Home is a four-letter word.

A wall, from both sides.

2011-12-03T03:46:00.001-05:00

"He who does not reach the Great Wall is not a true man." - Mao Tse-Tung

"I will tell you this, Lacy, these ancients knew a secret I should give all I possess to secure. They knew their life's meridian, and I still search mine." - John Fowles

Looking back, it's always been accepted that I was born twice.

My mother and I called it my Chinese birthday. A tradition born of an error in translation, misinterpreting the traditional Chinese belief that children are one year old when they are born. And rather than celebrate my birthday en masse at New Year's, as the other half of that Far Eastern custom would go, the running joke for my mom and I would be an additional phone call, card or email with cutesy quotation marks celebrating the date in 1982 on which I was conceived. 11/11.

It grew into a lucky number, my first pick for a jersey in volleyball and basketball, and later into something talismanic, protectorate, comforting. A promise even in the face of despair that everything would be okay. My grandfather's badge number in the SFPD, the exact minute my mother pulled our rental car into my paternal grandmother's driveway the first time I ever met her, the date in 2009 that my father died. #1111, 11:11, 11/11.

Fitting then that I should type these words from China in November, the 11th month of 2011. A coincidence I didn't realize until weeks after I jumped at an irresistible deal I saw on Twitter: a $459 round trip ticket to Beijing. The symbolism of visiting China during that month and year didn't hit me until I was informing my family about it in person, breaking the news that their impulsive, crazy, prodigal son that had yet to grow up was still impulsive, crazy, and had yet to grow up.

Really it was just somewhere to go. A nails-biting-into-walls rebellion as I was being dragged away from a waning 2011. An additional cache of memories to add to the year of my lucky number. One more adventure in the year of the bulls. But the full extent of the numerology of it all didn't sink in until tonight. Until I closed my eyes and saw myself staring up solemn-faced and doe-eyed at the summit directly above. Not that 11 was charmed for me, but why that number specifically was so fitting for this one place on Earth. For this precise moment in my life.

Tuesday I scrambled all throughout central Beijing, Tiananmen Square at dawn for the ceremonial Communist Army march out the Gate of Heavenly Peace and morning flag raising, idled through a queue of thousands for Mao's mausoleum, savored traditional Peking Duck at a revered family-run restaurant in a tiny, near-impossible to find back alley, was dwarfed in the indulgently massive Great Hall of the People, paced around the formerly taboo grounds of the Forbidden City, fought biting gusts of winter night air around the illuminated Water Cube and Bird's Nest stadiums of the 2008 Olympics. Wednesday I dealt with logistics for a weekend in Pingyao before I scrambled to the out-of-the-way 798 Arts District and the factory complex-turned-hotbed for contemporary art, deciphered as much Mandarin as I could to find an underground transport depot, sat with my 30 pound backpack on my lap and a heater raging mercilessly against my trapped leg on an overflowing 2 hour bus ride to the outskirts of Beijing, bounced around in the seatbelt-less backseat of a taxi van as it wove along mountain pass roads, driving in the wrong lane around blind curves to pass slower trucks, the stuttery strobe of its high beams the only warning oncoming traffic would have to keep from crashing into us head-on.

And tomorrow. Tomorrow I just walk along a wall. And in doing so, by definition cross that which divides. A monument to separation, or for me, transition. Here (by destiny, or the complex scheme of God, or just the pulse of the world) to achieve the Shakespearean climax. One side of my life on one side of the wall. A day to walk along it. And one side of my life to begin on the other side. Adding the weight of my size 13 New Balances to the pressure of the centuries, the cargo of a billion lives. Standing in the middle of two lives- both rich, both charmed. One of promise, one of fruition. The inherent simple beauty of 11. Or even 11/11. The symmetry of the middle.

I sit on this bed a few miles from the Great Wall of China with an impossible to ignore peace of knowledge that this is it. That every girl I've dated is passing footnote to a love still to be. Every hour at work merely prologue to a position to soon be my career. The end of the ascent, of the antecedent, is tonight. And that my Rubicon is 2,500 years old. 5,500 miles long. And about to be crossed.

(written Wednesday, November 23, 2011.)

= = = =

The gloves probably save my life. Or keep my mind free from thinking of impending frostbite for the entire day. Black with a generic clip art golfer icon and the word "SPORT" stitched in red along the back, they're never something I'd wear if I cared about appearance, but today isn't really about self-image. I buy them along with raspberry/blueberry cream Oreos, a squat little can of Chinese Red Bull, and a bag of what looks like picante Chex cereal and I will later discover tastes like spicy uncooked Ramen noodles. I pay the 18 yuan (a little under $3) and add them to the stash in my backpack of apples, raw shelled peanuts, sweet muffins, and water already purchased from another small market next door, one also without visible signs of running electricity. Jackson, the only other person staying at my hostel and my trailmate for the Great Wall, buys a pack of plain Oreos and a lighter. Neither of us smoke, but neither of us wants to hike around isolated sections of the Great Wall in a northern China winter without instant access to the ability to make fire. I put on the thickly-lined fleece gloves and push past the hanging strips of thick clear plastic that serve as a door.

Twenty minutes later we reach the trail that lazily dissolves into one of the oldest surviving sections of the Great Wall, dating back to the Sixth Century, last restored in the Fourteenth. My right glove comes off a decent amount to take photos (though I later perfect the art of taking them with it on), or to dig in my pack for water or a cookie to continue my meandering breakfast. The first time my left glove comes off is to touch it. I place my fingertips reverently and proudly upon the rough stone of the Wall I stand upon, wondering what worker in what century placed that stone there, so that centuries, a millennium later it could form the path that I walk. We stop about an hour and a half into the hike to sit and eat inside one of the abandoned watchtowers. I look out over waves of mountains risen around us and eat a sweet apple made crisp by the November morning cold; Jackson's water has slivers of ice in it from the below freezing temperatures.

Four hours along the top of the Wall, we reach the Twenty-Four Window watchtower. In those four hours the two of us pass only one group of five people walking the other way. I offer a sheepish smile and a "Nihao ma?," the extent of my Mandarin expertise. It is after this tower that Jackson and I will have to temporarily leave the Wall. Just ahead is a zone of it known as Military Zero, and the barbed wire running along the Wall and more modern, recently-manned watchtowers raise our natural curiosity, but our logic holds us back. I turn away from the path ahead to the one I've left behind. An undulating river of stone switching atop the barren hills, miles of noodles come uncoiled. Pride joins beauty and eats my exhaustion. We just did that. A silent admiration from the precipice. Standing atop the highest summit in our panoramic view I look down, back at my abandoned path, my consummated meridian. Aware. Of everything. It's at this point I remind myself that today is Thursday. It's Thanksgiving. I turn and we continue on.

Our detour lasts an hour and a half as we cut through seemingly private land and corn fields dormant for the winter. We lose sight of the Wall, but not thought of it. We finally, anxiously, cut back toward a lesser marked pathway back along the base of the Wall while there is still barbed wire above. This continues for some time past narrower ledges until we find a shorter part of the Wall, some 15-18 feet high with enough bricks missing to form a path up its side. Jackson goes first as I remove the warmth of the gloves and shove them and my camera in my bag. My fingertips touch the stone again, with the same reverence as a few hours before but far more force, enough to support my weight. I look around, then up, and step into the first foothold, and I begin to scale the Great Wall of China.

A bit farther ahead we reach another choice. A sloped decayed staircase about 25 feet down and immediately right back up, with a pile of rubble and rocks at the bottom or next to that a direct pathway, a 20-some-foot bridge of mismatching bricks about 24 inches wide that carries one above the stairway to one side and above a 40 foot drop to the forest floor to the other. Our smiles last longer than our hesitation.

The Badaling section of the Great Wall, the closest to central Beijing, has a movie theater, photo-ops with people dressed in ancient Mongol costumes, and among its hundreds of food vendor and restaurant options are KFC and Starbucks. Mutianyu has a slide for tourists to ride a toboggan down to their waiting cars rather than take a staircase and a hanging cable car making endless loops for tourists that would rather not walk. At Gubeikou there is just the Wall. And you. An opportunity to meet an intrinsic part of myself for the first time, one that's been hiding in the remote Chinese countryside for my entire life. Conceited, but that's all I could ever want; to feel more like myself with every stride forward.

Bulls on parade.

2011-07-08T20:49:00.015-04:00

"To keep alive a moment at a time/ To still inside a whisper to a riot/ To sacrifice but knowing to survive/ The first to find another state of mind/ I'm on my knees, I'm praying for a sign/ Forever, whenever/ I never wanna die/ I never wanna die/ I never wanna die/ I'm on my knees/ I Never wanna die/ I'm Dancing on my grave/ I'm Running through the fire/ Forever, whenever/ I Never wanna die/ I Never wanna leave/ I Never say goodbye/ Forever, whenever, Forever, whenever." - Foo Fighters, "Walk"

"There's blood beneath every layer of skin." - Alexander McQueen

I grabbed my passport from my locker and set my backpack by the door. I crouched back down to the bed and softly moved some tousled blonde hair away from her cheek. She stirred, her (blue? green?) eyes still shut as she craned up for our last kiss, one forever framed by intrusions of the Madrid morning light. Our lips parted to form the melancholy smiles of goodbyes and she opened her eyes. (Blue. They were blue).

"Run fast."

She sunk back down to the pillow and her whisper walked with me outside, toward my train to Pamplona.

Two mornings later I stood on La Estafeta, much longer than most streets in Pamplona but equally narrow. I was surrounded by strangers, drunks, the fearful. And I was surrounded by friends. Derek, Nicole, Damian, Mark, Sandev, Nick and I looking at one other with massive eyes, our adrenaline consuming our exhaustion. Seven friends had flown from California to meet me in Spain for the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, and five of them (six now, with Corey's cousin who met up with us) huddled with me in the minutes before the reason for the entire journey. Our encierro. Our initiation into a select set of humanity that together is just the right type of romantic, and just the right type of crazy. Thousands of mornings like this one throughout centuries, but still entirely unique to us. This morning was our turn to run with the bulls.

We broke our circle and stretched out unevenly along the left side of the street, about seventy yards from Dead Man's Corner, the sharp 90 degree turn on the course where bulls skid out and most often become separated, and thus most dangerous. As we took our places and waited for the rocket sound that signaled the release of the bulls, my mind was blank, as it was for most of the run. In the absence of thought, I instead noticed the relative quiet of the streets, of the other runners, but didn't process until later why it seemed, for all its surrealism, familiar.

It's something I know of from writings on Hiroshima, but most major bombs create the same phenomenon. After the initial shock of the blast that spreads outward from the epicenter, an even more violent vacuum sucks all of the air in the surrounding environment back to that one initial point, bringing buildings, cars, skin, everything imaginable, along with it. A wave of energy creating an area of momentary nothingness as the shock bubble collapses. The streets of Pamplona the morning of our encierro were a bomb in reverse. When we left the packed town square and jogged to our starting place on Estafeta, I left behind my thoughts, my sense of humor and personality, all complications in my life. All of that energy fed back into the six cauldron black bulls in the corral, the six brown and white steers with them. The wait and the run itself existed in an aura inhabited solely by the instinctual. The visceral. A world with minimal thought and sound as we waited. The twelve animals that were loosed from their pen became the first part of the bomb; the shockwave that chased us upon Spanish cobblestones.

We seven looked back toward the corner, Derek the closest with his large fist raised some eight feet in the air, I about ten feet behind him, hand raised as I bobbed like a prizefighter, the rest of the group strung behind me, a rosary decade with gapped beads. With the pop of the rocket a wave of thousands poured toward us as we remained in place, chanting our mantra borrowed from the final battle scene of 300: "HOOOOOLLLLD!!!" We were determined to stand in place until we could see the bulls make the turn at Dead Man's Corner, and we caught dozens of wayward elbows and shoulders in what felt an interminable wait. Seconds dripping like honey. My mouth completely evaporated the instant the runners came our way, the moisture gone with everything else not absolutely vital inside me. Over a minute past the first rocket, my wait didn't end from catching sight of the bulls, but the words of a faceless Aussie running by me. "You're gonna want to start running now, mate." There was enough panic in his wheezing voice to convince me, to realize the bulls had already turned that corner unseen and were almost upon us, and my raised hand became a beckoning wave to Derek. "Go, go, go, go!!!" I turned away from Dead Man's Corner and sprinted along with my fellow correadors toward the Plaza de Toros.

My concept of time was a casualty of the vacuum, but for a few seconds my inhaling breaths screamed in my head before I heard the clanging of the bells and the thundering of the bulls' gallop. I turned my head to the right, my eyes inflating with the vision they'd been trained for but still absolutely denied and my deserted brain could produce only one thought. "There are giant.... fucking.... bulls... right there. In the middle of the street?" The shock of it all. That no amount of preparation can insulate you from the abandonment of reason. Your intrinsic determination to deny your senses when confronted with the unnatural. I continued to flee until the moment I most dreaded happened right beside me. One of the bulls slipped and became isolated as the rest of the pack continued ahead without him. I paused along with him, along with time. He turned his head to the left, to where I stood motionless but ready along the wall, remembering in that moment that bulls are drawn to movement above all else. A second and a half that will last until the end of my life. To watch a bull's eye as he thinks. He jerked his head back forward and ran toward the motion ahead, and I followed, rejoining the wave consuming Estafeta.

We didn't pause til we reached the ramp leading down to enter the ring. The bulls all past us now, we bunched up waiting to get through the narrower opening to the arena. We turned to each other in elation, arms around strangers turned allies, chanting "O-le! Ole, ole, ole! O-le! O-le!" with breath we didn't think we had left. The runners moved down the ramp and into the arena and we emerged to stand on the dirt of Pamplona's Plaza de Toros with the audience of thousands applauding us. The closest I will ever come to gladiator. Drinking in the ovation earned for being chased by twenty-thousand pounds of meat and fury and bone. The vibrant banners of red and green, the stark white of most of the correador uniforms around me and the nothingness-brown of dirt kicked-up from the bull ring floor were the only colors around us, and I saw them brighter, deeper, and clearer than anything I have ever seen before. New eyes for a new world, post-experienced-dream. Life as altered by lesson learned well, with a mindset dominated by the confidence that turns clichė fact. What does not kill you, makes you stronger.

A few of us managed to find each other in the madness of the ring, and all of us were together again at our meeting spot, the bust of the American author outside the Plaza de Toros. We huddled up again, our eyes still sprung wide, our smiles wider. We walked back along La Estafeta together, past old cobblestones stained with new blood.

"Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters." - Ernest Hemingway

Saturday afternoon, after the siesta.

2011-07-02T13:04:00.020-04:00

I walk outside my hostel, past the Convento de San Esteban where people take pictures and look up as a stork perched up along the naves flaps its wings in a jerking rhythm, just as I watched him do yesterday, and I walk outside the walls of the city, crossing the river Tormes upon which two girls reverse their paddle boat away from the dock, and several benches that overlook the rio are taken by a series of old men in infinite conversation gazing at each other and the water below, as still further down in the grass along the water a couple in matching black bathing suits sunbathes, and I keep walking south of the river and come to a four-lane running track upon which a woman jogs one lap, takes a brief sip from a water bottle she leaves on a bench, and begins to run again, and I continue along a green bike lane as in the opposite direction a father pedals a bicycle with his son in a car seat mounted on the back and he points out features of the landscape to the boy who looks out from under an oversized bicycle helmet and trailing the two at full gallop is a massive grey and white dog who bounds along joyfully with his tongue like a baby's arm streaming out of his mouth, and I turn my head and watch the three continue on their stroll, unable to contain my smile, and after recrossing the river I walk back toward the town, passing two middle-aged men who sit shirtless, wearing trucker hats and tattoos, their sagging bodies the sign of lives lived fully, and past them is a small skate park where a group of teenage boys sits looking at their friend who skateboards along, effortlessly kicks away another board that has rolled up to him without losing momentum, and performs an ollie, and past the skate park people stroll across a centuries-old bridge with a stone statue of an animal worn away by time and with now only the generic stump of a faceless head, and by a small church a couple sets a digital camera on a pedestal, the girl setting the timer before joining her boyfriend for the picture, and then I enter the walls of the city and walk up a small street I've already walked up several times in just over a day, and for the first time notice a stenciled sticker of a Japanese girl on the back of a street sign, while a car slowly rolls past me and the older woman in its passenger seat is about to finish her cone of helado and as I approach the Plaza Mayor a bachelor party is dressed as lifeguards, with the groom-to-be wearing an inflatable Spongebob Squarepants attached to his lap, and his groomsmen wear Dora the Explorer waterwings, and inside the massive Plaza a group of American college students walk by with grocery bags hanging from their arms and a large party of people sit at a series of tables on a restaurant's terrace and a waiter counts their raised hands to know how many glasses of sangria to bring, and in the middle of the Plaza two women in fascinator hats and pastel evening dresses stand reading a text message, and another woman pretends to be a matador with a children's sword and cape and as she swings her arm in an artistic flourish the sword's sheath goes flying and slides along the stones of the square into the feet of the Japanese girls seated beside me on a cement bench, and the woman utters an embarrassed apology as a second bachelor party tries to get the attention of a passing bachelorette party but they strut past unimpressed and their walk takes them past a vendor holding fortysome mylar balloons, more Doras, more Spongebobs and some Patricks for good measure, and I duck into a carneceria for a jamon bocadillo and while the woman prepares it I look around at the large hanging shanks of pig's flesh with the hooves still attached, and as I am finishing my sandwich a wedding party is gathered outside of a church where two of their friends have just become husband and wife and more than anything everyone seems happy in the city of Salamanca. Saturday afternoon, after the siesta.

In concert.

2011-05-01T02:23:00.010-04:00

"Miles Davis, I've been swayed by The Cool.
There's just something about the summertime.
There's just something about the moon." - The Gaslight Anthem

"I still believe (I still believe) in the sound
That has the power to raise a temple and tear it down....
Now who'd have that thought, that after all,
Something as simple as rock 'n' roll would save us all." - Frank Turner

I first noticed her because she looked like my friend's ex-girlfriend. The same desert constellations of freckles surrounding tide-colored eyes. Different hair, hers more '50s inspired with a dramatic part. What you would expect from a girl waiting to see The Gaslight Anthem. An indiscernible monochrome tattoo venturing out beneath a rim of white lace and a short sleeve of black polyester patterned in a grid of thin white polka dots. Enough to hint at the visual similarities to the girl I knew but not be overcome by them. But even more a subconscious familiarity. The strangers you've never met that you feel comfortable around.

She stood pressed against a grey barricade delineating a four foot moat of pavement that kept the two halves of the crowd separated for security to roam up and down, occasionally pulling crowd-surfers off shifting platforms of hands, as well as photographers pacing and positioning, hands clutching enormous cameras, lenses like red wine bottles. I was on the other side of the barrier, another tightly-packed individual in that growing audience in a parking lot in New Jersey, the last night sky of April so clear you had to consciously acknowledge it, the lights and towers of Manhattan easily visible some miles off. My 40 minute wait for the band was an impromptu rotation mainly of looking around the crowd, talking to Ryan next to me, and looking down to text. It was with my head down rereading Kyle's message about the show that I saw movement peripherally while also feeling a shifting in the weight against my back. I turned left and saw the girl in the polka dot shirt reaching across that few-man's-land of space and the girl behind me stretching equally hard to meet her in the middle. They each pulled back looking accomplished, the nub of the joint they had handed off so small that I noticed their reaction first, and the girl behind me took about three hits off it while I smiled to myself and turned back to facing the stage.

