More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 16 - May 20, 2021
I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine.
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.
But 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.
If you were a suburban kid like me, you probably grew up in a school system that wants you to go to college and choose a major and go straight into a job and a marriage and a mortgage. It gives you rungs of achievement: a degree, a wife, a house, kids, golf—whatever—and makes you think these things give life meaning. “Collect them all and win!”
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.
Do what you love, but stay on the assembly line. There’s no time to find what you love, you should be building your credit score. Take risks, but don’t be foolish. Believe in yourself, but only if you’ve proven you should. Haven’t you seen those idiots auditioning on American Idol, thinking they can sing? Don’t be one of them. Don’t embarrass yourself. Don’t waste time at a job you hate, but magically manifest money to leave that job and chase a dream. Got it? Perfect.
And don’t feel stuck if you choose one thing. You can try it and choose something else later.”
Each choice I made began to feel more and more final, as if every choice was the death of all the others.
This is the story of that panic and my response to it. I’d done everything right. I’d spent my twenties going to college and law school and getting a job and being a good boy. But when I turned thirty, I quit my job and spent a year and a half bicycling from Oregon to Patagonia. It wasn’t the job that chased me away, it was mortality.
We have a policy of no more than three exclamation points in any e-mail. And you have five in your greeting of ‘hello!!!!!’ That’s not acceptable.” She wasn’t joking.
I looked back on my twenties and realized that every time there was a crossroads, I took the first and safest path. I did just what was expected of me, or what I needed to do to escape pain or confusion.
When you don’t know what to do, you travel. You go out and see. You have to rattle the bed, shake yourself out.
“Don’t plan too much,” he wrote. “You can’t assume that a map tells the truth in Central and South America. Just know that you need to make it forty to sixty miles south on each travel day. Trust the locals. Ask the people you meet what’s the best way to go. The most beautiful. Let the place tell you where it wants you to go. The worst thing you can do is assume you know now what you’ll know then. And don’t let anyone else dictate your trip for you. If you want to take a bus sometimes, take a bus. If you need to hitchhike, hitchhike. It’s your trip, not anyone else’s. If you try to be too
...more
By thirty, I had learned a valuable lesson: You are not an idiot. It’s okay if you don’t know everything. Don’t pretend. Ask all the questions you want. It’s fine if you’re not prepared for the zombie apocalypse at all times.
But that’s what happens when you become a mother. You become the things that drove you crazy as a kid. It’s the way God made it. To humble us, I think.”
What if my absence revealed that I was never really necessary? What if no one notices I’m gone?
I calculate exactly how many hours I can sleep if I get to bed in fifteen minutes, or in an hour. The calculation makes me feel like I’m in control.
theory of waking up my senses and slowing down time was proving true. Those days had stretched into ages, my mind so awake that every foot of every mile was noticed and relished.
That’s why I love looking at old maps, the ones with misjudged proportions and large sections labeled “UNKNOWN.”
“Back in the forties, fifties, sixties, everyone was hitchhiking everywhere. My dad hitched from Florida to New York and back a bunch of times. What changed was the news cycle. Back in the day, if someone was hurt or attacked in Maine, the people in Los Angeles never heard a word of it, so the sense of safety was only learned organically. National news made people in Boston fear what was happening in Phoenix. It’s the same with people locking their doors in their neighborhoods and not letting their kids play in the woods. It’s no more dangerous now, it’s just the fear has changed.”
I would be stripped of what made me feel safe to make room for something else.
It hurts to write by hand if I do it for too long, which pushes me to keep my language tight and right. The permanence of pen on paper means something.
I have met many lovely people from Santa Barbara, but I don’t think I would raise my children there. I’m not sure any of us are at our best living in paradise.
People love to blame a place for their own failures. Los Angeles is the king of this. So many people move here to chase a dream, or to escape the cold, or to escape their family. The city is supposed to be the answer to their discontent, to whatever it was that rejected them at home, and in their mind, simply having the bravery to get out west deserves fanfare. But once here, they find that no one cares about them as much as they do. If vanity drove them to this city, they discover that vanity doesn’t like peers. It likes followers.
Dreams are like a compass that points in a general direction, and goals are the islands in the ocean along the way. Goals are just guesses at where to make a home, and when they aren’t right, we try another. It isn’t a death, and it doesn’t negate the dream.
This shitty situation had given us the opportunity to receive the kindness of a stranger, to see the life and home of a person we’d have never known. I lay there thinking back through my life—how much energy I put into planning, trying to guarantee my independence, but how so
many of my best memories have come from the times where I needed help and received it.
