejected with force, and in doing so our vision clouds all the more. Build upon false foundations long enough and all you will have created is shit – rotten through with lies and misconceptions, based on willful ignorance and false perception.

The same is true of accepting responsibility for that which does not truthfully belong to you. The boss who steals the work of a talented underling, the owner who skims the labor off her workers while paying them a fraction of their value, the skillful liar who corrupts those around to serve his ends – these people rise both in society and within their own minds. This dishonestly is no less cancerous, no less disastrously destructive to the individual as that which externalizes blame for misdeeds. No, no, a thousand times NO – we cannot hope to survive without absolute honesty of self to self, for to lie to the mind is to construct a false reality which blinds and binds, rots and decays until there is nothing left but ashes of a once-great spirit.

We run a terrific risk in lying to ourselves, one I have mentioned twice before now, namely the risk of falsifying reality in the name of self-protection. It is not uncommon – perhaps it is our greatest shared human characteristic after breathing, shitting, fucking, fighting, and all those biological functions. We all lie to ourselves, we all judge our actions on a plane of perception that does not coincide with the basic reality of our situation. It’s a terrible trait, perhaps evolved for self-protection from the inevitable and constant clash between action and ideal – simply put, if we never force ourselves to justify actions that cross our beliefs, then there’s no need to doubt our own beliefs or question our actions – quite handy for building confidence in one’s own rightness and superiority. The problem of course is that we’re building facades of shit bricks on poor land, and the whole thing is blocking our view of the beautiful world just beyond. As the walls rise higher, as the mask gets thicker, we lose everything we once valued by simply not admitting doubt or truth into our minds. What a terrible price!

Of course, it’s only terrible if you value truth, and once the veil has completely obscured all that we once valued, it is only a matter of time before we forget what was ever there before. The boss really was an asshole, those Mexicans are stealing our jobs, Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons and supported Al-Queda. It’s so easy to lie to those who lie to themselves, because they want to believe – believe you, believe anything, so long as they don’t have to examine their own faults, or question their own lives. Believing becomes a defense mechanism, and by then the person has lost his mind; not lost forever, but lost beyond his willingness to get it back – belief has become so much less costly than introspection, and the pain of knowing he has based his life on false conceptions keeps him afraid of ever trying. He might as well be a zombie, because once you’re that far down the line you’re hardly ever coming back. Certainly he can’t be a productive member of society, can’t question the things he is told, can’t critically weigh the merits and shortcomings of anything around him, because he sees the world through a filter of what he wishes to be true. Not just him, mind you – we all do it to some degree or another.

How can we stop this destructive process? Certainly we must start early for it to be less painful, but if you wish to open your own mind now, then every day will be easier than the next. I ought mention now that we are incapable of opening any mind except our own – we may guide those around us, we might teach methods and strategies to others, but in the end this is a door that locks from inside, and we may not, for any effort, banging, or screaming, successfully force another mind to perceive reality honestly. Think of times when someone has been so SURE of a point, so dedicated to convincing you of the rightness and truth of it that you find yourself turning off your mind to that person – conviction is a double-edged blade, and without careful use it will cut you just so surely as your target.

No, what must be done is not more evangelizing; prosthelytizing will (at best) gain you followers, and what we need is free spirits. We must aim to be more as Socrates and less as Plato, less dedicated to our views, more self-doubting, less self-confident – for what is it to be self-confident but to have more self-respect than you deserve? We must meditate on our lives, on the good moments and the bad, and question everything we come across. If our entire life’s perceptions are based on dishonest interpretations of self, then let us tear down those facades, accepting as we do the pain, the racking doubts, the anguish and loss of belonging – what are these things except illusions? Is not reality worth hurting for? These growing pains of the mind will pass with time, and what is left behind is nothing less than a stronger, more real, and truer view of the world. The universe is more beautiful, happier, sadder, more alive than any tale we could tell ourselves as comfort. There is no need to cover that beauty – you are strong enough to bear it, and your fears of what may come from tearing off your mask are overwrought – all pain numbs with time, and the rewards are bountiful: a trueness of self, an honest view of what it is to be, to live, to die. What else could possibly be so precious as reality itself?

I don’t know if I’m convincing you, or even myself – I struggle as we all do to keep my own inadequacies from blinding me on a constant basis. Still, by spending some time each day to reflect, to write, to think, or sing, I draw myself inward, examine who and what I am, and come out a sliver more able, a thimble less full of lies and contradictions. Perhaps with an entire lifetime of this I might become worthy of knowing this beautiful reality all around me. What do you use to shatter your own illusions? How do you cope with the hypocrisy of actions and values that do not meet, that run in opposite directions at times? I do not claim to have answers, but I am trying to stumble through this life on my own terms, and I will take what solace there is in that – at least I am not simply swallowing what I am told. Small comfort, but in a society built upon the same lies I seek to rid myself of, what other course can I possibly take?

The Wrong Side

There’s 2 sides at least to every issue
and I’m sure that each has merits
but my nation picks the worst (or seems to)
and I don’t know how to bear it.

In the game of global politic
the stakes are high as ever
the world is grinding down to shit
with American hands on the lever.

Across the world apartheid reins
a million and a half in the cage
would anyone please try to explain
why we’re on the side of the captors?

Oil slicks the size of nations
set loose by reckless corporations
we have the strength to rein them in
if the politicos weren’t paid-for patsies.

Obama, Osama, who’s worse for your mama?
Who fights the bigger war?
Who takes your rights, privacy, money?
Piece by piece by little piece.