This was a long festival show, and I rarely do festivals anymore. Coachella would overwhelm and frustrate me, bands that I love performing simultaneously on opposite ends of the grounds while elsewhere pool parties abounded. The judgement of Solomon played out in real life. This was far more manageable. Two acts in The Gaslight Anthem and Frank Turner that I was dying to see, and a few other good bands also performing that I could check out as well, none of my choices overlapping. It gave the day a really casual feel and I spent far less time racing between stages than I did remembering all those outdoor shows I grew up on in California summers. The Sprite Liquid Mix where my friend Mark tried to follow Jay-Z's invitation for everyone to rush down to the pit and got clotheslined and laid out by a security guard. The Warped Tours of high school when A.F.I. was playing a side stage at 3 in the afternoon, and we accidentally saw 311 and Pennywise five times in the course of a summer. My first real concert, a $5 admission at Santa Anita racetrack where bands played on the infield in between horse races and I crowdsurfed for the first time to "Prisoner of Society" by The Living End. That's probably why I wasn't annoyed by all the New Jersey teenagers around. I was too busy thinking of what a little shit I must have been at that age that I will never get to be again.

Brian of The Gaslight Anthem talked about how excited he was to play this show in their home state of Jersey. With tattooed hands and fingers gripping the microphone, he talked about the band still owning the van they did their first tour in and how for this show they loaded it up with equipment like they did years ago and drove everything here themselves because they loved that feeling of nostalgia and their roots. They played timeless rock songs about common emotions we've all felt under a clear summer sky with the Empire State Building visible behind them. And Brian talked before another song about the feeling that being here gave them. "This'll sound fake, but it's not, this is something real. This means a lot to us, and the feeling you give us is incredible. I really feel like you guys are our friends right now. And we're so happy to be here, with you." They launched into another song and the crowd threw their palms toward the stage, had their index fingers in the air for the chorus of "Great Expectations" and as my voice sang along I realized for the first time, after over a decade of shows, that the word concert is the perfect description for the experience. Music is the one true unifying art form. Walk around MoMA or Musee d'Orsay and you'll study the works and think of what you see in them, what elements of them speak to you. Then you can read the little plaque that elaborates on more details or influences and arguments you probably missed. At films we laugh at different jokes or are frightened at differing times by varying types of scares. Some people focus on the cinematography while others analyze the costume design, or the art direction. Think of all the various critical essays a single novel or even poem can catalyze, the arguments about the true meaning of an ambiguous ending. Live music unites us, breeding one astounding composite emotion the entire crowd feels. For those hours, despite all our differences and idiosyncrasies we had before our tickets were scanned and that we will resume again in the parking lot, for the length of those songs we are living in concert. We are one in harmony.

It happened probably a minute and a half after the first time. The Gaslight Anthem still hadn't taken the stage yet. All we had of them was a soundcheck by the drummer and their giant black and white banner featuring the band's name scrawled next to a massive multi-sailed brig forging along upon an ocean of waves. The joint was truly finished, the chemicals in the body and the weed most likely starting to interact now. The girl behind me suddenly reached over the barricade first and the girl with the tattoo and the polka dots craned her arm again from her side of the gap, and this time it was much harder because of what their hands were doing. Each had a closed fist and they struggled until the two sets of knuckles erased the chasm and met in the middle, touching briefly but firmly before retreating back. Their bodies leaned back to where they were standing before, eyes still locked in contact for a few seconds, irises smiling, before turning back to face forward and await the band about to take the stage.

People as places as people.

2011-04-12T09:01:00.014-04:00

"It's hard to get hold of, and hard to let go.
Always something we look for from the day we were born.
Instead, we're the people that we wanted to know,
And we're the places that we wanted to go.
Yeah, we're the places that we wanted to go." - Modest Mouse

" 'No man,' said one of the Greeks, 'loves his city because it is great, but because it is his.' " - C.S. Lewis

It was my senior year of high school, so I must have been seventeen, but looking back it seems far longer. I feel I was much smaller then.

I was using my mother's camera, her metal Nikon from the '70s, and only now, typing these words, I realize she might have used it to photograph the same views when she lived here, the same sights that I was visiting then. Our nearly identical green and yellow eyes looking out the same viewfinder to frame the same concrete, twenty some years apart.

The photographs were in black and white; they had to be as I was developing them myself at our high school's makeshift dark room, and I guess I remember the photographs more than the place itself because in my memory the Palace of Fine Arts had the whitewash of Athenian ruins topped in dark grey rather than its actual maple and nougat tones. And it was atop one of the city's many hills, overlooking countless townhouses rising from pavement frozen in undulation. But really, I was recalling the view from Telegraph Hill, or from the apex of Lombard Street, rather than on the water by the Presidio. Returning now, ten years later, to a city I'd been to so often growing up, I was able to see familiar sights with unfamiliar eyes. I was able to see the details that my memory had stored falsely, and to be drawn anew to other virtues I'd glossed over. That decade of absence had been a decade of influence, and with my interests and perspective changed, the variable could now to return to the constant to measure its own deviation. Recognize its progress. See the spots on the map where allure and boredom had traded places. I could see the path I had taken by seeing the city once again.

But that was only a little of it.

I thought that I came to San Francisco to make it easier on Jeffrey and Aaron. As a thank you for their trip down to L.A. when I visited last September, I would come up to the Bay this time around and try to talk other friends in to coming up as well. Our core group of six friends from those immediate post-college years in Los Angeles is now scattered thanks to the three of us. I left in July 2009 for New York, via the world, and they each chose Northern California shortly after.

People continue to ask me if I'll ever move back to Los Angeles, and I've always answered No... That I love New York. True, but only partially the answer. I belong in New York because it fits me; who I feel I am now, and who I want and strive to be. It is a city that, like no other I've ever experienced, pushes you, constantly, to be simply... better. Smarter, wittier, more charming, more culturally aware. I relish this challenge that New York forces upon me, even if the results are subjective, and vary depending on who you ask. But none of this explains the missing part of that answer: the lack of lasting guilt that I felt for leaving Los Angeles. After moving, I had homesickness. Pangs of, if not remorse, then at least of wanting to exist in two places simultaneously. But except for birthdays, or occasional concerts, those are gone now. That burden was lifted and I never thought to ask by whom. I realized this weekend that my friends had unknowingly taken parts of it with them to their new homes. By leaving soon after me, Los Angeles would always be a setting for some of the best casual memories of my life, but no longer the place that I had to live if I wanted to make new ones. By following their own desires, they'd given me far more freedom than they could ever realize.

Seeing Jeffrey and Aaron over the past few days, along with Corey, another member of that disassembled band, was phenomenal, and despite 7 months of being apart, we picked up like it was a weekend away. But it wasn't like old times. It was somehow even more natural. We were finally us. Seeing my friends again, I recognized that they were more than just filled with potential, they were now well on their way towards achieving it. They were more themselves than I had ever seen them, and it was the city of San Francisco that was doing so much to make this happen. Personality alchemy. Juxtaposing what makes a city great, with what makes my friends the amazing people that they are, and watching that marriage become mutually beneficial. They fit there like they would nowhere else, and coming home to New York, I know that I love the Bay Area now not for what I saw back as an adolescent, or a teenager about to leave the comfort of high school, or even solely for its own merits, but really for what it is bringing out in them. So part of why I love San Francisco is part of why I love DC, or Los Angeles for my friends that are thriving there, where some of them truly do belong. Inevitably this means we're destined to be spread out, dots on an unfolding map. But it also means I have the potential to become the same sort of destination to them. The inevitable New Yorker of the group. The brutally honest, hyperbolic, less-than-patient, and yes Aaron, occasionally pretentious one.

There are scores of chasms that form in your mid-to-late twenties. Friends and lovers once inseparable totally dissipate. It's at this point each person becomes the individual they truly are, and opens his eyes to see all the new distance between himself and those that had been around. The natural tendency is to see that alienation, that gaping emptiness, to have that become your focus. Obviously, those ruptures have happened to me in two years of near-exile, across the country from most people I know. But it's all endurable once you see the ones that have moved closer. Because that motion is genuine. It would have to be since it's natural. It's what they saw when they opened their eyes as well.

I used my own Canon Rebel T2i to shoot the Palace of Fine Arts on Saturday afternoon. Irwin was reaching over a chain in a vain attempt to hug a swan, Jeff and Aaron looking around out of brightly-colored Wayfarers, all of us trading instantly-forgotten jokes fueled by the bottomless Mimosas we'd been downing the past hour. We walked around, all inevitably awed by how beautiful the structure was. Even more striking than I remember it being from years ago. And a hell of a lot happier too.

Up up, down down, left right, left right, b, a.

2011-03-01T22:06:00.025-05:00

"Ever since my childhood, I've been scared, I've been afraid
Of being trapped by circumstance and staying in one place.
So I always keep a small bag full of clothes carefully stored,
Somewhere secret, somewhere safe, and somewhere close to the door." - Frank Turner, "The Road"

"But you should never be embarrassed by
Your trouble with livin'.
'Cause it's the ones with the sorest throats, Laura,
Who have done the most singin'," - Bright Eyes

Video games harm children. I know this from experience; from the harm they did me. This isn't the Bill O'Reilly/Joe Lieberman culture war. I don't care about the violence some contain, or their slothful distraction from exercise, homework, or other aspects of life. They never harmed me in any of those ways. Where I went wrong was that I had very little video game integrity. Sonic gets killed unexpectedly on an easy level, my Steelers give up a deep touchdown in the first quarter of Madden, and I lunged for the reset button. A thumb flick and my angst became a black screen, a loading page that diluted my embarrassment. And with that, none of it ever happened. That frustration. That dejection. Evaporated.

Around New Year's I saw a ton of status updates of people who couldn't wait for 2010 to end. What the fuck were they doing wrong? Yeah, I had some rough patches, some 2 a.m. confidings with friends I'd like to forget, but even with those, 2009 and 2010 were far and away the most exciting years of my life. And 2011? I was starting work NBC (one of my 2 dream companies to work for), had a group of my closest friends committed to joining me in Spain for San Fermin, a lot of other promising situations on the horizon. I had zero complaints of any kind. Had every reason to feel that my lucky number 11 would be my year, even greater than the two it succeeded.

I'm not really sure what happened.

I don't remember the initial pebble that the snowball grew around before it started hurtling downhill. I definitely know it gathered serious momentum on and after Super Bowl Sunday (seriously, what was that, Steelers?) and in the less than 60 days to speak of in 2011, I could think of 4, maybe 5 good experiences overall. Aside from that handful, of all the Charlie Browns in the world, I was the Charlie Browniest. A victim of the sophomore slump. The winter of my discontent. And as urgently as I grasped for one, there was no reset button to speak of. My Pavlovian expectation courtesy of Sega, Nintendo, and Sony had failed me. Maybe for the first time I felt trapped by my life, rather than stretching greedily in the freedom of it. Correspondence grew one-sided as I let emails and texts accumulate without response. I felt years removed from the person who wrote the posts below this one, from the backpacker drenched in Naples, penitent in Hiroshima, invigorated in Warsaw. Even from the one of last October, defiant in Havana.

I reached out to one friend. Even that was unintentional. I was just trying to catch up; to allay her fear that my M.I.A. status had anything to do with her, or anyone else really. I didn't mean to delve in to my problems in detail. But the moment our voices connected, they joined hands and leapt. Instantly. Surgingly. Maybe not surprisingly to those who know both of us, but she and I were on parallel trajectories. (We think the same things at the same time. We just can't do anything about it.) Alone, that is. Conversation as commiseration, briefly. But then conversation as construction. The comfort not in someone else suffering with me, but whom that person was. Realizing that whatever negative energy out there was strong enough to bring someone like her down too wasn't something you defeat at its height. It's something you ride out until you see the hint of an opening. Then spring at that. My answer didn't come by looking in the mirror, but by listening to it.

That hint of an opening was two days off from work in a row in my now erratic schedule. A Tuesday and Wednesday with nothing to do. Where some people would see midweek errands or catching up on sleep, I saw a window that lead both forwards and backwards. An opportunity to go somewhere I'd never been and to remind myself of a life, and an identity, that had escaped me for too long. Without hesitation, without much planning, I shipped up to Boston.

It wasn't so much what I did, or what I took in of the city that was quintessentially Boston. No stories of Sawwx Fans at Fenway, dispatches from Mike's Pastries, or anecdotes bred over beers with townies in Southie. I enjoyed the sights I'd never seen before, but it was the ones I already had that stuck with me. I'd never been to Boston until 2 days ago. But there were parts of it I'd experienced before. Standing in Fenway after dark, there's a building by the Prudential tower, in the highrise cluster between Back Bay and South End, that echoes the Atomic Bomb Dome. The high winds last night chilled like those two night strolls on Memorial island in Hiroshima when I couldn't bring myself to leave it. A darkened stylized room in the Museum of Fine Arts displaying Buddhist statues, sparingly and accurately decorated, meant to evoke a temple. For me it was instantly one on the grounds of the Ten-Ryu in Kyoto. I chewed different malts, crushed hops in my hands at the Samuel Adams Brewery, and if I kept my eyes closed it could have been the Heineken tour in Amsterdam. The lone head of a deva statue at MFA; I had seen hundreds of its surviving brothers that lined the bridges approaching Angkor Thom. I thought of my barely 20 tuk-tuk driver who drove me around Angkor, his even younger wife who worked at my hostel. Remembered how the eyes of the Asura demons from those bridges were identical to the orange eyes of some of the elephants walking past me, and how I felt connected to the millenia-long-dead craftsman who shared that thought.

I got to see some of Boston. But I got to experience more of myself, walk around places I didn't think I'd be again, immerse vividly and authentically into a moment, to toggle sleeping memories back to the present once again.

Life has no reset button. Yeah, that's impossible. But there are cheat codes out there for when you need them. I found one. And I plan on using it.

Often.

http://www.vimeo.com/17614094

My first time in hell.

2010-11-02T05:13:00.052-04:00

I could tell you where it is, but I won't.

Admittedly it's part elitism, the relishing of insider knowledge on this matter only hours after its publicity, this solved mystery. But that's a fraction, a sliver. A significantly larger portion is out of concern. For you. For your safety. I have gone ahead; I don't think you should follow. I accomplished it with 3 other large grown men and even then our hearts were fluttering at times. We had to run briefly, slightly out of fear, mostly out of self-preservation. But the largest segment of the pie chart, the commanding majority: if you do want to find it, why spoil all the fun?

Most of you won't go. You can't. Not unless you're in New York City in the next week, maybe two. Past then and there may not be much left that's recognizable anyway. It'll be covered over, either with more graffiti or whitewashed by an embarrassed MTA. Eaten again by the City. And you'd have to be really dedicated to want to actually do this. Honestly, you'd have to be more than a little crazy.

My 11 day absence from New York ended in the early hours of Monday morning. If The New York Times had run the story at any time in that previous week and a half, I never would have known what I was missing. But there it sat, on the front page of the November 1st edition. A feature article describing "The Underbelly Project," a year-and-a-half-long workshop by major and emerging street artists conducted in a long-abandoned subway station somewhere in the five boroughs. The culmination was not an opening to the general public. That will never happen in the proper sense. Rather it was an invitation to only a handful of reporters in the world to cover the exhibit in an article, on the condition of anonymity for the artists' true names and also for the location of the exhibit.

Clearly I had to see it. Mainly for the street art itself, but exponentially more for it being held in an abandoned subway station, and that it was a giant, impossibly-tempting secret. A mystery built of sugar.

I turned my head to Kate, my friend beside me at work.
"You saw this right?"
"Yes. Looks amazing."
"We have to figure out where this is. I have to go."
She gave one of her signature pensive pauses, punctuated by a plotting smirk. "We can do that."

We rattled off the places we knew it could not be; eliminating three of the boroughs instantly. We used the other clues (the station's general size, its proximity to an occasionally reworked line) to narrow it down. Six minutes later she had her hunch. A quick search later that pulled up some images from this likely candidate station confirmed it. We looked at a photo from the slide show, an arresting piece proclaiming "WE OWN THE NIGHT" at the dead end of a track dugout, ringed by concentric rafters above. Then one from an older photo set of this likely station: it was the same dead end from the same perspective, here totally bare. It was the same photo, taken seven years earlier. One more search and she had years-old directions, admittedly vague, on how to get into this ghost station. In under 10 minutes I was set.

I texted my friends from California who were staying with me that week and set a time. 1:30am that night. A bit delayed, closer to 3, we got off the subway and crossed to the opposite side of the tracks for a better view to scout from. Encouraged by seeing an opening matching the directions, we crossed back over, then walked to the end of the platform, walked past the Do Not Enter sign and along the thin ledge of platform used only by workers and trespassers. This time of the morning we were safe from another train passing so soon and we ducked into the opening. A graffiti piece of a large Mayan-looking deity, mouth agape, lay just inside the opening. Not in the directions, but clearly where we needed to be.

We walked around several slanted aisles, each empty, or filled with discarded equipment, bottles. No stairs, no second hidden door. Embarrassed and perplexed, retracing through several times with little of anything to see I thought we had to give up. The only clue was another piece. 4 foot high letters, but the message was far too theatrical to be it. Right?

We looked up to wooden rafters and a barely visible cement ceiling some 30 feet above us. Our eyes traced that back down to see two extremely thin cords descending from the wooden banister, the one on the right making its way down to a loop at the bottom. For a foothold. Convinced this had to be the location and the means to get there, I turned back to the words on the wall. "Get Up. Get God." J______ went first.

Halfway up, "Fuck, fuck, it's breaking. It broke." A false alarm. He sturdied himself with the concrete ledge and used the still-holding rope for the last bit. He shone the flashlight. "This is definitely it. I see 'em."

My hands were already on the cord, my foot in the loop. I made it most of the way up to the concrete ledge that was the last boosting spot to the abandoned platform above, when the cord snapped. I fell back the twelve feet, twisting in mid-air to land on my side rather than with my back, which my camera was strapped to. Almost instantly after landing, before knowing that my jeans were widely torn or that my knee was bleeding, I assured them "I'm fine. I'm getting up there. I'm getting up." With a boost and more reliance on the equally flimsy thin metal pipes along the active line's tunnel than I wanted, I was on the ledge. Seconds later I was over the criss-crossed wooden banister. C______ came up as well while S______ kept lookout.

We wandered around mesmerized, I with the only camera snapping as many photos as I could. We navigated both the platform ledges and the drop-offs to the lower track-level six feet down in total darkness. After the initial shock and relief faded, something we weren't expecting became apparent. I saw them during the fractional flashes of my camera light, but had to switch to the play mode to read the tiny words on the viewfinder. That's how I learned we were being threatened.

