More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 1 - May 12, 2020
I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning. It forces your childlike self back into action. When you are a kid, everything is new. You don’t know what’s under each rock, or up the creek. So, you look. You notice because you need to. The world is new.
But as you get older, and the patterns become more obvious, time speeds up. Especially once you find your groove in the working world. The layout of your days becomes predictable, a routine, and once your brain reliably knows what’s next, it reclines and closes its eyes. Time pours through your hands like sand.
travel has a way of shaking the brain awake. When I’m in a new place, I don’t know what’s next, even if I’ve read all the guidebooks and followed the instructions of my friends. I can’t know a smell until I’ve smelled it. I can’t know the feeling of a New York street until I’ve walked it. I can’t feel the hot exhaust of the bus by reading about it. I can’t understand the humility of walking beneath those giant buildings. I can’t smell the food stands and the cologne and the spilled coffee.
This mixture of school and risk is the holy cocktail of American ideals, and for those rare beacons of exceptional success, it turns their life stories into fables. But for ordinary folks, it is a difficult road to walk. Be sensible, but be wild. Be ordered, but be free. Be responsible, but take risks.
But that’s what happens when you become a mother. You become the things that drove you crazy as a kid.
On a long, straight stretch, he pulled back next to me and wanted to talk. “Think we could get our trip sponsored?” he asked. “By who, like a company?” “Yeah. You’re writing about it. I can write about it, and I think a lot of people want to do what we’re doing. We could get a bike company or a camping company to give us money.” “That’s not a bad idea. But how? Do you know anyone?” “I’ve made pitch decks before, in my New York life. That would be rad.” “I thought you didn’t believe in money?” I smiled as I said it. “It’s not that I don’t believe in it. I want to dethrone it. Money is a
...more
Miguel got me thinking about how strange it is to be born in a country whose influence has spread around the world like an infestation. The world’s hunger to speak English is emblematic of this. Some cultures welcome our films, television, and music, or feel drawn by the prospect of money and power. Others resist. Either way, my culture is the most dominant on the planet, and I benefit from that.
I enjoyed feeling like this. But it wasn’t pure. It wasn’t contemplative. It was survival. It was heat and simplicity.
Nostalgia for my life in California progressed to the point where all of the imperfections, all of the things that sent me on this trip—my dream of a free life, of self-discovery and adventure, of doing hard things and writing about them, of bucking the system and being wild—evaporated. Home seemed like paradise, so fulfilling and lush. How foolish was I to want to leave it? All to go on some stupid, vacuous, self-absorbed man adventure.
(This, in my opinion, is why so many gay people turn to art, music, fashion, or comedy. As the world around them grows hostile, their spirit becomes obsessed with the meaning of it all. Straight people, finding the world designed to suit them, don’t need to explore its meaning in quite the same way. But gay people don’t have that luxury. We must study it, dissect it, reject it, or reshape it. We do this with the thing that was rejected: our heart.)
I remember a big kid named Geoff Warner stood over me in eighth grade and said, “You’re a faggot.” In retrospect, I kind of like the way kids insult one another. There is rarely any cleverness. Just raw reportage.
In modern Mexico, and through most of Latin America, both the original cultures and the conquests of imperial Catholicism are still everywhere apparent. Maybe that’s why I sensed in Mexico that people see their past more soberly. They seemed to hold pride and shame in the same hand.
I was also reminded of what I was looking for. A shaking-off of that film over my body I feel at home. Of confusion. Of self-loathing. Of constriction. I had to peel it back and see myself clean of what I had been told.
You know someone best by traveling with them. When someone is outside their comfort zone, when they are hungry or exhausted, and when money is involved, you see the sides of them that are often covered up in social niceties.
what scaffolding inside me had been knocked away. I thought about Weston’s worldliness, his rugged edges, his impurity. He carried a cloak of wisdom, covered in dirt.
We played the “actor game” for miles and miles. This is where you say a movie, then I say an actor in that movie, then you say another movie that actor was in, then you say another actor in the new movie, and the chain continues until someone is stumped. Annabelle’s movie knowledge made her impossible to beat.
We called this the movie game in college and I was the undisputed champion!
In two hours that day, five or six thousand unarmed men were murdered. Not one Christian was killed. Of the massacre at Cajamarca, a proud Spaniard later wrote, “Truly, it was not accomplished by our own forces for there were so few of us. It was by the grace of God, which is great.”
I was sick and tired of all the poverty. I felt bad for the thousands of souls that lived in mud. But the charm wore off, and I knew I could bike away and enjoy my good fortune of being born white in the world’s richest country.
Our interconnected world. Humans carrying diseases, coughing and perhaps carrying death with them, unaware, to every corner of the globe.