Give up freedom to fight those who would steal your freedom.
Who is the real terrorist here?

One slain in NYC is worth more
than one in Kabul.
Or Baghdad
Gaza or Tehran.

How much more?

A little girl
or a wedding party of dozens
destroyed by remote control.
Is that how to react to terror tactics?

If the one with the gun
to the head of her sister
must shoulder the blame of her actions.
These sister nations all have bloody hands.

Still…

Doesn’t the one who always sides
with violence, funds oppression
courts authoritarianism over freedom
bear the blame a little more?

What if she is the one passing out the guns?
The one with the biggest armies
the most bombs
the biggest stake in the status quo?

Sister America, you’re on the wrong side!
Sister America, you ARE the wrong side.
Sister America, you hold the world against the wall.
Sister America, you must fall.

If we are all to live.

This one will probably get me some heat. Before you react, claiming I hate America, I’m acting unfairly, don’t see this in perspective, use too much hyperbole, realize this – the biggest player in the game (in this case politics) is the one who makes the rules that all others must abide by. Iran, China, Israel, Russia, Britain, everyone must play by American rules right now, because we have the biggest guns and the best capacity to wreck everyone’s day. It’s been this way ever since we took over as global hegemon from the Brits, and will remain this way until another country arises that can take us in a fight. I’m betting on the Indians, honestly.

In this present moment we are the strongest military in the world, and are very open about using that capacity to achieve our goals. It didn’t start with Bush – Clinton bombed and shot cruise missiles at his share of the world – Bush the elder had his Iraq adventure, Reagan his secret wars… it goes back a long while. I would make the argument that we have been at some sort of constant war since the Spanish-American war in 1898! Warfare is our primary means of international relations, of maintaining our position at the top of the hill.

We need war to keep our cheap cars, cheap TVs, cheap oil, low taxes. We’re addicts – to consumption, to abundance, to waste, and to the warfare that underlies it all. We hold the world at gunpoint and reap the resource reward. How else do 5% of the world’s people get to consume 25% of the resources? It isn’t because we’re free and they’re not. It isn’t because we have some god-given right to all this abundance. It’s schoolyard tactics, nothing more – we are the biggest, meanest kid on the playground and until another, bigger kid (or some sort of Karate Kid) comes along to knock us around, we’ll remain atop the dirt pile.

It isn’t just, fair, or equal – lip-service values that every American needs to profess to be taken seriously, but ones unsupported in our nation’s history. Before the ink dried on our Constitution, the revolution was betrayed – equality, liberty, the pursuit of happiness were not, are not, for any except the privileged. Doubt me? We’re suspiciously absent from the French Revolution, leaving Thomas Paine, mother of our country, to rot in jail, and the revolution to fail. Then we funded Napoleon in exchange for land that wasn’t his to give. Haitians were so inspired by our example that they too threw off their colonial masters and became the second republic in the hemisphere – we ignored them then, and have actively worked against their subsequent democratic movements to this day. We massacred a continent’s worth of peoples, destroyed entire cultures, stole homes and lands from every group we came across in our mad rush to the Pacific. At least some of the survivors have casinos now, right?

The Civil War was northern manufacturing against southern agribusiness at the core, with the respective elites of each society vying for influence. The north won out through blockade and systematic destruction of the south’s biggest economic advantage (slave labor) and as history is written by the victors, so did the official account blur out the economic underpinnings and slap on a facade of human rights. Abraham Lincoln put it well – “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.  If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that” War in industrialized society is about power – I can think of very few exceptions, of very few wars where one side at least has not been motivated by gaining power. (Money, land, people being expressions of that power.)

Peering through the lens of costs and benefits, as any good Capitalist ought, America has made spectacularly good returns on her wartime investments. The Mexican-American war, instigated by and pursued almost entirely by the USA, gained us a coast-to-coast empire. The Spanish-American war earned us a global network of naval bases for pennies on the dollar, and sunk one of the world’s faltering empires in the process. We fought a dozen small wars in Central America against weak republics, gaining a century of dominance, control over the Panama Canal Zone, and another resource pipeline from these subject states. In World War One we made our money selling to one side of the conflict, then jumped in to fight the last 6 months against shattered Germany and come out as victors. In World War Two our isolation from the fighting and scorched-earth policies in Europe and Japan led to a stunning victory – a near-monopoly on world manufacturing capacity, and no one to oppose our cultural and economic dominance save devastated Russia. From an investment standpoint, nothing we did before or since can compare with the returns on World War Two. From that conflict we became the world’s imperial master, and every fight since has been a holding action to keep ourselves on top.

The problem is that we’re losing now. We’re broke, owing money to everyone, importing nearly everything. We built up the foreign markets so well that it became profitable to manufacture everything overseas instead of simply importing the resources and making things here. Now we sell knowledge, education, and guns. Lots and lots of guns. We sell them to our allies, to neutral parties, to enemies when it serves some aim or another. We arm the world, in exchange for mountains of cheap goods – an arrangement that has no foreseeable problems or future consequences for anyone. Oh wait, that’s not right… THEY’RE USING THEM AGAINST US?! Who could have seen that coming? The height of folly has been to first drive ourselves into reliance upon far-away colonies, then to build for them the infrastructure and armaments necessary to throw off our yoke. How long before the nations of the world tire of sending us their minerals, their oil, of using their labor to build our entertainment devices? How will we oppose them when they rebel?