The article stops short of the turn of the screw. Perhaps intentionally. The exhibit was not pristine when we came across it that early morning, as it appeared in the Times. The antique wooden table and chairs with a dinner set for two described by the writer was destroyed, a pile of wooden shards, except for one of the chairs which stood 40 feet away alone in an abyss. The look of a watchman's chair vacant, temporarily. About half of the works had been defaced, simple tags of static, intentionally ugly tags over complex works. Dogs pissing on every hydrant they pass. “GET OUT!”...."Fuck You, Fuck You" .... “Y'all Don’t Belong.....No No No No No”.... “The Tunnels Are OURS.” Words of anger, but ambiguously like those of a woken cyclops. One muttering in disbelief. Still debating how best to respond.

They were tags by the squatters of Hell Hou$e, their apparent chosen name for the station, furious that their turf had been breached, commercialized by whom they view as privileged, pompous outsiders. If such bile for the artists, what view of us? Something like groupies rather than guerrilla aficionados.

As arresting as the spotlight before me was, briefly illuminating scrawled threats, letting them come into existence, my mind was possessed by what our spot beam wasn’t showing. The other 330 degrees of world shrouded behind me, beside me. I kept half-expecting my camera flash to capture a figure lumbering towards me. Lumbering if I was lucky, rushing if I was not.

Down the sunken track dugout to the far side, still 15 feet from its end, my tiny miner’s light arched upon it. Upon him.

“Go. GO. Gogogogogo.”

I was briskly hurrying after saying the second, but J______ and C______ didn’t follow me until after I was done, when their lights had come across him as well. A man motionless on his side, an uncoiling fetal position, sleeping. But he did not stir with J______’s shocked yell and we never heard him afterwards. We regrouped at the opposite end, around a corner.

“It’s fine. Listen.... it’s fine. Just keep our distance, make it clear we're not trying to disturb him or anyone else.” In retrospect, absurd. The second we’d crossed the “Do Not Enter” sign back at the functioning station platform, we were intruding, disturbing him. Them. Trespassing, both on MTA property and inside Hell Hou$e, but only the latter really troubled me. (Y'all Don’t Belong..... No No No No No)

We carried on. About seven pieces later, J______ announced our warning call. “The spot has a minute left in it.”

I’d led us up but I wouldn’t keep us there without it. I photographed a few more pieces before returning to the path of our initial dugout, marked at the end by an American flag by Faile with a zig-zag pattern instead of stripes. We followed that track back to the middle and broke for the wooden banister. Five minutes of hesitant footholds, of easing down the others as they repelled, and frantic inhales of woken dust, inches of soot, and we were reassembled. Just in time for a train to rush past feet from us. We scurried around a corner, momentarily leaving our bags at the base. I doubled back to grab the gear and after hearing the line of cars pull away farther into the coming morning, we emerged back onto the ledge, then onto the public platform. The light, our first aside from the handhelds in over an hour, revealed our new layers of filth. We were covered in stagnancy, in time turned to soot, ash, and dirt.

The article came out yesterday morning. In this age of the instancy, I knew I wasn't the only asshole to figure out where it was. What surprised me was that there wasn't NYPD or MTA already waiting on the platform, blocking any possible access. What shocked me was that our hour up there wasn't filled with other groupies, other guerrilla tourists. That in all of New York City, for a full hour plus it was only us, the art, the art's backlash, the sleeping squatter we saw and any others that we didn't. That we spent an hour alone in the Underbelly. In Hell. Probably for the best that no one else tried to come up there too. Because the tunnels are theirs. And we don't belong. No no no no no no.

(post-script 11.11.10) The NYPD and MTA began sealing this up the following day. I actually suspect that the pile of wooden planks that we walked by in the alcove was a set of makeshift ladders that they had disassembled earlier that day, immediately after the article hit the public. Other people did manage to sneak in, but only a handful, and the only other pictures that I've seen were taken with a cell phone camera. A far larger number of people tried to break in and were either detained or arrested. But if you're moronic enough to attempt to break into a public transport station in New York City while wearing a keffiyeh over your face, you really have that arrest coming:

http://gothamist.com/2010/11/07/people_allegedly_arrested_trying_to.php

From where the palm tree grows.

2010-11-01T21:10:00.017-04:00

Dear Cuba,

I found you.

It took some time, but you came. We had caught glimpses of you before. You were the children playing baseball in a grass lot with a massive visage of Che keeping watch. I heard your symphony sung by birds in the Parque Central; then a six piece band playing "El Cuarto de Tula", three singers coalescing into one voice. Yours.

On our first day here, you were a storm cloud in the Cementerio de Cristóbal Colón . A four minute onslaught of pounding rain, to warn us, a display of what our week could be like if you wanted it to be. You weren't the constant unexpected sunshine that followed for the rest of the trip though. That was beautiful but inescapable, sometimes sweltering. You were that fleeting flirtation in the waning afternoon.

Dear Cuba. I saw you this morning. The procession of uniformed children tossing flowers in the river, out to sea to honor Camilo Cienfuegos. But you weren't the children; you were the many-varied petals. You were what prompted smiles to bloom on their faces. And because their innocent elation was infectious, to spread on mine.

A week chasing you left me with a blister on the ball of my foot that I felt when I rested, paused in my pursuit of you. I looked at it for the first time this morning and saw it was a perfectly-formed crimson heart. You wanted to remind me that love must involve some pain, a struggle. That only someone you love so deeply can reach you in that way. But the pain is our hurdle; it fades. Tested and torn muscles rebuild stronger. Proven capable of bearing the greater weight of our future.

Dear Cuba. You were the woman that welcomed me and my friend into her family's home, and you were her fourteen-year-old cousin there. You asserted your strength, defiance, sovereignty, determination, independence, as others around acquiesced, settled, sold themselves. But you were also that girl's potential. The belief that the next generation that idolizes you will build on all of those virtues. Will manage to reach farther still.

But tonight I saw you clearest, and tonight I understood. You started with a four piece band; three guitars and percussion on an apple box. Not the one of the farmer, but of the filmmaker. The percussionist leaned back with casual artistry. I was impressed; taken aback. "Viva Stevie Wonder" was scribbled on the walls of the courtyard, the white temporal chalk on dark rojo.

You were in the third row as the bands made the air around us tremble. You had a string of flowers falling from your hair. I couldn't help but sneak looks at your dimples, your singing along to songs I'd never dreamed. I didn't walk over to talk to you. Not because I was nervous, but because I couldn't express myself with the passion that I wanted. Not a passion that I felt for you in that instant, but that I felt was required for this country. Something my second semester Spanish never covered.

Dear Cuba. I could have kept talking to the Swiss girls. They were beautiful, but had no passion. They assessed attraction by arithmetic, reduced conversation to a quantity and I needed, need, passion on instinct. I preferred to keep vigil to the night around me, to join in the chorus with those around. With you. The words a mystery but the emotion an impossible clarity.

Dear Cuba. Years of longing and months of planning to come meet you are forever passed. In your history, you were mythology become reality. And now that we've met, you're myth turned flesh, and back again to legend. My lesson that you come from dreams, and to dream you shall return.

Dear Cuba.

We fell in love tonight. I hope you remember in the morning.

(originally written October 30, 2010)

Of a revolution, two.

2010-11-01T09:07:00.009-04:00

I walked around the back of the police car before it pulled away. Abdel and Pilar were now both inside, if not free then at least together. He had squeezed into the center of the cramped backseat, next to the teenage prostitute whose flirtation and pleading at me through the car window had quickly jerked into confusion and fear seconds earlier. Ricardo, myself, and the car that had just rolled off with its human cargo inside were each older than the policia especializada officer that we were speaking to, the one that had started the confrontation. The one that had shifted the tenor of that Havana afternoon.

I type these words for you now rather than later. With an ending as unsurprising as this, why bother building to it?

Two hours earlier I was at my leftist best. If there is a second coming of Joseph McCarthy, a Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, or someone (God help us) nuttier that succeeds in resurrecting HUAC, my morning in Havana's Museo de la Revalucion was probably enough to get me blacklisted. Or exiled. Three stories of the Communist government's time capsule to posterity, complete with a giant park for relics of war vehicles. The typewriter Fidel Castro used to write "History Will Absolve Me," his brother Raul's combat boots, Che Guevara's rifle and beret, the yacht they used in the unsuccessful Granma uprising, Fidel's tank he commanded in the Bay of Pigs affair, the wreckage of the American B-2 shot down during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a memorial flame to the dead that fought for the Revolution. Everything the embargo is in place to keep Americans from seeing, from spending their money on. But certainly no more offensive than the Ronald Reagan Library, and with about as much propaganda.

With our last sight-seeing stop during our 3 days in Havana complete, Ricardo and I walked across the street to one the countless all-purpose tiendas that heavily pepper the city. An amalgam of rum, laundry detergent, beauty products, candy, toilet paper, toothpaste, hot food, and beer for sale; we came in desperate want of the latter two. Neither a free table nor another tourist inside confirmed that we'd made the right choice. Our food was ordered, our bottles of Cristal beer were already sweating from the omnipresent humidity, and each of us looked around for some small vacancy coupled with eye contact as an invitation to sit. Ricardo managed first, and I walked around to the table's other vacant seat, next to a chain-smoking man named Abdel. A table behind me opened four minutes later. A few more minutes of indecision on where to eat, a few more Spanish captions to Revolutionary photos I could have laboriously translated, either of us going to the bathroom again before leaving the museum, and I could be sure Claudia would have seen her parents before she went to sleep tonight. Actually, any of those things and I wouldn't even know who Claudia was.

Instead it was the four of us. Abdel and Pilar with their red and black cans of Bucanero Fuerte, Ricardo and I our green bottles of Cristal. We were each ready for our next round before the food finally arrived. Somehow the smoke of unfiltered cigarettes wasn't a bother, somehow I stumbled through a description of my tattoo in Spanish when asked by Pilar. An hour of good conversation, if difficult to hear with the rowdy neighbors and TV blaring early 90s salsa music videos. When Abdel went to speak to some other friends outside, Pilar told Ricardo and I about their 16 years of marriage, their youngest child a 2 year-old daughter named Claudia.

I greeted Abdel's return with "Claudia?"
"Si, Claudia," his proud smile unobscured by the nub of a cigarette between his lips. He immediately reached for his wallet and a poorly developed dark photo of her. Barrettes, one purple and one green at the bottom of arching side braids, giving her backlit head the look of a trophy to match her paternal identity as one. Conversation switched back to our upcoming trip to Trinidad, the city that every Cuban we'd met urged us to visit, a decision that greatly pleased the couple. Soon we were invited to join them for more drinks at an African-Cuban club, a generosity and an opportunity for something so off the tourist radar we could not pass up. We'd spent days with strangers trying to coax us to one tourist trap or another, their salesman routine as stale as it was transparent. No different than my experience in India, Thailand, Egypt, Prague, Rome, Amsterdam. Experienced backpackers recognize the chasm between bullshit and sincerity, and we knew that Abdel and Pilar were on the right side of that divide.

It took merely the width of the street to get in trouble. As we got to the opposite sidewalk, the very existence of our unlikely foursome of two very dark-skinned Cubanos, a Peruvian-Canadian with a mohawk, and 6'4" white guy in preppy shorts and laceless Chuck Taylors was all it took for Abdel and Pilar to be detained by a member of Havana's Special Police. Their response to every question I managed to translate mentally pulled my stomach lower. Pilar did not have her identification. Abdel's identification was worn, peeling, its picture admittedly sketchy-looking. Minutes of radio conversation passed between the young officer and his superiors before he allowed us to speak the calm words that would eventually set them free.

Ricardo calmed down a frustrated, indignant Abdel as my rudimentary Spanish helped the officer see my explanation for what it was: innocence... the truth. Ricardo's far more fluent corroboration of who we were and where we were headed was the lynchpin that set us all on our way. We walked again, apologizing to Abdel and Pilar profusely for causing them trouble. Pilar's response, a sincere assurance that it wasn't us, made me more disconcerted. It replaced my guilt with sympathy as she explained how they are constantly stopped for identification without proper cause. That their quite obvious African-Cuban heritage forces them to endure constant suspicion. We shook it. We assured them that the afternoon would be great. How Ricardo and I were really looking forward to this club, which according to Abdel would not be a long walk.... which was correct.

"Alto, identificacion."
Ricardo and I looked at one another then down at the officer behind the steering wheel who was speaking to Abdel. The words "no" and "fuck" are universal, as is exasperation. The officer looked at me long enough to acknowledge each of those three things from me but immediately went back to Abdel. Identical routine but this officer was more decorated than the first, I would guess just old enough to pre-date the Revolution, and clearly far less open to negotiations.
Ricardo busied himself with the officer's partner, Pilar with trying to wave down the first officer who initially stopped us less than a block earlier. I found myself looking around at those looking at me. The doormen at the expensive hotel we were in front of, the uniformed military guards at the museum's outdoor exhibition, the German tourists walking by. And the wide-eyed movement in the backseat of the police car; the officers' prior arrest. At fifteen too young for her profession, her insistent flirtation too much for both of those. Her presence really only served to disquiet me further, not just for obvious reasons, but also as an indication that this officer was not one to merely warn.

The first officer's arrival cleared up nothing, instead only prompting his superior to frisk Abdel and then cuff him, catalyzing furious shouting. He made eye contact with Ricardo and I as he was placed into the back of the car. He cut off our frantic apologies with a yell only partially directed at us: "This is the shit because of Fidel."

Pilar was next to him in the car just a few seconds later, choosing her husband over her own freedom. I stumbled another explanation to the officer. "No, no, no problema con nosotros..... Estan muy, muy simpaticos."
"Bien... estan muy simpaticos." He shrugged as he slouched into the driver's seat and turned his attention to the ignition and the sidestreet ahead. Too ashamed and guilty to attempt for eye contact with Abdel, I turned in disbelief and exhaustion to the girl beside him. Earlier she showed her own arrest was an annoyance and a joke, but the terror in her eyes confirmed that his was now more. I wondered if a younger, faded her was in a wallet somewhere in the city. The car drove away.

Ricardo's conversation with the first officer was almost over by the time I could focus on it. "They did nothing wrong-"
"Where are you from?"
"Canada."
"Canada. And there you can just speak against the government and get away with it?"
The irony answered the question for us. It took patience and restraint to keep both of us from pointing back at the Museo de la Revolucion and declaring: "They did."

I type these words in a casa particular, just after sundown, hours after I watched the police car turn the corner and Abdel and Pilar shrink away. I'm going to save this draft and place the file, like the others I have started in Cuba thus far, in a subfolder of a subfolder of an innocuously named folder on my desktop. A precaution I've never taken before in my traveling. Unless the absolute worst happens in customs leaving Cuba, they should be safe there.I type these words grateful that it wasn't me the officer asked the above question to; that I wasn't forced to lie about my nationality to a specialized police officer in a Communist dictatorship or be placed in the back of that already capacity squad car, an American caught with those in suspicion of being against the government.
I type these words hoping that Abdel and Pilar are okay. That once everyone in that car has calmed down and had their backgrounds run, that everything will check out. That Claudia will have her mother and father with her to kiss her goodnight. If not tonight then certainly tomorrow, and many after that.

I type these words with weight of uncertainty; at times the worst oppressor of all.

(***All of the above conversation took place in Spanish, but I translated the more detailed dialogue into English to make it easier to follow.)

Of a revolution, one.

2010-10-30T01:25:00.010-04:00

"The things we need do not amount to much.
Made of abandoned wood, loose stones, and such.
This revolution maybe
Proves who you work for lately..." - Silversun Pickups

"Not all powers have to be discovered; some have to be regained." - John Fowles

A Cuba Libre is a rum and Coke, in some bars livened with a piece of mint or some lime. Its enjoyment derives from the sweetness of its individual ingredients, but also its simplicity. Anyone can make it, at pretty much anytime, with basics most people have already. From my experience, it's also what a lot of people start drinking when they're new to alcohol. It is later that they acquire the taste for bourbon, gin and tonics, martinis, old-fashioneds, but rum and Coke gets lost somewhere early on the road, crowded out by complexity.

It's a conversation I've had thirty or forty times. What I love about living in New York. It's really just rehashing the obvious, maybe confirming the stereotype that there is literally something to do at all hours. Any cuisine you want, any esoteric decor for a bar just a Metrocard swipe away. When bored with itself, the world turns to New York and the City, like no other in existence, quenches and electrifies. For visitors it often appears a cultural and social hurricane, but living there one is happily in its eye.

I spend most of my time with my nose to the concrete and glass mosaic, focused on the idiosyncrasies that add to the insiders' enjoyment. The brunch place in LES that will make pretty much any dish from any cuisine but will absolutely not accept parties of more than 4, the neo-speakeasies that change phone numbers every 6 weeks or can only be entered by dialing a certain number at a certain phone booth, the constant guessing game of what that night's color scheme for the top of the Empire State Building is celebrating; the little machinations that keep away the boredom in what is already the least boring city in the world. With only weekend trips since becoming acclimated in New York, this is my first true chance to step away from that masterpiece, to see what else can be found in other galleries.

Fittingly, I chose a place of further complication as my destination. The one country in the world that as an American I wasn't legally allowed to visit, where it was impossible to even look up flight prices because the embargo blocked such online searches. A country where hostels don't exist and you need to register your location with the government every day of your trip. I spent 40 minutes being searched at customs coming in, every item I owned examined in detail, the serial number of this laptop I'm writing on recorded in a customs agent's notepad in the Varadero airport. I can only imagine what's awaiting me at customs on my journey out of Cuba. And worse, clearing them when returning to the US ("A bit tan for spending 10 days in Toronto in late October, wouldn't you say, sir?") But it wasn't the complications that drew me, it was the taboo. The opportunity to not simply peek behind the curtain of the forbidden, but to spend over a week exploring what unknowns lurked beyond. An elaborate exercise in reverse psychology.

As our first full day here came to a close, my friend Ricardo and I walked several kilometers along the darkened El Maecon, much of it without conversation; but our silence wasn't born of a lack of interesting topics or boredom. For those minutes that swelled into hours, we merely wanted to observe rather than dictate. To inhale with nostrils, eyes, ears, and intellect the layers of the culture around us. We had left our casa paticular hours earlier in search of authentic Cuban food and a bar that locals would visit for this Saturday night in Havana. We gorged ourselves with seafood and flavorful entrees but failed in the latter. Few Habanas seemed to be congregated anywhere and we found ourselves for the second time that day on El Malecón, the winding highway and walkway that borders the ocean in the capital city. It was immediately apparent why the bars were empty. There were a few gaps of cement ledge in that hour-plus of distance, but they were either smaller than three feet or were the perma-damp sections where the Atlantic's waves scale the wall's height to reach land. The people of the city, what felt like the entire nation, formed a chain of laughter, smiles, passed bottles, and shared boxes of cigarettes along the salted breezes of the exhaling Atlantic. There was no festival, nothing special about this weekend for them. A beautiful Saturday night simply meant spending it along the ocean with the one person or handful of companions that they wanted to be with.