Somewhere in all those miles of heat and nothingness, I noticed time had changed. “Meetings” and “dates” and “days of the week” used to mean so much to me. They were necessary frames for my life, for the passing of time. Now I never knew what day it was. My alarm was the sun.
This happens a lot with people who espouse idealism. We want to feel better about our mediocrity, so we look for the holes.
(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.)
couldn’t give up on my global optimism. I’ve always believed that the world is far friendlier than it is not, far more loving than hateful. Fear is like a thorn in your foot. It may be proportionally small in relation to the body, but it hurts and demands attention and everything halts until the thorn gets pulled.
The truth is, violence is the exception—not the rule—in almost all places on this planet. There’s a saying in journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Humanity fixates on violence. We’re fascinated by its abnormality; we want to understand it and learn how to avoid it.
I knew it wasn’t for nothing that I’d been struggling with all my doubts and passions for the past twenty years.
But the wealth, beauty, and privilege of the West parades on top of the bones of the defeated.
“Well, Mom, it’s an honest observation. I am not attracted to girls.” It was much easier for me to say “not attracted to girls” than to use the affirmative “I am attracted to boys.”
Andrew Morgan (the fellow whose trip inspired mine) and his words to me: “This trip belongs to you, no one else. Don’t let anyone dictate your life to you.”
I wonder how many millions of relationships are alive because of this, avoiding conversations.
“Dad thinks we’re just gonna invite her in, like she’s part of the family?” my older sister would say. “I’m not doing this with every flavor of the month.”
It made me remember why I liked living in California, free from the odd feelings of family obligation and love.
Then I thought, “No, I love these idiots. This mess is what made me. I just need to control my doses. It’s easy to overdose and get sick.”
“I wanted to go on this trip to prove that someone like me could. You’re an upper-middle-class white guy—of course you can do this. I wanted to show that almost anyone could. And it’s been hard. I know you get mad at me buying weed. But it helps my anxiety. You’re on this trip to reach a destination. I’m on this trip following ideals.”
“So you’re telling me you really think this was the best idea God had for us…to build the universe in such a way that we show up with a deadly handicap that will doom us, hundred percent, unless we learn a story about His son, and say His name, and understand the story of how it happened? That was God’s best idea? That was the thing I could finally not overcome, and why I walked away. It didn’t make sense.” Weston was beside me now, looking at me when he talked. We had crossed the creek several times, and almost ignored the beauty of it all, our heads swimming in the meaning of life.
“I think you’re really just a kind guy, trapped in a tradition,” he continued. “You’re gay and you’re out and free but you were raised a certain way and you won’t let go of it. You don’t want to spin through space without a tether. I remember when I was a Jesus freak, I was preaching from park benches and screaming the Gospel. Salvation of souls was an emergency. I don’t see that in your eyes. I see a guy who likes the idea of God, of love, of defending a faith system that is the norm and the majority, but pretends it’s a victim and the underdog. If you really thought about it all, you would
...more
“Well, sure, yeah, I guess that’s right. But I don’t think that the universe loves me, and calling it the universe leaves it open to mystery and implies how big and unknowable it is.”
Exposure to them seemed to expand what she found acceptable. It reaffirmed my belief that exposure creates empathy.
Jesus saves. But you gotta accept Him real quick or He kills.
But being out here in nature…honestly, last night, looking at the stars, I felt God. I felt that feeling again I had back in high school, singing worship with my hands up. I felt the bigness of it. That is God.”
I have found more comfort and have felt a greater faith in something bigger than me, I have felt a bigger hug from the universe by rejecting the obsession to call it something. To name it. Maybe there is life after. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe it’s Jesus. Maybe it’s a giant oak tree. Maybe it’s energy. Maybe it’s stardust. Maybe we just shut off. But not calling it something certain has opened my heart more than when I was Christian, feeling like I was the lucky one who got to hear Jesus’s name and thus be accepted into the club. And quitting that limited idea, that the truth is so small, has
...more
We’d started with such fire and magic. With a shared destiny and destination. The beginning of a grand adventure is pregnant with a thousand futures. Every possible best thing. But the end is often a fizzle. For us, Weston left for a wedding. And didn’t come back. And just like that, a chapter was done.
“I don’t believe it. I believe it’s the U.S. coming in and lying, the newspapers are lying. The U.S. wants the oil in Syria, to control. I think Assad is maybe a good guy, and the rebels are U.S.-planted terrorists to disrupt. Like what the U.S. did in Nicaragua.” Whoa. There are so many ways to see the world. I tried to counter. “I don’t know. I’ve got friends in journalism,” I said. “I’ve got friends who work at NPR and cover the Middle East. They’re there. They see what they see and report it. And our news media is pretty antagonistic with our government.”
