The days are filled with dry heat and dusty streets and discarded newspapers rolling along, urban tumbleweed. The San Gabriel Mountains jut into the sky fifty miles east, but, like a film that’s been out for two months, locals don’t stop to see. On Sunset Drive, fifteen different conversations in fifteen different dialects flit through the air. Los Angeles, is a spring coiled, ready to explode. Young, wild, and free. Unpredictable, chaotic, and haphazard.

At night, lights from the city spill out into a desert basin filled with homes. There’s never any real dark here. And there’s never any real quiet. Somewhere, a dog barks and fifteen disparate howls answer. The echoes ripple out over rooftops and bleed down alleyways. The howls fade and the ever-present thrum of traffic – the white noise of a sleeping city – settles in again. A substitute for silence.

I stare out from my friend’s small backyard and wonder, not for the first time…what am I doing here?

I don’t ask myself that question enough, it’s a hard thing to look at yourself, but I ask it now. My family and friends are far away. With them at a distance, my past feels faraway too…and my future uncertain.

The lights in the neighbor’s window go out and I settle deeper into my rickety wooden chair.

I’ve never really fought to hold onto the past. The present was always more interesting. New and totally unexplored space! There was only one direction to go if you let go of your past: the only way was forward. No past meant no preexisting you to be beholden to. What a thought. To be born totally new each moment.

The city sprawls out before me. Restaurants and houses and telephone wires strung for miles and cinemas and record shops and roadside murals and invasive billboards and lights, lights everywhere. One look is enough to recognize that the city is a total contradiction to my idea of progress. I try to think what this place would be if it were razed to the ground each night and rebuilt the next day. There’d be no skyscrapers, streets, or neighborhoods. The construction crew would never even finish drawing property lines in the dirt, forget the construction phase. The buildings would never rise and the desert would still stretch clean to the horizon.

I wonder if it’s really possible for a person to be totally new each moment? Athlete one moment, desk jockey the next. Warlord on Sunday, priest by Monday. Saint one second, sinner the next. A person like that, in the world we live in today, is labeled bipolar or sociopath…but who isn’t tempted by the freedom to be whoever and whatever, whenever? Sylvia Plath was. Listen:

I saw my life branching out before me like [a] green fig tree in story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

I close my eyes and try to see the branches of my life. All around, the city howls its eerie psuedo-silence.

When I open my eyes again I see things I haven’t been able to see. Like some great and fateful joke, I realize I too am sitting beneath the fold of a fig tree. Withered, purple husks fill the yard and stone driveway. It’s one of those coincidences so totally serendipitous that it couldn’t have been made up. A long-dead woman foresaw the moment that I live in now. Her last lines come easily:

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

And suddenly I feel like Siddartha. Or someone more relatable, like John Travolta from the movie Phenomenon. A man struck by some otherworldly light, filled with comprehension, who knows and wants to explore everything, who sees that he can only make it as far as his two legs take him, and feels the truth of that so deep he can never sleep again.

——————————————

The branches of my life are important: where I’ve been, what I’ve done, who I am…or was. But right now my memory is coated with rust. Grown from apathy which disguised itself cunningly as nonchalance…

Those memories are so valuable. Past experience and emotion and thought like water in a well, ready to be pulled and drank in long draughts. Only thing is the winch for my bucket is busted. I’m working on fixing that, but till then the memories come in a trickle.

That said, if there’s anything I’m certain of it’s that improvement is always possible. “A person with a good enough why can bear any how.” It’s easy to believe Nietzsche was a fatalist —  what more likely philosophy for a sick man to spout as he’s dragged to an early death than ‘It was inevitable. It was always meant to be’?  — but when he says things that imply a person can always push forward, provided they have a reason he convinces me otherwise.

I believe that. I believe your reason carries you through when things get tough. I resolve to remember mine.

Two and a half years ago I started this page. The idea was to share the thoughts — mammoth ideas and buzzing trivialities, both — that continue to swirl in my mind. To hear what others think about them, or not. To accept help, constructive criticism, and ideas from those who’ve learned from their own lives. I wanted to dive into the experiences of my own life. Think deeply about them. Learn from them. Remember them. Two and half years ago I started this page and somewhere between then and now I forgot those reasons why.