Take 10 Wall Street bankers and 10 everyday Cubans and ask who is less stressed. Who enjoys life more. Who is simply happier. It shouldn't take much to achieve this plateau; contentment is a quick, basic emotion. Stock portfolios and applications for private pre-schools, lists for clubs, closet coke habits, gambling debts and contrived crises only add impediments between us and our remarkably simple access to joy. Stockpiling of possessions and vices that build a barrier to keep us out rather than the two or three simple ingredients that can easily form a bridge. The basic combinations that can make us happy. Havana Club and Coca-Cola, a stick and something remotely round enough to work as a ball, one star and five stripes, a can of Cristal beer and conversation, a tiny waist and wide hips, the ocean breeze and the laughter of a friend, an acoustic guitar and portable bongos, eye contact and a suppressed smile.

A girl I recently ended things with didn't take it well and tried to insult me by saying "whatever, you don't even have a bed." And she's right. I don't have one. I also don't own a car, a tv, an iphone, or a normal computer. I don't have many modern distractions and conveniences because for 5 months I lived without them and felt more myself than ever. The true individual that I am, for the first time. I abandoned a lot things that in some ways prevented me from constantly feeling the emotions that most people strive and fail to feel. Or keeping me from being the person that I want to be. What I have instead is a supply of v-neck t-shirts, a pair of blue jeans, my camera and a stack of unfinished books. What I have is my passport. And vigilant determination.

I'm a New Yorker now. Only 10 months in, I feel and act like a true local, carry a disdain for snail-paced tourists, anything and everything Boston, and the G train. I'm surrounded by the machinations that keep life complicated, and fully enjoy them because in many ways they manage to keep the monotony of the status quo safely at bay. But some part of my heart beats with the rhythm of a Cubano. I'll indulge in the eccentricities but I don't ever feel ensnared by them. I don't need them. I have what I need. And because of that I am free.

(*written October 24, 2010).

On angels with dirty faces.

2010-08-14T22:15:00.017-04:00

"You want to know what I've had to eat in the past twenty-four hours? One hot dog and twenty-seven pints of beer." - Eric (last name unknown)

I've been asked a few hundred times in the past seven months whether I miss L.A. My stock answer to such a stock question is "I miss my friends." I love Los Angeles, but New York holds so much more for me. Diverse inconsistency. I wake up each morning to the rumbling of industrial trucks and machinery on a small street in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and then sit up to see the New York City skyline biting upwards into the blue morning. Last night I stood on a roof in Hell's Kitchen with several people, each of us drinking and looking out over a different perspective of that same skyline. Still the Empire State Building, but also the New York Times building- a neatly stacked pile of illumination cresting out of midtown, and most vitally one I had never seen before at night: a tall one topped with the giant red words NEW YORKER, proclaiming not merely a magazine, but a life. A choice. A burden. A struggle. A persona. But now officially my persona, my struggle, my burden, my choice. My life.

I don't miss the city of L.A. with an active longing because I honestly don't think about it except for impulsive palpitations. Wishing that the Hot 97 morning show playing at the gym was Kevin & Bean instead, for one. But this isn't a story about New York or California, not yet. At first it's about Jersey.

First time there. I've refused to go to the Shore, to Hoboken, to.... whatever the hell else is in Jersey. I've let several invitations and opportunities go uncashed. But today my beloved Los Angeles Galaxy were visiting the New York Red Bulls and their shiny new stadium in Harrison, New Jersey, and all the self-loathing hangovers in the world wouldn't keep me away.

The vast majority of people in Los Angeles, no matter how many Dodgers or Lakers games they attend, miss out on the experience of going to a game. My first time was in London, March 2008. I somehow convinced my great friend Jennifer to fly out from Los Angeles to London for the weekend to attend a Fulham/Manchester United game with me, then met up with 2 more friends there. The morning of the game, wearing my brand new McBride jersey at a flea market in Notting Hill, a vendor smirked at the FFC team badge on my chest before delivering his heavy cockney: "Gonna need a miracle today, bruv." A bit later we emerged from a crowded tube ride to see an armada of neon green: dozens of police shoulder to shoulder, cautiously appraising the supporters headed to the stadium. The Three Bells, a pub that we four had been to the afternoon before, was taken over by the Red Army, Man U supporters, nearly a thousand chanting in perfect unison. The Thames to our left, we walked through Bishops' Park, the former hunting grounds of Anne Boleyn, surrounded by children in miniature Rooney and Ronaldo jerseys, families of five and six in matching team kits. In New York five months later, I took the subway to a game at Yankee Stadium, the final one between the Red Sox and Yankees at the old grounds. On the 4 train, there was a lot of light-hearted jawing between fans, but there was also an elderly man in a pinstripe jersey and navy NY hat speaking to a group of teenagers. They were asking him in reverent, almost shy tones about the 70 years worth of games that he had been to. I became a silent addition to his audience as he described the best Yankees outfield ever, obscure players swallowed by history and the brightness of neighboring stars, memories of his father taking him to games, of being seated on his dad's shoulders as they entered the archways. Games in the days when night games and floodlights didn't exist, when every single man wore a hat to a game, and that hat was a fedora.

As for me, today, I caught the PATH train in the financial district, my long-sleeved Beckham jersey drawing glares from those around me in white Henry #14's. Shoulders brushing against two Red Bulls fans drinking tallboys cocooned in paper bags. I began talking with the man in front of me, his persistent questions finally overcoming the silence of my still moderately self-loathing hangover. His jeans, boots, and hands hinted at what he confirmed, that he was a construction worker at the World Trade Center site. We talked very little about sports, instead mainly about the still disastrous job market, hubris, and the causes and realities of falling empires. In twenty minutes we were shaking hands goodbye and stepping out into New Jersey. Into a flood of a lot more #14 Henry's. Into the noise of a lot more heckles from Red Bulls fans directed at me.

I attended the match alone, with a ticket I bought from a scalper minutes before kickoff. Once inside, I could have sat with my good friend Matt, who was at the game as well, but what I wanted most from this game was something that every other afternoon spent on this coast has failed to give me. I listened for the chanting, I looked for the checkered scarves, and after only a few seconds of searching, I spotted them. Beaming, hangover defeated, I walked in their direction.

Back in Los Angeles, at the many games I attended, I never sat with them. I never had a full conversation with any of them. But back when Jared and I would shell out 2 days of income on a ticket in the VIP section of games and would be the only ones down there standing, chanting, holding our scarves aloft during corner kicks or after goals, they noticed us. They hated every privileged golf-clapper in the VIP on principle, but they looked at us differently. They found us after games and shook our hands, nodded with approving smiles. We didn't just have their attention, we had their respect. The LA Riot Squad and the Angel City Brigade, the hardcore supporters groups of the LA Galaxy. The type of fans that stand and scream chants the full 90+ minutes of game time. The type of fans that fly 3,000 miles to give the Galaxy their extremely vocal support on the road. 50 made the trip to New York. But when they started chanting and clapping to the ire of the home crowd, they now numbered 51.

I spoke with Mike and Eric, both middle-aged fans that were more than just blind supporters, but guys that knew a hell of a lot about the game and the team. Mike had flown out for this game from Anaheim... Eric? From England. We talked about past games we'd both been to... the rivalry games, the Superclasico derbies, the international friendlies with the likes of AC Milan. Mike used a hushed tone twice this afternoon. Once to tell me "In 14 years, there haven't been a whole lot of games that I've missed." The other time was to extend an official invitation. Next time I was in LA at a Galaxy game, come to parking lot 13. He'd be there, with the rest of the ACB. Those were two sentences among two and a half hours worth of what felt mostly like catching up with a familiar voice in a familiar surrounding, even though in reality it was neither.

This really doesn't have to do with soccer. It has to do with Venn diagrams. With nostalgia. With something that I experience far less than some might expect because I equate it with a city and not with individuals: this has to do with being homesick. Aside from my friends, there are other things I miss about Los Angeles. Even if I had to go to New Jersey to find that out. When I go back for a weekend in September, I won't be able to make it to a taco Tuesday, or even out to lot 13 at the Home Depot Center. But I'll definitely be seeing Mike and Eric and around 48 other semi-familiar faces again next season, in the exact same section, probably in the same jerseys. Because the Galaxy was winning (did win, 1-0) and because the New York fans were so quiet, a few times during the game we chanted "This is our house." We said it like we meant it. I absolutely did. But for me, it was a phrase that had very little to do with soccer.

National anthem.

2010-07-04T01:50:00.027-04:00

"If you're feelin' what I'm feelin', c'mon,
All you soul-searchin' people, c'mon..." - Delta Spirit

The hour struck somewhere during the rowdy Delta Spirit set, maracas slamming on to the heads of giant drums, Matt Vasquez leading the packed 9:30 Club in an egoless, self-unaware dance party. Emotions untethered, of both the band on the stage and us in the rolling, breaking crowd, limbs flailing along just minutes after he calmed us with a gospel spiritual, with an a cappella rendition of Ray Charles, after he brought many to tears with the song he wrote and dedicated to his grandparents- the lyrics tracing his grandfather's complaints of heaven's loneliness as he waits for his love to join him there. It was the hour of another midnight, another waning Saturday becoming a Sunday, but one of uncommon significance. That of July 3rd becoming July 4th, and the liveliest people in Washington D.C. recognizing the precise beauty of both that setting and that moment.

I arrived anxious to hear "Bushwick Blues," a song off their new album that couldn't describe me better if the lyrics contained my last name. After opening with that, Delta Spirit launched in to not merely the greatest concert of my life, but one of the greatest handful of hours. Hours with an awareness of context rather than self. Brilliant music heightened in that it poured forth from a guitar covered in scrawled black pen static that read "ZINN.... The people," in homage to the historian's A People's History of the United States. Bantering before the set closer, the ubiquitous "Play Freebird!" was screamed from the crowd, and they actually played "Freebird".... in doing so professing the fulfillment of their seventh grade-rockstar dreams in front of the largest band they had ever performed for, and on their favorite holiday. Matt Vasquez spoke of wanting to move a crowd like Louis Armstrong, and with the last song of the night he managed it, descending into the epicenter of the audience floor, calming all of our sweating bodies and beaming faces into silence and getting us to crouch low to the ground before leading us in the "Little bit louder now" bridge and ensuing chorus of "Shout!" as crepe paper streamers danced down from the rafters, our clutching hands reaching up to their dance through the vibrating air. A concert far more about this nation's incredible history and talents that we all embrace, than simply a rock-soul band from San Diego.

Seconds before, he had implored us: "If music has ever meant anything to you in your life, prove it, right now." We did. Substitute the word "music" with "America" and we accomplished that as well. With one phrase, Delta Spirit summarized what I've found myself striving to do nearly every moment of the past few months of my life. Because when you prove yourself out of internal desire and love of an ideal, rather than as a demand from others, it means inexpressibly more.

Midnight struck again the following night as Joanna and I stood on her roof, looking out over Washington D.C. and Virginia, with fireworks displays, at least 20, simultaneously erupting in all directions in the night above us. A few hours before we were on a balcony of the Capitol, watching fireworks ignite the air above the National Mall. Twelve hours later, we would be with more friends lazily floating down the Potomac River, the forests of West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland inching by our sunburned shoulders.

July 4th in D.C. After the exile comes the embrace. Comes the recognition of what home is. And the privilege of proving what it means to me.

From one, many.

2010-04-16T00:03:00.026-04:00

****It is important to me that anyone who reads this post understands that I do not hate Republicans, or all members of the Tea Party movement. I hate ignorance. It is a disease that exists on both sides of the aisle, and that I recognize as breeding in recent years. My writing below is admittedly passionate, if only due to my growing concern that the 2010's are looking eerily similar to the 1860's. Let this not be a condemnation but a call. Not to arms, but to minds.

"The God I believe in worked on a campaign trail." - Brand New

The roads of Washington, D.C. are on the grid system. Sort of. It's an exercise in controlled chaos, a roadmap I get in theory but don't really understand. More accurately it is an array of splintered streets and fractures. It is looking through the singularity of a lens and viewing the multitude of a kaleidoscope. From one, many.

I can't relate one episode to capture my time in Washington, D.C. My long, long overdue inaugural trip to our nation's capitol. I want to bring it all back, every second, every shared laugh with my friends here I was able to reconnect with. Every bite of the burgers at Good Stuff, the half-smokes at Ben's Chili Bowl, the sips of the orange slushy drink served in Mason jars known simply as Awesomeness at Little Miss Whiskey's, or beers at James Hoban's. I wanted to pack every tear shed during "Taps" at Arlington National Cemetery, not merely by me but those around me. The collective emotion that simple, familiar notes on a trumpet can conjure. From one trumpet, emotion and gratitude released by many.

The trip to D.C. is atypical of my travels so far. It lacks the exotic mystique of Southeast Asia or alien concrete of former Soviet bloc countries, but more than that it was not an exercise in solitude. I have friends there. My arrival delivers me to a setting where there are people that care about me. Not the spirit of frontier but of familiarity. That's something acutely vital to me, especially now as I'm so far removed from my close friends. Three months into my new life in New York, I only recently have felt I'm beginning to settle into a community whose niche I am tailoring myself. This reunion of friendship also means that many of my experiences in D.C. were shared. The memories are not solely mine to relate.

Near midnight Wednesday, my good friend Joanna and I visited the Lincoln Memorial on the 145th Anniversary of his assassination. We ascended the steps to where the giant gleaming statue of our nation's greatest hero sits perched, eternally looking out over the picturesque modern city, the capitol of the nation that he saved in its most desperate hour. As I walked up the steps, I thought only of one word: vigil. The spirit enshrined in that chamber, the one that fills those who visit for more than just a snapshot or a postcard- it is with this ever-present aura that he still keeps us safe. In the vacuum of that chamber by night, when the tourists are absent, that spirit is palpable. The central emotion of what kept our nation alive despite the depths of adversity is enveloping, penetrating. Hope. 145 years later, at a time of the worst division and partisanship in our history since the Civil War, the icon of Lincoln delivers hope.

I needed this the following day. Desperately. For curiosity's sake, I attended a Tea Party rally in D.C. There, I saw the fervor of total ignorance. I saw denial and bigotry masquerade as patriotism. I saw white face after white face after white face after white face coupled with the proclamation that this is the true representation of America. A bit later I was back at the Lincoln Memorial, descending the steps as Tea Party tourists ascended them, hands clutching signs that called our current President a tyrant. The same exact word that John Wilkes Booth hurled at Lincoln's already expiring body after he cowardly shot him in the back of the head. I felt like talking to these people, telling them "Stop. Turn around. Clearly you don't get it. Your presence here, in front of this statue and what it stands for... It is beyond a joke. It's blasphemy."

I couldn't. For the sole reason that this is not my country alone. We are a tapestry. From one flag, many stars. From one nation, many ideas. I have no doubt that of the two mindsets at the rally or on those steps, I'm the one upholding Lincoln's spirit. The one embracing healthy debate. The rational discussion of valid ideas rather than the hurling of hyperbolic and cliched insults. I want bipartisanship more than anything. I want a better America through union, not a tug-of-war government. Because of President Obama's historic victory, it's spewed by the right-wing these days, but no matter which side is saying it, the phrase "Take our country back" enrages me more than I can possibly express. To all those that say it, whether pundit or lemming, to every bumper sticker that proclaims it should be affixed another one:

Go fuck yourself.
This country was never yours to own. Just as it isn't mine. It does not belong to you, and the arrogance of your assumption only ratifies just how unworthy you are of it.

If you read even a few words of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and if you truly get what those documents are saying, you realize how absurd such a statement is. You realize that we are a kaleidoscopic nation, not by accident or modern evolution, but by the design and principles of our founders. From many, we are one.

I watched footage of the 9/11 attacks at D.C.'s Newseum and saw the faces of those around me in the packed room echo my emotion. This brought me back to that unforgettable Tuesday afternoon as I sat in an overcrowded hospital waiting room attempting to give blood. I don't remotely care what ideologies those around me had, on that day in 2001 or this one nine years later. My patriotism in the blooming of many diverse petals from the one stem of our nation is surpassed only by the union when these many synchronize into one force, one action, one hope. One singular wonder, like that of the U.S. Capitol illuminated against an ink sky.

Joshua: "Are you ever NOT completely amazed when you see that? I mean, does it ever get old?"
JoJo: "Nnnnope. Never."

My faulty, idealist wish would be that from the many that visited Washington, D.C. during the time that I did and all those who will in the months and generations to come, one emotion of congruency and compromise would spring forth. Or to reverse the paradigm, that the one sight of Lincoln keeping nightwatch over the city that is the cradle of our nation, that many individuals will take up his burden, and carry on his legacy.

With glowing hearts (desplus brillants exploits).

2010-02-26T13:22:00.015-05:00

"The person who doesn't make mistakes is unlikely to make anything." - Paul Arden

(or)

"Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity." - Michael Chabon

It's really only a mistake if you ask my malnourished bank account. If you ask a pragmatist. If you ask my impossibly nervous immediate family (who has no clue what I just did). It's really only a mistake if you want to play it safe. If you want to save up for a rainy day. If you put faith in the word "maybe." If you trust the word "hopefully." "Someday."

It's really only a mistake if you ignore the fact that not going is a far, far larger one.

I started my part-time job yesterday. The first day I have worked since July 2. The first time my income was not a lump sum from selling my car, or from Christmas presents, or a generous loan from a loved one. Wait... this is important, but not the beginning. This story starts earlier, kaleidoscopically.

The sportscaster/comedian Kenny Mayne spoke at the Barnes & Noble at the Grove a few years back and I listened as he talked about the certain sports events that you absolutely have to go to in your life. The Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby, the World Series, the Olympics. I had never actually considered that last one.

A few months later, as my friends and I played the extremely self-destructive game of pub golf for my birthday, every bar on Main Street in Santa Monica was airing the Opening Ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games. My friend Jeffrey surprised me by revealing that that was one of his lifelong bucket list dreams, to attend the Olympics. And the reason, from what my vodka-misted memory can recall, actually had little to do with sports or the events themselves. Rather the overall experience, the pageantry and spectacle of the world converging in one area for one massive celebration.

Sixteen months and 20,000 miles later I had insomnia. I was awake at 2 in the morning in my childhood house in Pennsylvania, an interminable two week visit to a village that was once home. And when I wasn't being lectured about disparaging the tea party movement or for not sitting at rapt attention during the homily at Christmas Eve mass, I was having withdrawals from the road. I missed the new experiences, the lifestyle, the camaraderie of backpackers. I missed what people far too often simply call feeling alive but really is the recognition and confidence of absolute sovereignty. At 2 a.m., I was still mulling over the invite I'd received a month earlier from another backpacker I had met in Jordan to visit Vancouver in February. A free place to stay and face value tickets to three Olympic events. I had no money, no job prospects, no clue even where I'd be living or how much rent I would be paying when I got to New York in two weeks. And then I realized what an idiot I was being. All the people in the world that would jump at such an opportunity, all the people that with starry eyes and meek voices say "Well, maybe... hopefully, someday" and I sat mulling it over. I leaped out of my bed and then had to wait a good ten minutes for my mother's ancient laptop to load to the point where I could send the email. One not much longer than "I'm coming. I'll figure out the details and logistics later, but I'll be there."