It is a cycle in every empire I have ever heard of for the central power to grow and thrive and gain until it is fat, bloated, weak, and dependent on its long-stretched tendrils for survival. At that point another power, be it from within or without, topples the empire and after a period of turmoil and infighting, another power arises somewhere within the system. Looking at the Romans, the Dutch, the Venetians, the Spanish, the Brits, the Russians, and now ourselves – the similarities are there, the biggest difference is our possession of a huge quantity of doomsday weapons. None of the previous dying empires had such a trump card, and as such there is no real precedent to our decline. We’ve certainly gotten more violent, more willing to use torture, assassination, remote-controlled killer drones, undeclared war, accept civilian targets; time will only tell what the American people are willing to accept in order to maintain the social order. If we’ve already accepted torture as necessary, racial profiling and religious violence as means to our ultimate end, and constant war as the way of the world, there is truly no telling what America’s next move is.

We have a situation where any strong, charismatic leader can have near-singular power over the nation, and while Barack Obama is not that leader, can you see the possibility of another him, but stronger and with malicious intent, as leading our country down the path to immolative global war? Certainly the power exists, as do the means – it remains to see whether the American people will demand their leaders take the sensible route – laying down the motorcycle, as it may be – or will continue our collective push toward totalitarian annihilation – and run us all face-first into the brick wall.

This is why I urge America to fall from our high mount – we cannot sustain it without destroying all we once held dear. There can be no American empire without slave labor and an owner class, without the rescission of freedoms, without constant violence to put down unrest, without surveillance and police state; without becoming the very sort of evil empire we portray ourselves as fighting against in film and popular culture. The transition will be rough, surely – perhaps it will be the greatest challenge of the American people, to put this out-of-control machine to rest – but only by acknowledging our internal problems and the fundamentally inconsistent manner in which we live our lives. We will come out of it stronger albeit poorer, and the whole world will benefit.

It begins, however, with us. With this generation. We must stop taking the prosperity for granted, stop charging our lives on credit cards, stop supporting the very things that hold us in this perilous position. Our food must come to us down traceable routes. Our power must come from sustainable sources. Our basic necessities must be produced locally, within a day’s travel preferably, if we are to stop relying on foreign powers with no interest in our well-being. We cannot live sustained on oil and corn (really, more oil) and propped up by our military power. Stop supporting the financial industry that owns our government, stop voting the same corrupt politicians into office, in fact stop voting and start participating. There is no substitute for a good angry protest in terms of inciting change. It is foolish to believe that pacifism and inaction, blog posts and angry letters will ever change the world so well as taking on your elected figures in person. This country was designed so that the highest authority would be the people, but it is run as if the only ones that matter are those with the money and influence to drive events directly. Does this stem from “them” corrupting the process, or is it because we have stopped caring, dropped out, and chained ourselves to TV, microwave dinner, iEverything, stable wage-slavery? When did you last take any action to better your society?

Every people have the government they deserve. Our ancestors faced harder problems than we do today, and came out better. If we wish, as a people, to survive and prosper, then it remains our responsibility to do so. No elected official, no president or congressman, can do that for you. No vote will ever change the world. If we want to leave a world, a country worth living in to our children, then it remains our responsibility to push for that. The status quo is unsustainable. The center will not hold.

I welcome any commentary, but please be prepared to back it up.

There’s a Fundamental Misunderstanding Here

It begins, as it usually does, with a question – an innocuous one at that.  People have asked me a dozen, a hundred times in the 6 weeks I’ve been home, a few thousand before I left, and nowadays it usually comes after I’ve told them some crazy story of my adventures, a love story or an escape, a hike into the jungle or a profound truth revealed to me by dire straits.

“That’s really cool man – I’m happy for you… (pregnant pause) so what are you going to do with your future?”

It’s an awful question.  It’s a terrible question.  Most of all it’s a loaded question, one where nothing I say can be both true on the one hand, and accepted well on the other.  It doesn’t even matter who asks – the answer isn’t going to satisfy you unless you’re the sort of person who would know better than to ask.  Still, I like to think I’m a pretty honest guy, and if someone goes through the motions of asking me a question, I’ll do my best to answer it.  So here’s that – my best answer to that apparently burning question of what the hell I’m doing with my life.

I do whatever feels right at the time.

That’s seriously it – I just do whatever I judge to be the best possible action at any given junction.  No grand scheme, no hopes of running the world, no desire to micromanage the universe – I’ve seen and tried enough of that to know it doesn’t work well at accomplishing what I want out of life, because all I really want is to feel happy, fulfilled, and like I’m making a positive difference in the world I inhabit.  This isn’t something I came to out of choice – it just happens that whenever I try to make plans they blow up in my face and leave me worse off than before I started.  This is my reaction, my defense against the great unknown and the greater known – I observe the world, learn what I can, and act as I believe is in my best interest – there’s no end goal aside from doing my best to be my best wherever and whenever the universe throws me.  I mean, so many people are terrified of what they can’t control or foresee, and a lot of that comes from these intricate, well-intentioned plans that people build up.  They don’t work because we can’t possibly plan for every unknown, and when things go wrong and work against our best intentions we have to work harder just to get back to where we wanted to be.   Given enough hurt, enough bad juju, and a long enough timespan, it becomes a colossal effort just striving toward equilibrium.  Thus, the fear – change means adapting the plan, and think of how much effort has gone into that brilliant shining hope!  Keeping the perfect lie alive has become more important than finding satisfaction in reality!