But now I remember.

I remember stepping off a road onto the Appalachian Trail in Troutdale, VA, on April, 5, 2016 with nothing but a pair of black, Solomon boots and a sixty pound backpack. The only choice I had to make was walking north or south. I put everything I had into that first day, covered six miles, and ate undercooked, whole wheat pasta for dinner. I lay on in my tent that first night wondering What am I doing here? and listening to the sound of rustling leaves in the empty woods around me. To this day it’s still the loneliest sound I ever heard.

I wouldn’t have made it far, if things had kept on like that. But then I met a friend. Cosmo, my trail brother. He was hiking for his dad, Moon Dog, who’d done the trail decades before. He had a bum ankle for a while and would listen to audiobooks like James Clavell’s Shogun while he picked his way along the trail with praying mantis hiking pole arms. He had a girlfriend back home waiting and sometimes, at night, he’d sing softly. I was the only one listening but the songs were for her. After one hundred days together and 1600 miles, we parted ways. Two and half years later I’m writing this, smiling as I think back to those months. What a gift.   

After the trail, I floundered at home. Life was simpler when I was walking through the woods. Somehow I got tangled up. I forgot the importance of moving forward each day. I spent my days in my apartment thinking about what to do next and not doing it and then getting irritated by my lack of motivation. A vicious cycle. Obsessed with self-improvement and convinced reaching my goals required sacrificing everything. So began my self-imposed alienation. Pushing friends and family away to make time for my martyrdom…it was a long time before I realized I was pushing away my most powerful motivation to change.

I decided to leave. Again. Not to the woods this time, but to Seattle, a city close to the mountains. Here I would channel my haphazard creativity into a quantitative discipline, I was sure of it. I took a month driving to get out there. I slept in my tent and friends’ apartments and my car. A lot of time alone. I arrived at my Washington AirBnb ready to put roots. The wind through the trees outside my window at night convinced me I was in a good place. But still and always, paradoxically, I longed for home. I spent five months learning to think like a computer, when what I really needed was to learn to think less and feel more. I felt alone a lot of the time. More than anything my roommate and my classmates were what kept me sane. I have them to thank for the diploma in my Mazda’s trunk. Thanks guys.

And then came an opportunity to write in Los Angeles. Forget programming for a bit, here was something I was more certain of. I would be writing with old friends. Telling stories just outside Hollywood. I said, “Yeah, I’ll give it a shot.”

But another new place so soon…was hard. If I’d been struggling with isolation for three years, the first months in Los Angeles were the straws that broke the camel’s back. I felt distant mentally, emotionally, spiritually from my cowriters, my roommates, the people walking the streets and the cashiers at Target. It was hard for my cowriters to be around me. I got a job as a busser, someone who flits in and out of conversations but never stays. Impermanent as I was, in the beginning my presence was still a trial for my coworkers.

The worst part was that I could see it too. When you can’t stand someone else you can leave, but what do you do when you can’t stand yourself? Where do you run to? I spiraled. No self respect, no vision that didn’t crumble, no control. I could barely hold myself together when I flew home in April as a groomsman at one of my best friend’s weddings. Again, my friends, helped me hold together…even after all my silence. Hector and Achilles have come and gone, but looking at them – my people forever – I realize modern day heroes don’t dress in bronze.

And then I met a girl. And she listened to me. And always tried to understand. And for once I let someone else in. And I learned about sharing my life. And even if we parted ways painfully, we left knowing we helped each other. Yet another gift, freely given, by someone who owed me nothing…

What am I doing here? I don’t ask myself that question enough, it’s a hard thing to look at yourself, but I ask it now.

I can see the branching decisions that have led me here. They stretch out behind me, clear and defined.

I can see where I am now. In a dusty LA backyard. In a wooden chair barely holding my weight. Beneath a fig tree spiraling into its end of season.

But what am I doing? Where am I going?

The more I ask that question, the more I realize I have to answer it myself.

To anyone listening, hello after a long time. The goodbye will be shorter this time.

— Nomad