February 20th rolled around and, still no television job, only a part-time one that was being delayed by this trip and down to the vapors of my checking account, I boarded a plane to Vancouver.

For five months, I went to the world. I ran an absurdly large spectrum of cultures, people, cuisines, languages, customs, conversations, currencies, experiences. Memories. For the past five days, in Vancouver, I let the world come to me. A singer-songwriter belting out lyrics in French at the Maison du Quebec, telling an anecdote about his dreams of being a hockey player fizzling after one 22-0 peewee hockey loss in which he was the deluged losing goaltender- how his father played him a song to cheer him up and how his love of music grew from that. Tiny Russian toddlers clapping and spasmodically dancing outside of Vancouver's giant-disco-ball-looking Science World that served as the Sochi 2014 Pavilion, slapping together thundersticks printed in Cyrillic that they could barely hold in their growing hands. Germans rooting for America at a downtown sports bar called Malone's, even painting flags on their cheeks in support of the US against Canada in hockey, and then using the same palette of colors to paint Swedish flags on the faces of a family from Montana. Thousands of people simultaneously taking pictures of the striking Olympic Cauldron, unified in wonder of how beautiful something as basic as lights and fire could be. Watching part of the Slovakia/Norway game on a TV in the Hudson Bay Company's window, there was an incredibly violent hit where a Slovakian player was knocked unconscious, blood pooling from the back of his head after it slammed on the ice- a crowd of 15 or so assembled in silence and concern, finally broken by a man asking me in a trembling whisper what happened, and then translating in Czech to his friends what I was saying. Worry and fright that transcended languages, that was common ground. The city of Vancouver itself: stumbling upon a back alley in the Gastown district covered with some of the best street art I've seen outside of New York and Berlin- the alley was a government funded initiative for convicted graffitiers to create art more complex than simple tagging, the city allowing the street to be their canvas. I found this out from a homeless man who didn't ask for any money, just took joy in a stranger finding beauty and excitement in something he got to see everyday. Just relishing in the pride and opportunity to be a tour guide was enough for him. People I met for five seconds that I will remember the rest of my life.

The Olympics. It has so little to do with the actual events. In the same way Thailand had little to do with the famous temples, or Brussels with the Mannekin Pis, or New York with the Empire State Building, or LA, home, with the Hollywood Sign or Chinese Theatre.

Kenny Mayne was right for advising. Jeffrey Harris was right for wishing. And I was right for going.

The Golden Age doesn't happen in your living room. You walk outside your front door or take a plane to a new city and it meets you somewhere along the way.

Vancouver: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2117303&id=35804394&l=4e94846d6e

Closing argument.

2009-12-22T22:30:00.017-05:00

"Searching for patterns in static,
They start to make sense
The longer I'm at it." - Death Cab for Cutie

"This is me with the world on the tip of my tongue." - Taking Back Sunday

"They say they never really miss you 'til you dead or you gone,
So on that note I'm leaving after this song." - Jay-Z

There is a shot from the BBC series Planet Earth of a hurricane raging above America's Gulf Coast. It is especially memorable to the viewer because the camera that captured it was in space, high above the carnage on the ground, where the true scope and scale of the hurricane itself can be observed rather than the individual winds that comprise it. With our feet on the ground we normally measure the hurricane's effects, the devastation left in places like the Lower Ninth Ward or Galveston. We listen to interviews of those whose lives have been forever changed by circumstance, if we bother to listen at all. We pay little attention to the hurricane itself, to all the ignored miles of ocean that it encompasses. We break it down to the parts that we can quantify and comprehend, the Saffir-Simpson scale, property damages in the hundreds of millions. This approach casts the hurricane as something random, incomprehensible. That shot reminds us that there is a poetry to its grandeur.

The most beautiful quality of traveling for so long is that you see more than a list of cities, or an enumeration of monuments. The phrase "see the world" is used pretty casually, has lost basically all its meaning. But because I was in so many different countries, I saw more than similarities between a few of them. For this small period of time in my life, I really feel like I saw the world. Its true scope, its true scale. Not merely similarities or parallels between one city and another, but how these parallels themselves were part of something greater. More than lines on a map. Something closer to the lines of sheet music.

It started with Rembrandt. Going to museums nearly every day, in every new city, I was seeing a large number of his ninety-some self-portraits. The Louvre and Musee d'Orsay in Paris, the National Galleries of London and Edinburgh, Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam, the Uffizi in Florence. Even when this began, I didn't just walk up to his portrait and move on. Early on I was struck by the differences between them. The darker shading creeping in at the ages when he was poorer, more depressed. The fluctuating number of lines in his face, whether or not his eyes held a glint or its more-telling absence. I remember one of the portraits I saw towards the latter part of my time in Europe was bittersweet. In it Rembrandt was young, proud and self-assured. I felt oddly happy to see him like this, the simple joy as when you visit an old friend you have been out of contact with for a while, one who is doing better than expected. But I grew somewhat mournful because I had already seen what he could not- the pain that he would go through later in his life, the darker pigments that would inch closer from the edges of the canvas.

At the British Museum in London, I saw an exhibit on dogu, small carved figures from ancient Japan. When I visited Tokyo three months later, the same traveling exhibit was about to open at its National Museum in Ueno Park. The Tokyo Tower is modeled after the Eiffel in Paris, more colorful, far more utilitarian, but the resemblance is clear. I walked by restaurants in Estonia and Cambodia that share names. At the Sony headquarters in Tokyo's Ginza district, there are large Lego sculptures of the Coliseum in Rome, the floating torii at Miyajima, and Angkor Wat. I couldn't help but beam at the sight. I had not only been to each of them; I'd been to each within the past two months.

This pattern and repetition goes beyond arts and sights. When less specific, it grows more acute. I've been attracted to street art for years, but in Europe it became something more, especially after Berlin. Leaving Europe for the Middle East and then Southeast Asia, the street art doesn't just change. For the most part it disappears altogether. I can't remember seeing any at all in India or Cambodia. Because graffiti is an indication of disposable income. If people are doing everything they can just to afford food, the idea of purchasing spray paint merely for self-expression is absurd. This holds true for smoking as well. In my two weeks in India and Cambodia, I saw two locals smoking on the streets. And weirdly enough, they both had the exact same unnerving posture: crouched low to the ground, like a gargoyle, their bent knees at eye level, hunched shoulders and arms inside of these. Two people of different nationalities that will never meet, almost assuredly don't have the money to ever leave the borders of their own country, yet identical in that telling stance. After watching the first one in India for a few minutes, I knew what I would see in the second on the streets of Battambang. They were both silently aggressive, not towards me but others, both native and foreign, who walked by. A belligerence that was inappropriate given their situation. Something like prey trying desperately to be a predator.

It started with Rembrandt. It continued with us all. The main park in Riga, Latvia contains a small bridge covered in locks with the names of couples. On their wedding day, these lovers clasp the lock around the wrought iron and throw the key in to the river below. Eternal love manifest. Similar sunken keys can be found hundreds of miles away at the bottom of the Arno River in Florence, Italy, beneath the picturesque Ponte Vecchio. Here the same tradition is carried out. It's not important which came first. Chronology is inconsequential; commonality alone is essential. A few kilometers away from the Ponte Vecchio, on a side street I came across graffiti of a potted flower, its stem making up the last "i" of the accompanying word "imagini." I'd seen this a month and a half earlier in Barcelona, on another side street nowhere near any of the tourist attractions. Comparing the pictures on my laptop, I saw that the flowers and the penmanship were different. It was not the same artist, but the same concept, the same emotion. My emotion. Our emotion.

In these twenty-one weeks that have just come to a close, I have been privileged to have the perspective of that camera watching the hurricane rage. I've seen life on the ground, as we all do, but I have managed to also see life from above. In this time, I have watched the Earth swirl, and I have watched the Earth dance. And I have seen the symmetry in the choreography. The intrinsic rhythms we follow, unknowingly, movements merging into the one grand symphony.

That I enjoyed this perspective deeply might make it sound like I have a God complex. I don't think that's true. What I do have is a Prodigal Son complex. What I do have is the desire to leave, experience, and return. I know that I am not the same person that left five months ago, but I also don't think I'm a different one. Hopefully just deeper. Hopefully my change is due to growth. Roots stretching lower, firmer, from the lessons that have come by watching those winds, by listening to their melody. On this trip there is only one lesson left to share. The one that helped me the most on my travels.

Florence. Piazza Di Santa Croce. Still part of that makeshift study abroad phase I wrote about earlier. I have no idea why this lesson came here specifically, and it wasn't inspired by anything that happened to me or that I observed. Maybe when you're in the city of Dante and in the square that holds his majestic statue, you're prone for hyperbole. But I don't think that's what this is. It's a sentence that just arrived in my head, too curious to let go. Like a truth so simple you're positive you can disprove it, but you can't.... you know, like that no word rhymes with "silver" or "month."

You are immortal every day of your life except for one.

Immortal. Not invulnerable, we still must suffer the same pains, the same frailties. But there's only one morning you will see that won't be followed by a night. Maybe this is closer to that God complex, but I still would disagree. It's just the definition of being human. I think we live down to our expectations so much, we forget our limitations are a little bit elastic. We are capable of so much more. We can go a little farther, accomplish a little bit more than we did yesterday. And we can let those yesterdays add up for the rest of our lives. When I woke up in the morning, in Doha, in Wadi Musa, in Chiang-Mai, in Phnom Penh, in Pakse, in Kyoto, in Los Angeles, in Linesville, Pennsylvania, and a few weeks from now in Brooklyn, this thought was, is, and will be somewhere on my mind. It's the thought that got me out of danger in Egypt, through the severe stomach pains and solitude in Istanbul, and pushed me farther on the rock trails of Petra, the pounding rains of the Kyoto streets, the one in my head every time I took the stairs instead of the escalator, when I went running today for the first time since July, snow cascading down from a 22 degree white sky.

It is the thought on my mind as I officially end this journey.

And it will be the thought on my mind when I begin my next one.

___________________________

(post-script) Thank you so much for reading this, whether it is your first post, or you've been with me the whole way. In some ways this was a lifeline to everyone back home, and your support has been phenomenal. This will be the last post I write on this blog..... for now. I'm sure that that Prodigal Son complex will kick in again, even if it's just for a week or two, and when that happens, I'll probably be spilling my brains out about it here. As for the time til then, I've fallen back in love with writing, but I'm still unsure if this will translate into an actual separate blog. There was something very special about these last 5 months of my life, and I don't want to water that down. We'll see.

Thank you again for the company.

Joshua

You only live twice.

2009-12-15T14:56:00.027-05:00

"Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

The first time I lived Monday, December 14, 2009, it began somewhere in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. My eyes absorbed the snaked neon of incomprehensible characters that comprised the world above and around me. Standing on the pavement and looking straight up, the buildings were so tall as to appear curved, like a seprent's teeth from the perspective of inside its jaws. The view of someone who can't escape. In so many ways, after over four months on the road, I didn't want to.

I can't tell you exactly where I began Monday, December 14, 2009 the second time I lived it. It was somewhere between cans of Kirin, 34,000 feet above the seemingly interminable Pacific Ocean. It was either during conversation or a well deserved sleep, not just after staying out all night and all day to close out my time in Tokyo, but after 146 days of distance between myself and Los Angeles. 146 sunrises away from home.

At 10 a.m. I was sitting next to Corey Irwin, driving back from the airport, inhaling some of my first breaths of Los Angeles air. But four hours later, at 2 p.m., I was thinking about how I had not seen anyone I knew (other than Kelly and Cory Santos) for nearly five full months. I was still anticipating how those first few handshakes and hugs would go, even though they had somehow already happened.

At noon I was eating a burger with Jenn at The Counter in Santa Monica, but at the same time I was also eating phenomenal sushi in the basement of the Seibu building in Tokyo. I was enjoying medium-rare beef, sweet potato fries, sweet shrimp nigiri, the greatest slice of raw toro I could imagine, washing all of this down with a Sprite Zero, with a crisp glass of Suntory Malts draft, exchanging glances with LA models, exchanging glances with Japanese cougars.

At 9 p.m. I was cramped in seat 41E talking to Vinnie, a sailor in the U.S. Navy who was going back home to Palm Springs to spend his two-week leave with his family. We were ordering more rounds of Kirin while talking about our various experiences in Tokyo, his time in Singapore, mine in Egypt. At 9 p.m. I was lounging in a leather chair at South, surrounded by friends I've known for months, years, and decades, sharing some of the same stories, but with a bigger smile on my face this time around.

Flux. The name for this paradox is flux. For 21 weeks I have lived a life that seemed impossible. So why not break the laws of physics, be in two places at the same time, and live forty-two hours on Monday, December 14, 2009 that embodied that surrealism.

At 9 a.m. I was standing in a queue at LAX, waiting to go through customs. I was filling out a landing card that asked me to list the countries I had been to on this visit and that provided two small lines of empty space for a response. All I wrote was "29."

At 9 a.m. I was standing on the grounds of the Zozo-ji Temple by Tokyo Tower, looking at rows of tiny memorial statues, lovingly tended to and dedicated to mizuko. I was meditating in front of the larger statue of Jizo, the Bodhisattva and protector of travelers. With emotions building, with gentle tears in my eyes for having to give up this life I had led for the past few months, I was doing the one last symbolic act I felt compelled to do to end my time not merely in Tokyo, or Japan, but on this trip entire.

In the theoretically complex modern-age-crossing of the international date line, he wasn't just about to safely guide me home. Even though I was standing on pebbles and blades of grass in Tokyo, he somehow already had.

And at 9 a.m. I was thanking him.

Tokyo:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2119845&id=35804394&l=9cd01795b6

There is a light that never goes out.

2009-12-08T06:35:00.031-05:00

"I can't fix something this complex any more than I could build a rose." - Jakob Dylan

As if I wasn't crying enough already, she handed me a paper crane.

Something between a Japanese fairy tale and an idiom, it is said that a person that folds one thousand paper cranes will have their dreams come true. I know of this, like most people that do, because of Sadako Sasaki. Sadako was two years old on August 6, 1945, when at 8:15 in the morning the sky exploded above Hiroshima, Japan. She was in her home, a mile from the hypocenter near the Aioi-bashi Bridge. She did not die right away, was quite healthy for a number of years actually. But at the age of nine, she developed a series of skin conditions, radical ones, that were diagnosed to be leukemia, one of the lingering legacies of the nuclear fallout. Sadako began folding. Knowing this legend, she strove to assemble this grand flock of paper cranes so that her deepest wish could come true: survival. Sadako died before she came close to reaching her goal, but her friends and classmates decided to finish the rest for her after she had already left them. In Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park, there is a statue in Sadako's memory, one with a bell, the clapper (that hanging part that actually strikes the side and makes the noise) is a gold origami-style crane. What makes this monument stand out above the several hundred that I have seen but not written about is not the main part, but the glass sheds that surround the statue. From far away, even from as close as eight or ten feet, the multi-colored interiors look like ribbons, crafted signs urging world peace. You need to get up very close to appreciate the artistry. The meticulous detail of the folds. Because they aren't ribbons or normal signs but rows and rows of tiny origami strung together, pasted to a board. An infinite flock of cranes made by schoolchildren throughout Japan, constantly being donated and rotated as they have been for the past half century, all in honor and memory of Sadako Sasaki.

I was privileged enough to see a few dozen of Sadako's actual cranes. I was struck by how tiny they were, how much attention and love she put in to each one of them. She didn't race through them emptily, rush urgently to reach her target of one thousand. She couldn't. These cranes were not destined to be an empty statistic, each one was not merely a fraction of a goal. Each single crane had to be strong, the wings of each one had to bear the weight of their creator, the weight of a city itself. Each had to support the burden of the past and carry an entire people in to the light of the future.

I saw these cranes inside the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima, which held a large number of artifacts from everyday citizens (not soldiers, citizens) killed by the blast. There are photographs all throughout the exhibits of the maimed as they lie in hospital beds. But the worst photographs aren't there. They don't exist. There's no celluloid to capture the immediate aftermath, the atmosphere of the half-dead victims wandering the rubble-strewn ground, so they've turned to other means. You know those really cheesy life-sized dioramas at museums of people frozen forever in some endless task? They're a lot less funny when their skin is dripping off them. The Japanese school girl next to me audibly retched at the sight of them as she and I both rounded the corner. I looked down, shrank still further in to the shell of my embarrassment, my shame at being American in the city of our second worst transgression (more on that below).

Unlike Sadako, I do not know the older woman's name. I don't know her personal history enough to tell if at the very beginning of her sixty-odd years she endured the morning of Hiroshima from a vantage point of safe distance or of frightening proximity. All I know is what she did for ten seconds today. What she said to me as I walked through the exhibits, nearly biting through my bottom lip in an obviously vain attempt to keep the tears from falling openly.

"Thank you for coming here." She handed me a postcard and two tiny cranes, one green, one purple. The postcard I will keep for its sentiment ("Change all bombs on earth in to fireworks"). The cranes I will treasure, like few objects I own in this life. My tears flowed uncontrollably after she gave them to me. Especially at the tender way she emphasized the one word in the sentence that changed its entire complexity. Most people would stress the "thank you," believing it would underscore the gratitude. She emphasized "here." She emphasized that this was a choice that I made, not to just come to this museum but to this city. By saying that in the way she did, she did more than emphasize, she conveyed her recognition that for me this was much less of a visitation than a confrontation. Hiroshima is not Omaha Beach, not Auschwitz, not S-21. On these grounds, I was not an heir, not a victim, not a bystander. In Hiroshima I, an American, was something I haven't had to be before in any of my travels. A culprit. A perpetrator. You can make your own decision on whether or not the ends justified the means, but whatever you think in your head, in your conscience, understand that it does not change the fact that we did this. In the photographs all throughout the museum, it is we that turned caramel skin in to white wastelands of cells, or worse yet, a liquid. We that made dying little boys so thirsty they tried to suck the puss from their own open boils.

You can think what you want. But understand, about not merely Hirsohima but all events in our nations past, present, and (sadly) future, that the question was not "Do we drop the bomb or not..." It is "Even if we do take this step, is there a way to go about it somewhat humanely...." (In the case of Hiroshima that is. To repeat the same display, the same atrocity three days later in Nagasaki is flat out reprehensible. We as a nation gained unequivocally nothing by it.) To flesh this argument out fully would take too much time, space, deviate from the core of this writing, the central themes of what I felt today and last night as well. Its something that, if you want, we can discuss in person....

After being sequestered and thoroughly searched for half an hour in customs at the Hiroshima airport, I didn't arrive to my hostel until nearly 11pm. But neither my exhaustion of traveling for more than 24 hours straight, nor the freezing weather could keep me away from visiting Hiroshima's Atomic Bomb Dome right away. A building some two hundred meters from the hypocenter of the blast, the Atomic Bomb Dome (formerly the Industrial Promotion Hall since being built in 1915) was not leveled like almost everything else that morning; it was damaged pretty severely, but it still stands, part shell, part concrete tatters. Last night I took photos of it from across the Motoyasu-gawa River. But I never crossed to the other bank to get close to it. I wasn't ready yet. Tonight, after visiting the museums and various related sights in the morning, and heading out to the famous floating O-Torii at Miyajima in the afternoon, I had an overwhelming impulse to return. To complete my confrontation. Tonight I looked at the ruins up close. Tonight I crossed the river.