I don’t even want equilibrium.   I equate that with stasis, with decay and with death.  The only way I’ve ever found to keep living is to keep mobile, roll with the punches, enjoy every drop, every instant of my life without getting so attached that I’m unable to function when it comes down on my head.  It’s survival – basic evolution – as life changes we must adapt along with it or perish as we’re left behind.   Every form of life, every idea, everything  that exists must adapt to stay relevant to the matrix of reality that envelops us.  To stop is to become irrelevant, to be cast aside in favor of another who keeps adapting.  A few hundred years it was kosher to duel to the death over an insult, a generation ago it was acceptable to test nuclear weapons in the open atmosphere, a century ago we were overwhelmingly a planet of farmers, twenty years ago the coolest kids around had pagers or car phones – everything changes, and that change is accelerating.  The faster it spins, mutates, evolves, the less stock I put into making any sort of plan – where’s the relevancy?

How many times have you seen someone clearly left behind by the world around them?  A person tied emotionally, financially, or otherwise to a reality that no longer exists isn’t uncommon – I think that most people upon reaching a certain age lose their ability to adapt, settle for whatever satisfies that them in that moment, and spend the rest of their existence fighting against the irresistible current of change to hold onto their past joys.  It doesn’t matter if their chosen path becomes untenable, self-destructive, or even impossible, these people will forever fight to grasp onto that which once fulfilled them.  They’ll die before they change.  The old woman who refuses to drive because that just isn’t done can survive just fine so long as she has a child, husband, or neighbor around to help her or her mobility is good enough.  The same woman, if she loses these advantages, must adapt or starve to death in her house.  Likewise fucked is the holdout against a government Eminent Domain plan to build another bloody bypass – sure, the world has a whole lot of bypasses, sure I can lie down in front of the bulldozers all day, but when it comes down to the wire you’ll get stuck in the mud and run over one day, and even if you don’t the goddam Vogons will just blow up the whole planet to build an interplanetary bypass anyway, so why not grab your towel, fire up the sub-etha Sens-o-matic and just hitch a ride into the stars – it sure beats extinction.  That which does not adapt, which does not change, will find itself outdated, useless, and dead before its time.

Let’s bring it back to the question at hand – what am I going to do with my future?

The way I see it we balance on the precipice, a cliff down into the mist on one side, a jagged body-strewn drop-off on the other.  There’s so much changing, so much shifting and sliding, exploding, rebuilding, dying, reviving, that I’m going to do the only thing that makes any sense at all to me – I’ll walk the razor’s edge, between unknown danger on the one hand and the known I consider worse on the other.  I’ll keep my footing solid, my spirits high, and try to recruit the best companions I can along the way, but as far as where I’m going… well, that’s a question best answered by the path I travel.  I don’t know what comes next, but so long as I keep doing my best along the way, staying happy, smart, flexible, strong, then I’ll find myself where I was supposed to be all along.

It has worked out pretty damn well so far, and I see little chance of that changing in the future.  With the world changing as fast as it is, it’s really a matter of choosing which potential future you want to prepare for, and while I’m not ready to throw my hat in with the canned-food and ammo collectors yet, I do think they have a better grasp on reality than the dumbfucks going into finance degrees hoping to make a fortune screwing the rest of us out of our inheritance.  It’s a matter of faith more than anything else – why invest so much effort into the ether?  Please, don’t ask me what my plans are for the future, because if I’ve learned one thing it’s that anything I promise gets wrecked up real fast.  I work better without the self-imposed chains, have enough of those anyway, and I don’t know what tomorrow holds.  You don’t either, and I reckon I’m better at living on the road, on the ground, in the shit than most of you are.

It’s evolution, dear Watson – why do you think there are so many rats and roaches and so few cute fuzzy panda bears?  You can have you high-falutin’ life map, your 5-year plan, your career and your mortgage and pension.  I’ll keep my eyes and mind open, my baggage minimal, and take whatever I can scrape by on.  Call it a waste of life, but don’t get offended when I laugh at those dull echoing words, and don’t be afraid either – living in the moment is as easy as saying “yes” to the next unexpected idea, starting a conversation with the next interesting stranger.  It’s quitting a job you hate but are working because the money is good, it’s not settling for the things you’re expected to have that don’t make you happy.

What will I do with my life?  Whatever works in the moment, because you never know which moment will be your last.

Make every moment count.

Confession

From my notebook, 2-2-10:

I confess that I have lived. That I have been. That I have seen. I confess that I have done. That I have laughed, and cried, and run. I confess, that I am me, and I am real, and I can see. I confess that this is true, and ask – not forgiveness – but that all might try to do as me. -k

And then some phone pictures:

The Fight

You look at me

as if I’m weak

because I run instead

of fight.

The truth is that

instead of hurt us both

I choose to take

the blame

the hit, the hurt,
Absorb it all, roll with

the punch.

Just wish you knew

how much I care

and die, so that you won’t.

Love Stories in Stolen Glances

Wrote this in the airport in Panama City – I have no idea who she is, never will – that’s the beauty of it, I wager.

Love stories in stolen glances

lost souls star crossed

scruffy bum rebel,

your cause – what became of it?

You’ve let it run wild

like hair

like life

just how you like it.

She’s speaking French now,

lying on a bench

sunglasses on

hidden in plain site

drab scenery

plane sight.

You’re staring boy

she catches you

a smile

a wink

Two bored

to board.

Boarding call.

She’s gone

and think of what

in that instant you saw:

hopping planes

fleeing free

Anything, everything

a perfect runaway life.

silly rebel boy –

love stories like that

only work in bad poetry.