I saw the building from close up this morning as well, but to see the frame floodlit at night is the true way to experience it. It is in this stark illumination that it looks most like a skeleton. It is in this light that the emotions it evoked from me were strongest. It's silly to cry over twisted metal, steel girders contorted off their axes. That's not what I cried over, and that's not why the decision was made sixty years ago to keep this ruined building standing. The generations of visitors who have looked at the ruins of the Atomic Bomb Dome are looking at the embodiment of that morning, at the corpses of the dead and the shells of the living. The bent off-shoots I saw tonight were not steel girders. They were the black fingernails that grew perpendicular to the hands of survivors. The grid structure of the dome was the checkered pattern of the kimono that had been branded in to the skin of a female blast victim.

The ruins of the dome embody Hiroshima the event. Not Hiroshima the city. For that you cross back to the island of the Peace Memorial Park, to its very center. There burns the Flame of Peace. It burns day and night, sun, rain, or snow, and will burn in this place, ceaselessly until the last nuclear bomb on earth is destroyed.

I write these words on the day of my visit. Twenty-three thousand, five hundred days exactly after the era of nuclear aggression began. Twenty-three thousand, five hundred days exactly after Hiroshima. And I know that I will never live to see that flame extinguished, nor will anyone else in any generation to come. Since 1960, after every single test of a nuclear bomb anywhere in the world, the mayor of Hiroshima has written a letter of objection to the appropriate test-conducting country's ambassador, or even head of state. Each one has known that these petitions will not be acted upon. But that does not stop them, as it should not stop any one of us. Even in the face of the insurmountable, one must continue to do that which is just. Because it is also that which is necessary. In matters of such importance, fatalism is not just suicide. It is genocide.

Through it all, the flame burns in protest. But it also burns as a starter, something which we can each visit, physically or metaphysically, and use to ignite the fight for what is just that we intend to wage ourselves. Even if it is in simple, everyday ways. It's not that your actions need to accomplish something in themselves. If they can inspire others to join you in this fight, that is enough. That is something that can build, grow stronger, swell in to something so bright that it cannot be ignored.

I think before, back in Liverpool, I compared myself to fire. I think that's necessary now. I think that's what we all need to be.

http://www.facebook.com/cnduk?ref=ts&v=wall

Hiroshima: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2117765&id=35804394&l=4fd1e09e69

Cult of personality.

2009-12-06T01:44:00.020-05:00

"I tend to think of myself as a one man wolf pack. But when my sister brought Doug home, I knew he was one of my own. And my wolf pack, it grew by one. So there.... there was two of us in the wolf pack. I was alone first in the pack and then Doug joined in later." - The Hangover

This post could have been written from Poland, back in late August. But back then it was too vague to be even a theory, just an educated hunch.
These words nearly came from Jordan, when in my five days I experienced this pretty strongly, and my beliefs were solidified.
I am writing this in my last few hours of three weeks in Southeast Asia, just before I walk down to the Mekong River in Vientiene and wash down some phenomenal laap with a Beerlao. I am writing it now because that cloudy theorem of months ago has proven undeniable.

I spent six days in Estonia. Far longer than I probably should have, far longer than the glorified village of Tallinn probably warranted. But while I was trying to get my stomach right again from the parasites, I met some people that weren't merely fun to be around, but that I clicked with surprisingly quickly. Same sense of humor, similar personalities even though we came from different backgrounds and opposite pinpoints on the globe. Leaving for Riga, Latvia was the first time I had to surrender friends at the border. It would become a pattern.

I met Ricardo and Paul in Lithuania, but we didn't hang out until two cities later, when we found ourselves once again in the same hostel (Ricardo and I even again in the same dorm room) in Krakow, Poland. Something like four days together and we three experienced Krakow's Old Town, the leaden grounds of Auschwitz, and the quirky salt mines of Wieleczka in a rotating 30 foot bubble of conversation. Not to mention the bars, restaurants, and clubs. To find people you've just met that you can be around all day, discuss heavy issues in Twentieth Century history, politics, and religion with, then still want to hang out with later for seemingly endless glasses of vodka is rare. Unless you know where to look.

The theorem that shed its mist, the central social lesson of my travels: Certain types of places draw certain types of people. As a traveler, when I've deviated from the commonplace, I have felt the most camaraderie. I have felt most at home.

In my first few hours in Amman, Jordan, I met Cindie from Vancouver and Til from Hamburg. This was when our hostel owner Ali was trying to get us to pay something like $80 each to take the sightseeing route (the King's Highway) from Amman to Petra. Together we found a separate way that only cost us a quarter of that. We traversed night markets together, stocking up on food and supplies for the next day, tackling everything together with a recurring sense of collaboration. It felt at times like we were solving a riddle that individually may have stumped each of us, leading to higher prices, shadier travel options, but together was different entirely. The Voltron approach to travel. We made it down to Petra, did the same shopping around and negotiated an equally good deal back up to Amman, where we parted ways once again, Cindie to Istanbul, Til to Damascus, and I to Qatar. We clicked instantly, not always perfectly and we're not in constant contact now, but we each still talk, each pass along travel advice for our next destinations. Because we're still unified, still feel that precious overlapping of our Venn diagrams that is shaped like the Jordanian border.

The moment these thoughts became granite was two days ago, in Champasak. It's one thing to go to Laos, let alone a tiny village in the remote South, so of the seven other backpackers of all ages on my cramped sawngethaew that held another 15 Lao locals, I had seven easy conversations, seven faces that looked back at me with the identical determination and small but still present sense of adventure that fewer and fewer places on this Earth are capable of giving you.

For all the grandeur and impossibly complex historical tapestry that is Western Europe, I'm in no rush to go back. I did meet some awesome people there, in Scotland and in Berlin especially, but the vast majority of other people at my hostels were weekenders or permanently attached to their copy of Lonely Planet. You can be somewhere for just a few days and not be a tourist. Then again you can travel around the world and still not see a thing. The experience can easily change you, alter your perceptions- if you're open to it. And that seems to be the dividing issue. One that cuts across the European continent like the Maginot Line.

If you've traveled a good deal, seen various parts of the world and Western Europe is still for you- awesome. That's you. I loved what I got to see while I was there, the life lessons I came across in Barcelona and Naples are no less profound, but Europe is domesticated to the point that I'm in no rush to go back. It will always be there, and be more or less like it is now. Places like Laos are disappearing. In the few hours I've spent on the patio outside my hostel in Vientiene, I've seen maybe 30 groups of backpackers get turned away because there's no room. I've seen the same groups an hour or so later still wandering hopelessly with their backpacks still on because the entire town, which has a large number of hostels and homestays, is full. The older travelers I've met that were here a decade, even two years ago, speak of how vastly it has changed, how modern and touristy it is now leaning. So far this is just some of the northern cities; in the south you still run in to incidents like my forced hitchhiking in Ban Mueng. As shitty as it was at the time, I'll take that over a stamp on my Eurail pass any day.

It takes certain personality traits to look at a map and say "Lithuania. I want to see what's there." Or Jordan, Phnom Penh, rural Laos. The night before I left Los Angeles, my best friend told me that I had a something of a gift, a strange mixture of stupidity, balls, and guile. Maybe this is what he was seeing. This personality trait, this product of curiosity and desire for adventure, it is probably the most unifying single social characteristic I have ever come across. Even though we've only known one another for days at most, sometimes as short as the span of shared tuk-tuk ride, these people that I have met and clicked with understand an aspect of my personality that people I have known for years have never approached. Because it is burning within them as well. Paris is beautiful, but keep it. We'll take Petra. We want to see places other people didn't even know existed, let alone thought of going to. I don't know what it is in the others that catalyzes this quality. For me it is a sense of discovery, the awakening of the frontier spirit that quickens the beating of my American heart.

That's the feeling I get when I think about the next places I want to go to next. Syria. Bhutan. Tibet. Nepal. The Trans-Siberian in reverse. I read an article that a British company is doing small guerrilla style tours of Iraq. Something with six or seven people that is less like a tour group and more like a cadre. How could I turn down a chance to go to Babylon? And of course my last continent: South America.

When I started this trip I was a little annoyed that traveling in the E.U. you don't get new passport stamps at the border. Now I'm grateful for that. Because each box I do have stamped in there is something that I feel I've earned, its pages are like a table of contents for the short stories that have comprised the last four plus months of my life. This little beaten blue and gold book in my pocket is more than a government identification for me now. Its obvious heavy use, that it is now noticeably heavier with ink and stamps- this is my badge of honor. One that I plan on always keeping in close range, always at the ready for the next adventure.

One for the grandkids.

2009-12-05T08:53:00.018-05:00

"Me and my friends are like
The drums on 'Lust for Life.'
We pound it out on floor toms.
Our psalms are sing-along songs." - The Hold Steady

The moral of the story probably isn't Try Hitch-hiking in Communist Countries. Probably.

There's a difference between stupidity and desperation, in cause but not effect. I've been vigilant to the point of being wary for almost four months straight. I've had to be. People might know what city I'm in from status updates or email, but when it comes to being more specific than that, I'm the only person in the world who knows where I am at any given point of the day. And with a useless phone-turned-digital watch in my pocket, if anything goes wrong, it's pretty much going to stay that way. Before yesterday, I had slipped up twice, and only one of those was really avoidable. What happened yesterday wasn't exactly preventable either. Aside from maybe me putting even less faith in Lonely Planet next time.

I took a day trip to Champasak, a tiny town in the southern Laos countryside. One that buses don't reach (even though the guidebooks claim they do). To get there, you either drop a pretty large amount of money on taking a tuk-tuk (in Laos' case basically a motorcycle with a wheeled-bench sidecar) for the forty bumpiest kilometers of your life, or you negotiate a ride with the owner of a sawngthaew, a pick-up truck with two benches in a covered truck bed. I did the latter. So did 22 other people (7 of them fellow backpackers). It was easy enough getting out to Champasak, even if we were crammed in to an impossibly small space, and had to wait a good while for the auto ferry to carry us over to the tiny village that held the ruins of an 11th Century Khmer temple. But by the time I was ready to get back to the biggish city of Pakse, all these drivers' runs were evidently done for the day, even though it was only two o'clock. I was supposed to have another hour and a half of breathing room, but maybe because it was a Friday afternoon, or maybe because it's me and I do things the near-impossible way, there wasn't a ride to be had.

After some brokenly communicated negotiations with a shopkeeper in town, for a little over two dollars she offered to have her husband drive me to a crossroads only five miles from Pakse, a distance I could then easily get a cheap tuk-tuk from. I hopped in the back of another sawngthaew, this one smaller, this one solo, and got ready for the thirty kilometer ride. We got less than three. We hit a larger road, at which point her husband demanded more money. An absurdly larger amount more. Considering it's Laos, this was still fairly affordable, but on both principle and logistics (if he dicked me over once, why wouldn't he do it again another mile down the road...) I got out. 31 kilometers away from where I needed to be, I started walking. Eighty cars must have passed going in the opposite direction. Going my way, in four minutes I was able to futilely outstretch a thumb at only one motobiker that sped past. I plodded on a little farther and turned back around to see a mini-bus surrounded by the town-children way back at the crossroads I had hopped out at. Assuming it had to be one of the promised but never delivered tourist buses back to Pakse, I sprinted back as much as my exhaustion would allow and ran up to the driver side panting. Getting a peek inside as I rounded the windshield, I knew it wasn't a tourist bus, but tried to explain my situation to the Lao driver nonetheless. I didn't ask for a ride back the full way, just partially, whatever would fit in their travel plans. Hesitantly, very hesitantly, he agreed.

Entering the side door to youthful screams of excitement, it was the matching shirts I noticed first. A flood of stark Fruit-of-the-Loom white with an orange bubble on each. I got distracted by the raw vegetables they were all snacking on before I was able to read what those bubbles, and the increasingly familiar logo said. "United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.... We Combat Human Trafficking." I had managed to flag down a van of Lao UN students. I was given a screaming welcome of confusion as well as some raw vegetables of my own (turned out to be really good jicama) before they resumed their singing and makeshift percussion that must have been going on for their whole trip. I was asked by their nine smiling faces and waving arms to join in, which I managed to in the form of clapping but not singing. That wasn't good enough. They urged me (though none of them spoke any English) to sing something of my own. But the shock of the entire situation, coupled with nine high-pitched early-teenage voices screaming playfully for me to start, as well as the thumping of sandals on a small bongo drum as the one boy did interminably, and I blanked. I couldn't think of a single song, let alone the lyrics for it.

It did come though. Halfway through one more round of their chanting, I was able to think of it. I have no clue why this song specifically came to mind. With my ipod being stranded in London, I haven't heard it in months, and even before then it wasn't one of my most played, but as soon as it popped in to my head out of absolutely nowhere, I knew it couldn't be any other song. That it couldn't be other way. I charaded an apology for my bad singing voice and started in:

"Hey Jude, don't make it bad.
Take a sad song, and make it better.
Remember to let her under your skin,
Then you'll begin to make it better,
Better, better, better, BETTER,
Na.... na na, Na Na Na Na.... NA NA NA NAAAAAAA..... Hey Jude....
Na... na na....."

We pulled in to the bus station in Pakse two minutes later. If I had waited another round or two of their traditional Lao sing-alongs, I probably would have saved myself a good deal of embarrassment. But that right song at the right time doesn't always come around just for observation. Sometimes it's about expression. Declaration. It doesn't come around for just you. Sometimes it's not about the memories you take back for yourself, it's about the memories you make for others.

"For well you know that it's a fool who plays it cool
By making his world a little colder..."

Laos:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2116554&id=35804394&l=beadba0ff1

This is why i don't do christmas.

2009-12-02T00:23:00.009-05:00

"All are punish-ed." - Romeo and Juliet. Act IV, Scene iii.

I don't get to tell you about watching the sun rise over Angkor Wat, that that was how I began my December. I don't get to discuss my musings from the back of a moto outside Battambang or sailing down the Tonle Sap to Siem Reap while listening to "The End" by The Doors. Not yet. Because first I'm forced to talk about trying to do the right thing and looking like an idiot in the process.

I woke up at 3:45 AM to get to Angkor Wat in time for sunrise. For the next eleven and a half hours I wandered throughout the most gorgeous thousand-year-old buildings on Earth, spread out over a 26-kilometer area. I took over twelve hundred photos. That's more in a single day than my first three weeks on the road. I bought my bus ticket for tomorrow afternoon after shopping around for the best deal, found the Cambodian history book I've been searching everywhere for at an equally cheap price, and completed all the other errands I set for myself today. Felt like I'd accomplished a good deal, so I figured I'd treat myself to some ice cream at a place my friend Whitney had recommended to visit while I was in town. I was lazily strolling along the riverside from the Old Market back to my hostel, enjoying a scoop of ginger and black sesame, about a third of the way back when a girl of maybe five ran up to me. She begged and pleaded for two blocks for a dollar, which broke my heart not to give her. Then she asked for the rest of my ice cream cone, which I gave her immediately, but felt a little guilty that it was such a quirky flavor, one that a child definitely would not enjoy, and even if she did there wasn't much left of it anyway. I don't really know why, but after I left her, I turned back around, walked back to her and, crouching down so she was almost as tall as me, I told her that I still couldn't give her a dollar, but I would buy her a real ice cream cone, not my seconds, in any flavor she wanted. There was another place just 20 meters back and I walked out with a blueberry cobbler cone for me to replace the less-than-satisfying one I'd given away, and a large chocolate peanut butter one for her (she didn't understand when I tried to ask her what she wanted, so that was my best guess that any kid would like). It still cost me a dollar, but this way it felt a little more personable than empty charity, that in giving one to her I was saying thank you to the hundreds of beaming Cambodian children that had waved as my boat, or tuk-tuk, or moto passed them. It took all of two minutes to get the cones, but when I came back outside she was gone. I walked a good distance in both directions and couldn't find her. Asked the tuk-tuk driver she was sitting with when I met her but to no avail.

And there I was. Lugging a shopping bag around my wrist, craning my weather-beaten and sunburnt face in all directions with a defeated look upon it, and holding an ice cream cone in each hand. Not even one two-scoop cone, that would have been somewhat socially acceptable, but double-fisting fattening dairy like it was about to be outlawed. I looked like the fat German kid from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. And I don't even think there was a fat German kid in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but you'd pretty much have to invent a simile to describe how stupid I looked. Walking again towards my hostel, I didn't see another Cambodian child that I could give her cone to, but I did pass a tourist bus stop full of backpackers who looked from one of my hands to the other, then at my face with an almost insulted look of disgust.

That's it. No deeper moral lesson. No waxing poetic on what this says about me, or my trip, or the world around me. Not even going back over this one to proofread it. Too embarassed. Just me looking stupid. And gluttonous. And feeling like no good deed goes unpunished.

And not wanting to eat ice cream again in the forseeable future.

*****************************
(post-script) For those that read my last post about not giving money to the probable Khmer Rouge victim outside S-21, here in Siem Reap I found another victim of their torture. The Khmer Rouge cleaved off both his hands at the mid-forearm, but he still manages to operate a steet cart selling bootlegged Xerox copies of books and Lonely Planet guides, so I bought one that I didn't really need for Laos. Still nothing to assuage the pain he has suffered, but it's reassuring that there are alternative ways to be constructive than simple handouts.

The ruins of Angkor:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2115132&id=35804394&l=123eb2365f

The red and the black.

2009-11-28T05:18:00.037-05:00

"Where do I start, where do I begin?" - The Chemical Brothers

I didn't see a single one that had front teeth. Top or bottom. I don't know if this was from malnutrition, or they had been knocked or yanked out by the Khmer Rouge during beatings or torture, or if that's just one of the first steps when bodies decompose. But I looked somberly and carefully at several hundred human skulls today, and not one of them had its front teeth in place. When surrounded by atrocity, sometimes it's these little details that distract you enough to get by. Because when I focused on where exactly I was, what had occurred in these fields and these cells thirty years ago, my normally granite stomach turned over and I nearly vomited. I wouldn't have been the first.

The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, sixteen kilometers outside the center of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. When the Vietnamese liberated the country from the Khmer Rouge, this small area of six or so acres was found to contain 129 mass graves. Just under nine thousand corpses. Most of those remains are now piled in to the 17 tiers of the bone stupa memorial. Level one is a pile of clothing. The next eight levels contain nothing but skulls. The lower three of these were some of the ones I was able to look at, where only molars of their smiles remained. Skulls don't tell you all that much about a person's life. But they can scream sagas about their deaths.

The Khmer Rouge, not surprisingly, had very little money. Whereas their Nazi predecessors in genocide chose not to shoot their victims because it was too inefficient, too slow a destruction when attempting to wipe out an entire race of people, a good deal of the Khmer Rouge cadres avoided bullets simply because they were too expensive. They instead turned to methods of murder that were cheap. Repeatable. Hammers. Wooden stakes. Garden tools. Many of the skulls I saw today had a large, uneven hole in them from these instruments. One had a large slit. Could have been anything from an axe to a garden hoe, but while my mind will never be sure, it certainly visualized all the possibilities.

The killing fields were impossibly beautiful. Jade foliage broken up only by the mirror surface of ponds reflecting the most pristine of skies above. Not S-21. In horror movies and campfire stories, the wise elderly character will speak of places with an inherent evil, where venom is palpable in the building itself. It sounds like bullshit, and the places described in those stories actually are, but I wandered a complex of horror today for two hours. Its walls exhaled hatred. I legitimately felt the violence from those few decades ago still churning in the air I walked through. The air I had to breathe. Its proper name is Tuol Sleng, "Hill of the Poisonous Trees," which is fitting, but S-21 is even more appropriate. Those who entered this high school turned military compound in central Phnom Penh were unwillingly stripped of a name and reduced to a number, so why should it not be afforded the same courtesy. Security prison 21 was the epicenter of the Khmer Rouge's strategy of barbarism during its reign. This was nothing like Auschwitz, then or now. Then it was not a straight death or work camp but a place for political prisoners, even when that classification made no sense. Interrogations were conducted here to gain confessions, admissions of guilt and expositions of names of others just as guilty. Except that none of it made any sense. When you interrogate the same person for several months, you're going to run out of information to gain. What deeper knowledge are you going to acquire from the sixth fingernail you tear out, the thirty-eighth time you water-board somebody? (yeah. they did that. congratulations, we're in the same league as them). What you get is not accurate information, if that even existed to begin with. What you get is the names of everybody they have ever met, every grade school bully they can still recall and describe. What you get is a fuller prison, when all these new people are then brought in for interrogations, the further naming of names. And meanwhile the cells get smaller, are more hastily constructed, and walking through them now, today, it's not just your body that becomes claustrophobic. Looking around, you get a vise clamped on to your soul, your capacity for love, hope, faith in humanity.

This was not Auschwitz. Here you have solitude and space for the crimes to sink in. Because it was death manufactured on a smaller scale, you also have nuances that Auschwitz did not because of its sheer size. At S-21 I walked up and touched a bed-frame that just a few years before I was born a mutilated body was found on, covered in and hovering above a font of congealed blood. The broken plastic jug that held gasoline that was poured on the victim is still there. It was not to burn their corpse, but to get them to speak.... once that fire had been put out. In Building D you see the torture racks. The rooms of manacles that held the screaming in place. Still visible bloodstains.

Needless to say, I was not very successful at being distracted. You can only count a lack of teeth for so long.

****************************************

The first time I saw the tree, I frowned and took a picture. The second time, I cried. Because my only other option was to vomit.

English is a quirky language; the word "set" has somewhere around 150 different definitions. So I guess it's understandable not to get things right on the first go-round, even for someone who has studied history, specifically Twentieth Century warfare. The sign read "Killing tree against which executioners beat children." This sounded hideous, deplorable. I pictured toddlers being whipped, kicked, punched- desperate to keep their hands submissively on the tree's cutting bark to avoid further torture. Minutes later and a few hundred meters away, inside the Choeung Ek museum, I read the brief history of the tree and gagged. Because I wasn't even fucking close.

The tree itself stands next to one of the 129 mass graves found within Choeung Ek. This grave alone, when exhumed in 1980 after the Vietnamese defeated the Khmer Rouge, was found to hold the corpses of over one hundred women and children, most naked. The first time around I said I pictured toddlers, but I think that would be inaccurate. The soldiers wouldn't have the arm strength. Certainly not to get the proper torque or velocity. You see, what they did, what that sign is actually telling you, is that soldiers would grab children, infants, by the calves, or by the ankles and swing them, as you would a tennis racket, a baseball bat, and slam their heads in to the bark of the tree to kill them. In front of their mothers. "Killing tree against which executioners beat children."

Maybe it's reassuring that I didn't comprehend that upon my first reading. At least I had 26 years of peace not knowing human beings were capable of doing that. Not simply to other humans, but to their own innocent people. That peace of mind of mind is gone now though. You don't get something like that back.

****************************************

Last night I went to sleep still thinking of the gorgeous girl I saw in the Bangkok airport. Tonight I'll be trying to convince myself that I'm not a monster.

It probably would have been worth the three or four shitty dollars not to feel like this. To break my rule of not giving to beggars, one that exists not out of apathy but equality. I can't give to all, so I shouldn't give to any. And what's a Band-Aid to a bullet wound anyway.

The first time he asked me, on my way in to S-21, the prison camp museum, I mumbled a "Tay, sohm toh (no, sorry)" out of pure instinct, still struggling to see my camera's playback screen in the glare of a noon sun. I glanced up and didn't realize what I was looking at right away. The first thing I noticed was the amputation, high above the left knee, condemning his genetically skinny legs to a lifetime of fragility. When I scanned up I saw the too-smooth flesh that comes with years-old third-degree-plus burns, these covering the left side of his entire head. I don't know how many years ago, but considering who he was and where I saw him, I would guess between the years 1975 and 1979. I would guess it was done by a man wearing loose-fitting black clothing and a red and white checkered sash around his head. What kind of a fucking prick says "no, sorry" to a genocide victim......

I said no on the way in, then spent the next two hours of my life wading through the most morally depleting site I've been to in my life. I left in a state of shock. I wasn't thinking clearly (still am not, that's why this post is in 3 incoherent parts) and simply said no to everyone, the several tuk-tuk drivers trying to get me to go with them, the women selling food and cheap wares by the gates, and the four or five beggars there as well. The burn victim/amputee included. Literally a blur of humanity to me at a time when I just trusted my feet to get me somewhere that my brain could catch up with later.

I realized only when I was somewhere across town that I had said no to what I can only assume was a victim of Khmer Rouge atrocities. For hours, I couldn't fathom my own self-disgust let alone express it. Typing this I'm still seething, but the loathing is waning in favor of something more promising. Determination. I have more in my arsenal than Band-Aids. When this five-month journey ends and I move to New York, it will be in search of the same type of job that I had in Los Angeles. I make documentary television. If I can't change the world, I can help enlighten it, and however small a fraction of the population it is at a time, at least it's forward movement. Writing this helps me for now. While some parts of this are graphic, and my photos in a few weeks time will be as well, it helps tremendously that for the few minutes you're reading this I feel like I'm catalyzing thought, maybe even discussion. No amount of money I could ever give would bring that man's ear, face, or eye back, bring back the years of embarrassment or torment that he has endured. But my effort to bring his story, Cambodia's story, Poland's story, the stories of guerrillas in the Spanish countryside, anti-Soviet demonstrators in the Baltics, environmentalist politicians in Scotland silenced by the Thatcher regime, Catalans vying for independence, Russian prisoners of the Gulag who died building trains to nowhere.....

This effort can really achieve something.

Phnom Penh and Battambang:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2115845&id=35804394&l=bee6341c00

The revelation will not be televised.

2009-11-26T09:20:00.015-05:00

"I'm on the verge, just one more dose,
I'm traveling from coast to coast.
My theory isn't perfect but it's close." - Red Hot Chili Peppers

It started as a joke. I didn't realize why I'd done it, even when it was staring back at me in careful black block letters. Years ago, when Kelly gave me the artisan-crafted leather journal that would contain my travel writings, I wrote out the steps of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth, the Hero's Journey, front and center on its first page.

Maybe it was my lingering sense of only-child self-importance, or just a way to see if patterns hold true no matter how small the quest one undertakes. Admittedly my life is not an epic. It does not hold its own in comparison to the fictional heroes whose fabric was cut from this pattern, consciously or sub-consciously by their creators. But the brilliance of Campbell's theorem is its commonality. It not only finds a way for stories throughout history to overlap, but for the readers and viewers who have breathed them in to find mutual ground too. This is why we are drawn to such stories, because the protagonists are just us in a different environment. Neither my life, nor this trip fits the carbon-copy of the Hero's Journey. But there are undeniable elements within it that certainly apply.

The Abyss: "Regarding sharks in motion."
Atonement With the Father: "Two weeks notice."
Refusal of the Return: "The revelation will not be televised."

The way a deep sea diver resurfaces is in stages. After hours of isolation, of wading through darkness and heavy, salt-laden water, the change in pressure is so drastic that their return must be gradual, calculated. Those who rush back to the surface get the Bends- bubbles form inside your body, and symptoms range from headaches and queasiness, to paralysis and death.

I knew that my good friend Kelly meeting me for 10 days in Thailand would be more than simply two friends re-uniting after a long separation. With one month left in my travels, it was my first step back towards the vague concept I have of home. And coming from the Middle East and then India, it was also a return to a more Western world where American fast food chains aren't aberrations breaking up a foreign landscape, but merely more neon-colored Legos constructing a post-modern metropolis like Bangkok.

I know there are ways to which I've become accustomed, backpacking grooves I've worked myself in to that are incompatible with life in the States. In the first ten minutes of conversation, I got a little reprimanded by Kelly for some of these- describing weather in Celsius, distance with the Metric system. I'm not trying to be pompous, or Anglophilic, I've just thought in these terms, without interruption, for months. At some point I stopped doing the mental conversions back to the American system, at some point this became how I measured and broke down the world around me. And while I know it sounds arrogant, and gets old quick, it's hard to tell any new stories about my life that don't feature phrases like "The second time I was in Munich..." or "This guy I met in Lithuania..."

The ten days of her visit didn't dwell on these things. We were too distracted by the gorgeous architecture of wats (temples), the impossible hue of the water near Ko Phi Phi, hour-long massages that cost less than $5, getting lengthy rides down a mountain and in to town from incredibly kind Thai strangers (if you haven't seen the video on my Facebook page, feel free to check it out). But even if it wasn't foremost in my brain, this incongruity with life back home did creep in. Often.

This first step back, the inching closer to the surface, more than anything it made me realize that I'm not ready. But that's not a negative realization. I touched on something in Chiang-Mai, in one of those gorgeous wats we visited, this one in the middle of a forest compound that had an unavoidable déjà vu to something Colonel Kurtz ran in Apocalypse Now. Most images of the Buddha in temples are the same. They are generally either the meditative or reclining one, usually gold and androgynous, with a nearly robotic smoothness to his body. These are so prevalent because they depict him either near or (in the reclining position) at the exact moment of attaining total nirvana. It is the miracle upon which the dogma of Buddhism is based, why he is worshiped at all. But in the middle of the woods by the large chedi of the Wat Umong forest temple sits the life-sized black statue of the still-very-human fasting Buddha. Each rib is visible, as are veins that weave across the top of them. His eyes, still peaceful, are bulging from his emaciated face- his stomach nearly caved in upon itself. More than any other gold-leafed or jade carved statue in Thailand, more than any image of Christ I saw in my twenty years as a devout Catholic, or in the cathedrals of Europe since, this image permeated me on a spiritual level. Vitally, I think I began to understand. I've complained about my muscle and weight loss on this trip because it eats away at my outward self-image or how I think others will view me, but maybe it just means that I'm on the right track. I've spent nearly four months wandering three continents, but I've spent that same amount of time journeying within myself. It's not that one is more important- they're interlaced. I could have taken this same amount of time and wandered just India, or South America, or even the United States. But I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near the same results. It's the comparisons that I needed. I read Dante at the Vatican, faced Mecca on my knees at a mosque in Bahrain as a Muslim man talked me through the steps of prayer in detail, walked through temples and shrines dedicated to Ganesh and Vishnu in New Delhi, and I visited Wat Umong in Chiang-Mai. I know which spoke to me the deepest, which eternal voice resonated most profoundly.

This does not mean I'm now Buddhist. Upon returning to the States, I am planning on reading the holy texts of each major religion, more out of an academic's curiosity than a pilgrim's devotion, and we'll see what decision I make from there, if any. But for now it does underscore to me the fact that I'm not ready to come back yet. And it's not the depression that a return to the American workforce, or to more consistent surroundings will probably bring. It's the fact that right now I feel close to something I cannot define. I said that I touched on something in Chiang-Mai. It did not fully impact me, not to the point that I think it is capable of. And while I can't logically describe it, I feel something beckoning me from Cambodia, from Laos. Of everything I was to see on this trip, Angkor Wat was always the most anticipated. But there's more to Cambodia than a complex of temples, and I need to explore what that is. And I will. Beginning tomorrow when I land in Phnom Penh. A step back away from a more Western world like Thailand. A step back away from home.

One cannot anticipate an epiphany, and the most profound ones happen when totally unexpected. But I feel like I know myself vastly more now than I did four months ago. The dream I had in Berlin about meeting myself, the one in Istanbul that predicted my father's death days later. This is proof to me that I'm gaining a greater wisdom about who I am and what I am capable of, and maybe even that I'm reaching some deeper level of knowledge in the world itself. And in going to some of the rural towns in Cambodia and Laos that I am planning to, I feel like I'm capable of finding there elements of existence that are raw. Not primitive in civilization, but primary in our humanity. I feel like I can just make out the outline of a lesson, maybe my lesson, hanging heavy in the shadows before me.

There's one last step in the Hero's Journey that I think applies to me on this trip.

Approach of the Innermost Cave.

Probably just that lingering only-child self-importance. But just imagine with me, for one second:

What if it's more?

Bangkok, Chiang-Mai and northern Thailand:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2112162&id=35804394&l=e005427d01

Phuket and Ko Phi Phi:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2113946&id=35804394&l=041eb13e8a

A passage from india.

2009-11-14T07:29:00.027-05:00

"An endless string of tragedies obscured by the occasional miracle." - Sports Illustrated, describing golf.

I was half asleep on the way there. Lyrics from "Fake Empire" by The National tumbled lazily in my head as my bleary eyes looked out the taxi window. I was in my third country in as many days, and had slept less than ten hours during that span. This on top of the general road weariness that I've been feeling since Istanbul.

I paid the small entrance fee for my fourth Delhi sight of the day and robotically took photos of the exterior gates of the Humayun's Tomb. No audio guide; time was short if I was going to squeeze all of Delhi in to a day, so I figured I'd just wikipedia it later. I passed through yet another identical looking gate, this one the West Gate, the modern-day final entrance way. I walked through it distractedly, my gaze still turned up at a rusting light fixture hanging above me. I finally looked straight ahead.

"Holy shit."

Loud. Loud enough for the nearest dozen or so people to turn around and give me judgmental looks. I mumbled a distracted, unaffectionate "sorry" without shifting my locked eyes. It wasn't just its beauty that shocked me, it was its unexpectedness. Its context. Aside from the previous few sights I'd visited, for hours I'd been surrounded by absolutely nothing but decay, in both buildings and bodies. For an afternoon I'd almost forgotten that wonderment was possible.

I've seen a good deal of destitution, especially on this trip. I mentioned the eyeless elderly woman crawling backwards in Lithuania, just one of many penniless beggars in Eastern Europe. Small Egyptian neighborhoods, especially outside of Cairo, were the worst kept I had ever seen. Then came India. In Delhi I thought it was just the scale that shocked me. Poor people packed as far as the smog allows your eyes to see. That every single time my car stopped children pounded on windows for money, or little girls dressed with absurd pigtails and inked-on black freckles did backflips in hopes of charity, their appearance distantly chasing an ideal so forgotten, so anachronistic it seemed like parody. A mother helped her daughter shit on the street in front of a UNESCO Heritage Site because they conceivably have nowhere else to take her. But Jaipur's desperation sunk so much lower. The first five minutes I was there I walked past a dead cow on the sidewalk, its eyes already mostly cannibalized by insects. (Mostly. That was the worst part.) Dozens of people urinating in the middle of the street (I mean middle), countless people with glaucoma so heavy it looked like cotton growing from their sockets, severely crossed-eyes, anorexic limbs twisted backwards: the tolls of malnutrition. Homeless men whose feet and ankles were the purest shade of black from dirt and soot from never owning a pair of sandals that a block away cost less than a dollar. Dozens of people molding flat cakes of manure with their bare hands so they can burn it for warmth. This isn't poverty. This is an economic holocaust.

Seeing all this squalor doesn't break your heart. It slowly drowns it in syrup. All the success and comfort that we strive for as Westerners works backwards, potently resonating as guilt when you have to turn away little girls tapping your legs and arms for a few cents. Men who walk beside you begging nonstop for the length of a full kilometer, in the unfathomable hope that after refusing fifty times, you'll somehow change your mind.

Then look up from this to see phenomenal architecture. The Hawa Mahal, Qutb Minar. Jaw-dropping works of exotic beauty, close enough to complexes of squatter's lean-to's that they cast shadows. Or would be able to if the pollution didn't block out most of the sun.

If this sounds like my experience in Egypt, it shouldn't. At all. At no point in India did I ever feel in bodily danger. These people did not want to see me injured, maimed, dead. Their never-ending insistence, the flocks of dozens of potential cabbies my white face attracts when it steps out from the train station- it is all borne of need. These people need to survive and have very few realistic options. And despite all this tragedy, despite the weight of my sodden conscience over our economic divide, the occasional episode comes along to sweep my mind away, albeit temporarily.

I entered the Gandhi Smriti, the house in which Gandhi spent his final days and that contains the courtyard in which he was assassinated, rolled my eyes and sighed. Schoolchildren. Hundreds of them. Visit a museum at the same time as them and you'll be stuck there for hours, or at least so annoyed that you skip half the sights just to avoid them. Wandering the hallways meant I had to compact myself and tiptoe past a whole line of them. Just about all the boys turned their heads as I did this and around forty of them broke off from the end of this line to start following me around. When I hit a dead end, they cornered me.

The bravest one approached me timidly.

"Picture?"

"You.... want a picture..... with me?"

Bobbleheads can't nod that fast. And he handed his cell phone/camera to a friend, and several other boys slyly jumped in too. Not just this picture, but the seven or eight more that I was asked to take before I finally had to tear myself away. Back at Humayan's Tomb, the sight that blew me away to the point of public profanity, I encountered another batallion of schoolchildren, this one from an all-girls high school. I left the main chamber where the symbolic coffin lies to go into a side room that, it turns out, held nothing. I heard a clamor behind me and saw that fifty or so of these girls had evidently picked me over the dead famous emperor. The echoes of their giggling and catcalls filled the monument with a deafening roar that brought their less-than-amused old chaperon running, waving her walking stick in anger. Since this is a long post to write, I just took a break to grab dinner at a local open kitchen. The nine year old boy that brought me the menu stared at me for the next ten minutes, and shyly scurried away gushing when I simply asked his name. All this to say, even if it's for a few seconds, even if it's across the world, and for reasons I don't totally understand... it's pretty fun to be a rock star.

And it's not just these moments of flattery. Though I talked to them only briefly in my two day stay (been busy with sightseeing, errands, photo albums, blog posts), I could feel such incredible warmth from Arvind and Shoma, the 40-something couple that ran my small homestay in Jaipur. A genuine desire to know me and hear about what I had to say, what I had to talk about, as well as the others staying within these four rooms. I didn't just sign the typical guestbook with the necessary info. Shoma asked me tonight to write in a personal notebook, where travelers leave their well-wishes, the url's for their blogs so she can follow them long after they've stopped walking down the alleyway from Purohit Ji Ka Bagh, thru the gate and up the steps to the Explorer's Nest. The two of them have never been out of India, but in this way, yeah. They have.