Barstool Jockey

There are some things you can’t talk to people about unless they already have experienced something similar. Actually, there are a lot of these things, and generally all of the people who have gone through them agree on the salient points. Find a group of young mothers and ask them about the experience of childbirth. Meet a group of former alcoholics and listen to their tales of quitting. Talk with some paragliders, or some surfers, or some X sport enthusiasts, and marvel at how much they all seem to agree on things related to that activity. Repeat ad nauseum.

Then there are travelers. They all have had wonderful experiences, incredible adventures, and shitlow days where nothing seemed worth a damn. Pretty much every one I’ve ever met has expressed their heartfelt desire to do as much traveling, wandering, exploring as they can in this life, and how they can’t wait for the next town/country/trip. None of them want to have a career, relationship, or situation that interferes with their wanderlust, at least “not yet.” Nothing is so important, so drawing, so engrossing as this crazy lifestyle they’re all stuck in, and it’s a secret that none of those poor working stiffs at home will ever understand because they just haven’t been here, haven’t felt this.

Then the travelers all go home, get steady jobs, fall in love, and get married. They pop out kids, take out a mortgage, buy a car, and they’re set in a completely different orbit. It’s like a rite of passage – go out there, see that there’s an alternative to the life you led, live it, love it, be changed forever, swear to never go back and get stuck, then go back and get stuck. Oh, and tell your stories – the ones that mean so much, the ones that shaped your entire life – to a bunch of people who will not get it, will never be quite able to understand what the fuck you’re talking about, nor why you keep telling the same tales over and over as the worry lines spread, as the drinks come one after another after another. Former travelers and bar stools seem well acquianted – like strippers and dollar bills, like rice and beans.

Not surprisingly I have no real desire, even at this late hour, to become another barstool jockey with that old fire dying. I’m sure I could settle down, get a respectable job, and start slowly dying – if I’m not careful, that’s less possible and more inevitable. It takes a lot of work to remain free and mobile. The thing is, there’s no profit in freedom, adventure, rabble-rousing, or doing anything that don’t sell other things. There’s a way for me to fund my travels, probably forever – travel writing, hawking bracelets or artwork or small gizmos to tourists – but I can’t be fucked with to do that, because to me those things are just a different level of the same soul-salesmanship that epitomizes modern existence.

How much is your life worth? That’s the real question being asked when you look for a job, and answered whenever you accept a paycheck or do anything for profit. How much am I willing to sell a chunk of my existence for? For most of us, that isn’t much. When I worked in Honduras, it was $5 a day, plus a bed in a concrete hovel and three squares. In Guatemala about $200 a month and all the leftovers and booze I could sneak. Was I happy with it? No, not really. Not when I thought about it. Thing is, I didn’t think about it much because the other rewards of my life – being in amazing cities, swimming in phosphorescent seas, watching volcanoes erupt from my rooftop and living in foreign lands surrounded by amazing strangers – all made up for the shit pay, and on top of that, life was cheap as dirt. The ability to leave town right now, no notice beyond “I quit”, no more time required than packing a backpack and walking to the bus terminal – none of those hurt either.

Now I’m back stateside and the question looms but the answer is going to be a little more problematic. The rub is that I’m losing every perk – the sense of adventure, the foreign travelers, the ability to tell my future boss to shove this job up his ass as I walk. I’m facing a looming mountain of credit card debt, an awful job market in a city I’ve never really enjoyed living in, and I’m going to lose my biggest advantage, which was being from a far-off land surrounded as all of the foreign travelers and locals that sustained me through the rough times. In Central America everything about me was as exotic, wild, and different as I wanted it to be. My flight and inability to stay put were seen as assets – my refusal to put up with bullshit jobs, my dirty clothes and scruffy look were all admirable to those around me. I was desired, looked up to, praised for my lifestyle. Once I get home I’m nothing – just another post-college bum, broke and hungry, with an awful resume and a useless college degree. Stories and adventures aren’t looked too highly upon here. To say I’m not looking forward to it would be like saying cattle going into the meat factory weren’t much looking forward to the future either.

That’s why I’m think about that former traveler, lined, resigned, fire dead inside, sitting quietly on his barstool. In the near future I’ll be him, unless I’m careful. It shouldn’t be so god damned difficult to live without selling yourself, without giving up your values, hopes, and dreams for a dollar. Especially when that dollar is just going toward the things you need to live.

Who really profits, when it comes down to it? Those business executives, the ones everyone hates for their massive salaries and crazy bonuses are working 100 hours a week straight from school to heart attack, going through their divorces, never seeing their children until they plop over spent and dead. They’re not winning. The burger cooks and maids and strawberry pickers get the shit hours, the family problems, the health destroyed, and don’t even have the pay to show for it – they’re definitely not coming out on top. What about the guy in the middle? He’s working all day, gets his two weeks off, might even be able to skip out of town to go skiing once in a while. Still, he’s underwater on his mortgage, going further in to pay for little Jimmie or Juanita’s college in a couple years, doesn’t get to see the piano recital or the ballgame, and is one paycheck or a broken muffler from falling into poverty. I don’t see him coming out on top either.

Perhaps the guy doing best is the one sitting on a street corner in ragged clothes, singing to himself as he watches everyone rush off to their deaths. He might be the only one who sees the joke. I mean, people are GIVING him free money sometimes, pitying glances, and he’s the only one free to do as he pleases – it would make Kafka smile. Sure, he’s never going to have the nice vacation home, he’ll never get to visit the fancy restaurants, and he certainly won’t make the “25 most influential people of 2010” but have you seen how much Barack Obama has died in a year? The man has aged a decade and a half since he began running for the office! Every action has a price, every movement, everything we do – I’m halfway, barely joking about the bums profiting most from society being as it is. What use is there in having so much, so many nice things, if you spend all of the best parts of your life striving for more, for better, so that you can spend the dimming years in relative, threadbare comfort?

Why not just live yourself ragged, die a few decades earlier, and have something beautiful to show for it? A successful shoe company? A lifetime sales award? Employee of the month? A BMW and a stamp collection? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! What use is any of that, what value can it possibly bring you? A poem written on a torn-off piece of a cardboard box has more value in it than any of those things. A kiss at sunrise on a rooftop – priceless. The look a girl gives you as you help her pick up the spilled items from her purse is worth more than any CEO’s pay can buy. There is nothing good, nothing valuable, nothing helpful that comes from the work 99.9% of us do, and yet we all carry on, all push ahead, so that we keep consuming, multiplying, dividing.

Isn’t that what a cancer does? Pushes on ahead, grows, spreads, regardless of the health of the organism or of the system? Perhaps human society has gone cancerous. Perhaps we’re not good any more, have become the very root of the problem. Granted, we need to survive, but does DSL cable, fast food hamburgers, or suburban sprawl really even out against the destruction necessary for any of it? You can’t have modern America if you don’t have modern Haiti – the two must coexist or neither can. Sub-Saharan Africa, for all her woes, is the Siamese twin of Los Angeles, Beijing, and Rio. Those of us on the upper end don’t see it much, but every excess, every luxury we have comes from somewhere else – somewhere there are children starving so that kids in America can eat greasy french fries. This is a zero-sum game, just like selling your time for money, but at much larger scale.

There is X amount of Oil, Y amount of water, Z amount of arable farmland. Every resource has a true value balanced against a limited quantity, and that reality of limits must factor into any discussion of worth. If we factored in the true cost of burning one gallon of the only fossil fuels we have, fossil fuels that cannot be replaced, do you think it would really cost $3.50 a gallon? $10 a gallon? Give me a break – how much do you think the last gallon of oil will sell for? The same can be said of clean water, just look at the water wars that Bolivians were going through a couple years back! Likewise for everything on the planet – at a certain level there is a finite quantity of everything we depend on, because we only have this planet as yet – until we start mining the universe for raw materials, that is a fact.

If we were smart we’d start thinking about what we really need to survive – not video games, not new clothes, not the latest iFuckstick – food, water, shelter, power, medicines, community. Those are things we really, truly need, and so of course those are the things that have such ridiculously suppresed values. Growing food isn’t glamorous, doesn’t pay well, and so nobody even knows where their dinner comes from. It’s cheaper to import it – labor from Central America, off-season foods from the Southern Hemisphere. The true cost of growing a tomato in Chile, packing it in a box, shipping it to the US, and then selling it to me in the middle of NYC should include the environmental impact of every step, just like the true price of one hour working in that dead-end sales job ought include the one hour less you have alive. Why doesn’t it?

For starters, such a revaluation would blow the shit out of everyone’s investments – what sane person would buy a house in the suburbs if gas sold for its real value? Who would ever work at or support one of those big-box superstores? Nobody. The US economy would collapse as the service sector was seen as the useless circlejerk that it is, and the world economy would follow. There wouldn’t be a market for luxury goods if we were serious about saving resources. There would be no fall fashion, no seasonal sales to pump up the numbers. There would rations – life would become a whole lot poorer, dirtier, labor-intensive. The US would have to stop consuming 25% of what the world consumes in a year. Things would be a whole lot less routine, and we’d have to start living as if our actions actually meant a damn thing. A lot could change, and to say it would unpredictable is an understatement at the very least.

That would be uncomfortable. That would be scary. Thus, everyone with a vested interest in the current order of things – be that a house, a fat 401k, or just a truck and an apartment in the city – has a stake in things staying as they are now. Or at least, that’s how it appears on the surface. The guys in the nice seats in front class, with beverage service and the hot air stewardesses have every reason in maintaining the current system right up until the airplane nosedives into the ground. Almost everyone in the US fits that metaphor – we’ll be doing great right up until our brains go through the ass of the guy in front of us. If we were smart, if we were looking ahead, if we thought about what we were really doing, we’d probably all sell our cars and plant a garden, or move off to a place less utterly dependant on scarce resources and imports. I’m not holding my breath…

The wizened old traveler slumps forward on his stool, the glass nearly empty in front of him. The barkeep, a fresh looking kid from another country, stands polishing a glass in front of him. “Another mack?” A shake of his head nearly sends the sodden chap onto the floor. “No thanks – I’ve had too many. We’ve all had one too many.” The bar is nearly empty now, the few remaining patrons all in shit shape and on their way out.

“Say man, whatever happened that stopped you from doing all that crazy traveling you talk about? It seems like you really loved what you were doing, and if you’re still talking about it now, you must regret giving it up.”

“I didn’t give it up – it ended because it had to. There’s not really any way to sustain that sort of life unless you’re born rich or get lucky and inherit some dough. That’s part of the tragedy of it all – you find this life, so beautiful, so rich, so utterly fulfilling and free, and then you have to go back to another one that you don’t agree with, that you hate even. You swear you’re only going to work until you can get out, until you can save up a bit and blow this joint, that you’ll never give in, that you’ll never sell out like all the other suckers.” A tilt of the glass, and it’s empty now.

“So what happened?”

“Same thing that happens to everyone. I fell in love, got stuck in the job. Once I had a kid I wasn’t going anywhere soon, and then the years just fly by with the drink. Now – shit. I don’t think I’d even know how to travel like I used to. You won’t find me wearing a backpack and hitchhiking, that’s for sure.”

“Pretty tragic.”

“You can say that again.”

“Pretty tragic.”

“Hah, fuck off! I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

“Take care of yourself out there.”

The old man staggers out, pauses with a hand on the doorframe and slowly turns back over his shoulder. “You think you’re different, that you’re young, and you’re smart, and you won’t fall into the same traps I did. You might be right, but if you’re going to succeed you need to be relentless – to follow what you want even when it doesn’t make any sense, even when it goes against everything your friends and family say, even when it nearly kills you. Eventually, it will kill you – doesn’t matter what it is, it will eventually knock you down and you won’t get up that time. Just make sure that whatever kills you is worthwhile. That’s the only way you won’t waste your life.”

And with that he’s gone, out the door into the misty night. The young bartender shakes his head, wipes another glass, and smiles to himself. Life goes on, and there’s work he needs to do. Why worry about the ramblings of washed-up old men?

The Daydream

I’ll spend a lot of time missing this if I’m not careful – lying in a hammock, music in my ears, banana trees swaying softly off my right, beautiful mountain vista ahead. I could, and some days do, spend hours upon hours lying here in silence, thinking, dreaming, letting mind and body wander freely. It’s not something I was used to before this life, but now I question how I ever went without it. A break, siesta, a time for me, my needs, my wants, for my spirit to rest and recover. It fits so well with everything, and yet I know it will interfere with a more traditional American life – who takes an hour break after lunch these days? Only hippies, weirdos, and other dangerous sorts, I’d wager. It’s a pity too, because after a short lounge I find myself a whole lot more motivated and ready to face the world! Well, face this world anyway – I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to face that other one again.

What sort of world is this? Well, here’s today – wake up before anyone, yoga on a big flat rock overlooking the city below, playing with the ants and practicing my balance, then a cup of strong coffee and another of fresh orange juice. We fly midmorning to just past noon, playing on the thermals with the chulos (vultures) then drive back up to the launch site house where we all live for coffee, tea, or beers depending on who you are. I cook something easy – beans, onions, peppers, and perhaps a couple eggs – while the rest of the family takes off to eat at a little comedor in town. I’m broke past any sense of a budget, and I can cook 4 or 10 meals for the same cost as anything I can get down there. Plus, cooking is meditation. Eat, hook up the computer for some tunes, then it’s hammock time, writing, reading, or napping.

After watching the clouds a bit and relishing in the pure joy of a life lived simply, we’ll fly again around 4 or 5:00, wind depending. Some days it rains and we’re grounded, others we soar for hours, riding the ridges up and down – it’s magical, almost, with the almost coming in whenever my lack of experience leaves me in a shit spot, fighting for altitude and space, hoping not to crash into a tree. With a dozen flights and the nickname “K of the Jungle” one might say I’m not doing so well on that last part. Still, it’s a beautiful sport, and I’m finally living a lifelong dream of flight – no engine, no enclosure, just me, wing, and sky. It’s exactly what I’ve always wanted, and I can feel this sport taking over my life already – I want nothing more then to learn to see the wind like the expert gliders can, to make the whole world my playground, to get into the air and soar like an eagle.

Nights we spend alternatingly crashing into tire walls at the Go-kart track in town or sitting around drinking and telling stories. The Canadian friends have their wild flying tales, Alex her scuba stories, Jake the crazy Alaskan his entire life, and I my hitchhiking and bad decisions. It’s a great group, conversation flows with the shit talking, ebbs with the early night. By ten or a bit most people have retreated to bed, and those of us remaining shift to late-night email on the cranky wifi, or just sit out and watch the skies. I try to end my night by pissing off the cliffside launch, inky blackness over the neon city. It’s primal, the feeling of power that comes from such a stupid act., but you won’t catch me complaining. After that, with the world seething awake below but my tiny corner fast asleep, there isn’t much to do aside pass out, and dream of another day the same as the last.

My question really is this – how can I spend as much of my life doing exactly this? There must be some way, be it working at a launch site, bank robbery, or inheriting some grandiose fortune, where I can live like this forever, right? I don’t feel I’m looking for too much – just a bit of peace, quiet, and good company. Given those, I think I could live quite happily. The only parts that trip me up are the debt, the needs of others, the gossamer strands of past that still yank across distance, time, and space. I’m not truly free of their world, much as I try to hide and deny it – I still need filthy lucre, still must contribute something of “value” in order to live, and believe me, writing, poetry, advice, companionship, and camaraderie are grossly undervalued in this economy, unless you’re telling people what they want to hear. No, truthfulness doesn’t sell, doesn’t satisfy, doesn’t get you ahead – if I could just get more into lying and conniving and scheming I could probably be filthy rich enough to do anything I want!

Yet I’d be miserable then, because the ends quite clearly do not justify the means. If I want to be a writer, to create something beautiful, then a trashy novel will not suffice regardless of how well it sells. I could be a therapist, tell the richest of rich twats what they want to hear about themselves, be a friend-for-hire, but that won’t make me happy if I want to be the best confidante I can. Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig blissful in shit. Better to live by and die doing what I consider irreplaceably valuable than to cower before the painful difficulties that keep most people trapped in lives they do not want. No, I cannot bow before the altar of global capitalism, cannot suck off the golden teat, because the source is something I cannot agree with, and as such, I’ll always have to live around the edges.

Perhaps then, it is best that the things I’m interested in are so marginalized – hitchhiking, paragliding, camping, living in hostels and on beaches and mountains. For me, and for those who feel like me, the margins of society are the best bits. We don’t have to hide here, conform to social pressures to act, live, breathe, behave a certain way. We don’t have to pretend we’re like the unhappy people we’ve been trying to get away from in the first place. We don’t have to guard ourselves, swallow our desires, keep mouths clamped tight to avoid offending people who don’t know any of the things they hold like precious truth. How do you know I’d be better off if I lived like you? You don’t know I was dying when I tried that, you don’t even know me anyway! No, best to get away from that, to stay up here, out there, far from the great vacuum of suck in the middle.

There’s nothing in the center, no value, no soul, no heart, nothing! This isn’t to say that there’s no value in finding your own personal center, no, quite the opposite – what I’m trying to convey is that the supposed middle ground isn’t what they say it is. If I try to be all things to all people, what am I truly left as? I become a chameleon, a poltergeist, a shadow then, representing nothing, holding nothing, not being me, and at that point I have become meaningless. Like pop art, like the music on the top-40s station, like television commercials and the people in movies – I’ll have become just more meaningless drivel, oatmeal for the toothless man. I’m not bland enough, not flexible enough, not stupid or weak enough for that – I actually care about life, live like it means something. My values make me strong, not weak. I am not a coward or an idiot when I say that I will not help destroy the world to propagate one species – my position isn’t based on hysteria or fear or misinformation – I just happen to like the natural world and know that paving it over will eventually kill us as certainly as we kill it.

Yet the pavement spreads, and the fields shrink, the fences go up and the wild world slides down, down, down into the shit. The garbage dump fills day by day, the packs of SUVs roam the concrete jungles, as the real jungles burn, and the packs of real animals are devoured by the mechanical ones. When are we going to have enough? When there isn’t enough left to grow any further? When the world can’t sustain us? What then? It’s madness to build your society around production with the goal of more production when your space and resource pools are both limited. What happens to all the cars when there isn’t any more gasoline, and we can’t make enough fertilizer? Who gets to eat and drive then, and who doesn’t and must die? Am I out of line for noting that we’re going to have to make that decision sometime soon? That we’re making it now? Do we kill the African so that the American can keep driving another few years? We’ve certainly decided that Iraqis and Afghans must forfeit their lives when it suits us!

We have the biggest guns right now, so at the moment these decisions remain ours, but what happens when the people who finance our wars see their interests splitting from our own? The Chinese won’t be content to sit and let us run the world forever, you know? Certainly not while they have us by the balls, producing everything we use, buying our ever-ballooning debt – whenever they’re ready, that bill comes due, and then who makes the decisions? The next biggest gunslinger, and after that the next, and the next, and the next, until someone with the wrong values and his finger on the trigger starts seeing the appeal of mass nuclear warfare. Perhaps I exaggerate, or maybe I don’t understand humans, but I don’t see anyone in power giving it up willingly! No, as the resources dry up, as the starvation and disease and desperation of poverty grip white people instead of only brown ones in far away lands, then the leaders will be pressed – protect us, save us, coddle us, keep us safe. I don’t want to be around when that happens.

The best solution then, as I see it, is not to play – don’t try to get ahead, don’t try to beat them at their own games, don’t fight the crushing hand of dying empire. Emigration seems better, to a place with real communities and people who know their neighbors. A place like here, on the mountaintops, away from the cities, away from the crush and consumption that can’t go on forever. And it can’t go on forever – don’t pretend at such thoughts, comforting as they are. When the oil runs out, when the ships can’t sail around the world, when the trucks full of groceries can’t make it to the supermarket, as the combine sits rusting in fields laid fallow for lack of fertilizer, where will you be then? I hope I’ll remember times like these, the ease, the convenience, the extraordinary complexity that makes life seem so simple.

At least there will still be hammocks, open porches, and banana trees – perhaps if we’re smart we can keep the paragliders around. Actually, this is not a bad place to be in such a time, since the people here still remember life without modern clutter, can still cook and grow crops and work with their hands. Where the average American would be staggered by the thought of growing their own food, the Colombians still have their gardens and orchards, still have the open land and knowledge to feed themselves, the animals to work with, and the community spirit necessary to make such projects succeed. They still know the value of lying back and dreaming, of thinking forward toward what may come instead of rushing blindly toward it, phone to ear, steering with their knees as they eat their fast food. Perhaps here they won’t hit the wall, will slow in time. I just wish I had the same trust in the United States, and in the people there.

Until then, this is my siesta, my stream of consciousness, my worry, my goal, and now I need only to find a way from here to there and back to here. There’s a lot to get to know – sustainable farming, building without depleting scarce resources, community governance in the face of societal collapse, how to play the harmonica, much more about medicine, plumbing, renewable power sources – the list goes for days, but at least I’m getting started! I’d advise others to think about what they’re capable of doing without fossil fuels, without factory food, without the resources and conveniences of industry – they can’t last forever, that’s just a brutal truth you’re going to have to accept! If we don’t have some new fuel source, new pile of resources, new reality-changing moment, then this lifestyle is not sustainable, and we’re going to have to live without most of what we take for granted today. Where will you be? What will you want to keep around? What do you know how to do?

Do you see why I’m going to treasure these moments in the hammock?