Of everywhere that I told people I was traveling to on this trip, India was the place that the most people were jealous of, that they were dying to go. That confused me, I didn't understand the common thread, why that stood out over 29 other countries, especially when it wasn't even in my top five. My best guess is that it's the lure of the beautiful unknown. For all the current world tension the divide has created, the roots of Islam and Christianity aren't that different from an outsider's perspective. Hinduism on the other hand is magnificently rich, infinitely fascinating, and a total world apart from the ideology that most of the West is used to. The people that come back from India raving about the land, having experienced something profound, my guess is they've left their known world completely behind, they've wandered around this country giving it the depth and attention that it deserves, but doesn't often receive. Not the six days I can spare, not the two weeks you can get off work, but at least two or three months. You cannot attain any desired epiphanies by visitation, but by immersion. Life can only truly change via doorways, not windows.

I am in India long enough only to be an observer, not a participant. The cows wandering the streets still attract my attention and even though they're just about everywhere, I get a jolt with each swastika I see, even if they only still wish its ancient, original meaning of good luck and protection. The doorway I'm walking through is not India, but rather the column up top to your right. My overall journey is the opportunity for change, something long enough that it has the capacity to shape my life. My season of wet cement. Some of the first words I wrote on this blog were that I preferred microcosms, not mosaics. I didn't realize that one can breed the other. Moscow, Manchester, Omaha Beach, Valencia, the Isle of Skye, Berlin, Amman... so many others, and now Delhi, Jaipur, Agra. For now crystal shards still settling, shifting in the fluid mortar. Still unsure of the final pattern. Not ready for display yet.

Soon.

Delhi:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2110582&id=35804394&l=c2834e4f17

Jaipur and Agra:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2111247&id=35804394&l=8899150aaf

Two weeks notice.

2009-11-12T06:08:00.046-05:00

I was eight years old when I met my father.

He was not a bad father, not intentionally, not when we were speaking. This assessment may be cutting him a bit too much slack, a halo effect in reverse, but I can only assume that learning how to be a father for the first time at age 57 is not easy. Certainly not when your arthritis keeps you from playing basketball with your son with any agility. Certainly not when you're playing a video game for the first time with a child that is half a century younger than you.

To clarify, "when we were speaking" means from that day in 1992 to late 2002. We bonded mostly over court-ordered weekend visits, Dodgers, Kings, and Lakers games, buckets of balls at the Wilshire Country Club's driving range and cups of gazpacho in its clubhouse. These things I remember clearly. But for the life of me, I can't recall just what the fuck happened to start our silence, the one that would rob us both of seven years of one another's lives.

That's actually a lie. I remember quite clearly what it was, but not why it had to happen that way. The child of parents who are no longer together, I lived holidays twice. In this decisive case, it was Thanksgiving, and I was 19. I'd just been initiated in to my fraternity, just filmed my TV-MA episode of Dismissed, and to say I was cocky as shit would be a complimentary understatement. I spent the afternoon of Thanksgiving at the house of one of my mother's friends, got wasted before the meal began with that friend's son, and drank a few more glasses of wine at the table on top of that. Then I got behind the wheel of my car, maybe triple the legal limit, and drove drunk at 19 years old the 45 minutes up to Thousand Oaks on one of the biggest police checkpoint days of the year. I did this idiotic act so I could see my father on Thanksgiving. I got there at 7pm. He had already gone to sleep. And this was despite the fact that I'd phoned when I was leaving so they'd know I was on my way. That's when I stopped talking to him. The five minutes I saw of him early the next morning before I had to rush back to my Black Friday retail job in Orange County would be the last that I cared to see of him. But considering that Christmas came and went without so much as a phone call from him, the decision was evidently mutual. That was the part that I never understood. Never will. But now I no longer care to.

For six and a half years after that day, I couldn't think of any positive memory of my father. I didn't want to. It was easier to vilify him, to listen to "Styrofoam Plates" by Death Cab for Cutie, convinced that that song epitomized how I would feel when I found out he died. This morning is when that moment happened. And sitting in my hostel in Delhi, I just re-read the lyrics to that song and nearly threw up, literally sick that I had let such vitriol ferment within me for so long.

Those six and a half years of silence ended not today with his death, but in June, less than two months before I left for this trip. But the truce that ended it was asymmetrical, because it had come too late. When I walked in to the convalescent center that was now my father's home he had been wheelchair-ridden for over a year by a series of strokes. His extreme dementia (think severe Alzheimer's meets cerebral palsy) left him incapable of speech other than gurgles and moans, left his body folded in upon itself like melted plastic, left a once athletic and later a stout 260 pound frame withered down to about 140. His femurs and forearms were like Q-tips, and on my first visit his own sneeze prompted a look of absolute terror in his eyes. That was how deteriorated his mind was at times.

It took until my third visit to tell him that I forgave him. I refused to say it unless I meant it, until I was sure that I did so out of true understanding and not simple pity. But I did forgive him. Because he was no longer an abstract to me. No longer hubris personified..... he was just human all along. He fucked up, a lot, and put my mother through deep, deep shit, multiple times. It was out of selfishness, but more importantly it was out of weakness. And I saw that in some ways, he was frail long before the illnesses overcame him. But that's what human beings are. We are weak, we give in to temptation and our id, and put ourselves in situations where we'll act first and just get around to worrying about the consequences later. But if we expect forgiveness from others, we too have to be forgiving.

My entire life, it's been really difficult for me to accept that I was one of those worry-about-it-later consequences. That in a world where fidelity is universal and lovers do not lie to one another- that in this perfect world, I would never have been born. I still don't think that I have dealt with this properly, because I have a recurring recklessness borne of the inescapable feeling that since I shouldn't be here to begin with, I'm really just playing with house money. That's a big reason why I'm typing this from a hostel in Delhi and not from my old apartment in Los Angeles. And ironically why I'll be over here, missing his funeral, just as I missed the funeral of my grandmother (his mother) while I was in Australia. The compass needle and the damage done.

For years I always pictured myself absent from my father's funeral. But never once did I think that I'd want to be there and simply could not. I feel..... I can't describe how I really feel, awful is too weak of a word (maybe abhorred?)..... that I won't be there. But not because I needed to say goodbye. I was able to do that before I left, and to achieve the inner peace and closure that had eluded me for so many years. And the email my cousin sent me that announced my father's death came not as a surprise. Really it was two weeks overdue.

The last post I wrote, the letter to my friends, was in a very different tone than any of my other entries. This was because of the reasons that I expressed within it, and because it came at a time in my travels when the road felt interminable, when I saw myself standing on a bridge so long that I could not see either bank, neither its beginning nor its end. The bridge itself was the only thing that existed, and land on either side was merely an assumption and not a certainty. But the bigger reason that I wrote it, the one I didn't talk about, was that I had had several nightmares that morning. Ones extremely vivid, like negative exposures of the one in Berlin, and they affected me to a point that I was convinced that they weren't just dreams. For reasons of sanity I'm hesitant to say that I was seeing the future, but I awoke convinced I was seeing reality that just had not happened yet.

The last dream, the one that woke me up. I was in a car with someone that I used to feel was maybe my best friend in the world, but who now I haven't spoken to in months. We arrived at the care center to visit my father, and were sent to a theatre that served as a waiting room where an old film was playing. I left her there to find out what was taking so long, left to find where my father was. As I wandered corridors, a man in a Fedora came with me, his face covered in the shadow his hat cast, his footsteps silent though I didn't realize why. We wandered around and around, hallways in basements that never existed, corridors that led to identical corridors. I tried to go back to the theatre to find my friend but got just as lost, and I realized that I would never see that person again, that our bond was lost for good. I turned back to my initial task, an increasing desperation to see my father, and all this time the man glided along with me. I turned to him for help and saw the face of my father as he raised his head. I alone spoke.

"You're here. That means you're not with your body."

His face was placid, but vitally it was less than solid. His feet hovered above the ground.

"It's because you're already---"

I woke.

Miguel wrote me the email less than two weeks later. And while I wasn't looking for it constantly during that time, I knew without a doubt that my return flight to Los Angeles on December 14 would be too late.

"You should stay a full week [before coming back to Pennsylvania], that way you can see your father a few times," my mother wrote as we planned out the itinerary of my return. I realized oddly that that had never even crossed my mind. How can something be a priority when it's not even an option?

I won't get to say goodbye at his funeral. But I said before that wasn't the part that upset me. Because I had already said goodbye, more in fact.

On my next to last visit with my father, I was extremely choked up. Having already spoken my forgiveness, there was one thing I hadn't expressed yet. One more resurrected truth left to tell. Which is silly really, because anything you say to a person in a vegetative state is really for your own benefit, not theirs. We'd made eye contact a few times over the course of my series of visits, and one was prolonged enough that I thought he might have started to recognize me. This had been the highlight in the rekindling of relations with my father so far. The best I could bring myself to hope for. For my own benefit, for the final release of my burden, I knew I had one more thing to say. Holding his hand, I leaned over and kissed his sunken, overly smooth cheek, and then whispered slowly in his ear, enunciating each syllable.

"Dad. It's Joshua. It's your son. Joshua. I want you to know, Dad...... I love you. It's Joshua. Your son. I love you, Dad."

It was on the first time that I said it, not the second, that the limp hand I was holding seized firm, with a ghost strength that had not existed in years. It gripped mine for ten seconds, more, I didn't think to count. And as I moved away from his ear and sat back down, our eyes held contact again for a short while before he returned to staring in to the nothingness of the calm-colored wall.

Saying goodbye to my father before I left was possibly the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. Because I wasn't just saying it for my own sake anymore. I can't be at his funeral on Monday, which tears me up to think about. But I can always live with the knowledge that the peace of mind I feel, the absence of animosity... it's mutual. I didn't just get to say the goodbye that I wanted to say to my father. We were able to say goodbye to each other.

Kenneth William Woods
10.24.1934 - 11.11.2009

---------

(post-script) This is probably too much information for a lot of people, but writing this has been extremely cathartic. I will not be at my father's funeral to give his eulogy, so in this way at least I feel I'm paying tribute to him in another way. Admittedly it is not a glowing one, but an honest one (and yes, the dream happened, exactly as I wrote it). Another reason to write this is that a few people have given me the honor of telling me that my writing has helped them. In trying to be open about something so personal, I hope that maybe others who relate to a bit of my emotions or my experience in this entry can be helped a bit by it.

Regarding sharks in motion.

2009-10-31T03:39:00.039-04:00

"I put my money where my mouth was
Until I couldn't breathe through my nose.
And now I'm staring at the floor,
Where my second life just ended,
Where I lost not one but two friends." - Taking Back Sunday

"Everything beautiful comes from pain." - Chuck Palahniuk

The irony is that Halloween is my favorite holiday.

Dear j.a.c.c.k.,

How are things back home?

I wasn't sure until this week whether or not I was doing this all wrong. You see, most of the other backpackers I've met so far, they've given me skeptical looks when I've told them how many countries I've been to on this trip. That with an itinerary at that break-neck of a pace, I couldn't truly be appreciating where I was. That by trying to be everywhere, I was really nowhere. And yeah, there are places I wish I could have stayed longer, sparks of friendship that I wish I could have explored more to see what sort of fire it would grow in to. I'm not one for second-guessing myself, which is strange considering how I have a tendency to jump first, look down second. So when I do, that means it's something that's truly tearing me up. Remember that really brief conversation we had when you were helping me pack up my apartment?

Joshua: "Am I making the right dec-"
j.a.c.c.K.: "Yes. ...Yes."

It took me twenty seconds just to build myself up to ask the question, and you wouldn't even let me finish it. The confidence of your response carried me. When I needed you most, you were there, even if it meant choking back your own emotions at watching me leave. And when we refused to say goodbye, instead saying a casual See you later to keep our emotions from flowing over. To an observer that might sound like denial. But really it was an unspoken promise. That this separation between us wasn't going to be as drastic as it appeared.

Sorry, I got sidetracked there, I'm bad at writing letters from the road. The thing about whether or not I should have been spending a few weeks as opposed to a few days in each country..... Well, I'm in Istanbul right now, had to spend a full week here waiting for my camera to get fixed. It was so frustrating not having the camera, I realized how dependent upon it that I've grown. It's not just a way for me to relate back to you what I'm seeing, it's more of an outlet for my creativity, and taking pictures almost feels like a voluntary occupation that infuses my hours, days, weeks, months, with a richer meaning. So my first four days here, I didn't have a camera, which means I postponed all the sightseeing options, and couldn't do much of anything, and something I didn't want to happen happened. Reality caught up with me.

By switching cities or countries every three or so days, I've been so distracted/enthralled/overwhelmed by everything new to take in, that I haven't worried about my dwindling bank account, the friends who have repeatedly let my facebook messages go unanswered, the economy/housing/job market that I'll be returning to and attempting to conquer in New York. But when those distractions went absent, those realities took over. They didn't creep in, they flew, and with devastating impact.

And that's when I remembered, j.a.C.c.k., that's when I remembered something that I think we learned back in Mr. Sanga's biology class back in sophomore year at Providence. The thing about sharks in motion. That sharks, except for the scavenging bottom-feeders, they have to always keep moving. That the second they stop, they begin to sink.

It wasn't just those looming concerns that caught up with me, it was my health too. I have stomach parasites again, and these are crippling, way worse than the ones I got in Russia. It hurts to stand, let alone walk, and I've doubled over from them more times than I can count. On top of that, and all the symptoms those entail, I also have a terrible cold (I'm hoping it's just a cold), probably because it's been pouring down rain in Istanbul for a week straight. So because of these I feel nauseated all day, and can only eat a few bites of something twice a day at most, and I can feel the weight-loss creeping in. But like a mantra, I've told myself "Remember Naples, remember Naples, remember Naples, remember...."* and that's gotten me through. These sound like complaints, or cries for sympathy, but they're not. I've been trying to relate to everyone else my experiences, and right now I'm just relating to you the lesser-known realities of life on the road. The side-effects they don't advertise. The loneliness of the long-distance runner.

On the night before I left, I told someone else that while I knew that I was doing the right thing, I really underestimated the negatives. I couldn't really gauge the difficulty of saying goodbye until the words were out of my mouth. Until the car doors were shut, and Justin and I were on the 134 East headed for Moab. I know I quoted Conor Oberst back then, and now a different line of his comes to mind. "I haven't been gone very long, but it feels like a lifetime." God it feels like forever ago, j.A.c.c.k., it feels like forever ago that we drove around Hollywood at magic hour with our cameras, photographing murals and neon marquees. It feels like so long because so much has happened, so much has changed. I still feel like I underestimated the negatives, even more so now actually.

I haven't heard the voice of anyone from back home in months. This is because Skype doesn't work on my laptop, and my phone inexplicably doesn't work overseas. For a while there I still carried it around as an extremely-underachieving watch. But then I realized that was silly. With the exception of a train/plane every once in a while, I never have to be anywhere at a certain time. It's weird to live a life in which you can leave time behind you. That with the exception of growing older a day at a time, it doesn't really apply to you anymore. I'm so far removed from this basic human concept that it took me until a few days ago to realize that it was October. I mean clearly I knew that it was October, but I forgot that it was October.... This is my favorite time of year, j.a.c.C.k. When the leaves change color and even in California the sky is grey, the wind howling, and I would hole up inside and watch the horror movies that we both love. I forgot that I was missing this. But sitting around now in Istanbul, it came back, and I was struck by an amalgam equal parts nostalgic and homesick.

So you need to know that you've helped me so much, J.a.c.c.k., maybe without even knowing it. Your emails make me feel like I'm still connected, still missed, and even if you're only reporting anecdotes of sitting on your couch sipping warm cocktails made with Ralph's brand soda, they mean the world to me.

I have at most a month and a half left on this journey... this is something of a two-thirds marker. Literally one hundred days of solitude. I'm not looking forward to this trip ending, but I will be inexpressibly grateful to see you again.

I feel like I've learned something in every city I've been to. And while it has nothing to do with the city itself, other than it was the setting for the perfect storm of the downsides of my travels, I will always remember that it was in Istanbul that I learned that sometimes "road" is a four-letter word as well.

I miss you, J.A.C.C.K.. And I love you.

Joshua

*if you don't understand this, please see my earlier post "Primi piatti: un chien napolitano"

One-way conversation.

2009-10-26T16:49:00.029-04:00

Safwan - "I used to play football. Professional. I was really good."
Joshua - "Really? What made you stop?"
Safwan - (silence and a lengthy pause as he shakes his head) "There's no place for that here, I can't in my life. 24/7 in Cairo you have to concentrate just to stay alive."

A Richter scale works by quantifying how devastating a movement is, increasing by one hundred percent with each number behind the decimal point, and one thousand percent with each number before it, so that an earthquake measuring a 7.0 is ten times more violent than one that is 6.0, which in turn is also ten times more than a 5.0..... I'm not going to arbitrarily enumerate the difference in danger and trauma between Cairo and all my previous travels, but the very fact that I'm contemplating how things grow exponentially worse in such a short span should be an indication in itself.

This is my twentieth country. It is also the first in which I have not been mistaken at least once for a local by another local, who usually have stopped to ask me directions or about a train schedule. This ability to blend in has been pretty crucial since I've avoided being an obvious target for would-be hustlers in Barcelona or corrupt policemen in Russia. Entering the Middle East and then Asia, this is a luxury I am sacrificing. But I didn't realize the scale of this sacrifice until Friday.

My plane arrived at the Cairo airport at 2 a.m., and the driver my hostel was supposed to send for me with one of those cute little signs with my name failed to show. So as I gameplanned outside on just how the fuck to cheaply make it to an address in a city with virtually no public transportation in the dead of night, I was approached by scores of cab drivers trying to convince me to come with them. Except for one. That wasn't what he wanted.

"Why white?"
"......What?"
Far more aggressive this time around. "WHY you're white?""
"Why am I white??"
He nodded, his eyes seething further as he waited. I knew the answer he wanted to hear... I'd already been called "Obama" several times by the customs agent who stamped my visa.
"Because my family is white."

And I gave in to the reality of the situation, that standing around in anger and exasperation wasn't going to make my driver appear and I had to get out of here, so I booked a cab with two middlemen for 10 Euros. This price was settled upon and confirmed 3 times, and 30 seconds later it mysteriously jumped to 15 because of a phantom airport toll, and then finally back again to 10 when they were reluctantly forced to admit I'm not a complete moron and wouldn't pay that.

I didn't reach my hostel til 4 in the morning. That's a 2 hour ride from the airport, not because of distance or traffic, but because the driver didn't know where the address was. It's one of the main streets in downtown Cairo. Forty minutes earlier, he pulled over on a street in which thirty men were hanging outside talking animatedly. Thirty mouths that fell silent, thirty heads that turned to follow my face in the passenger window.

"Here."
"This isn't the right place," without hesitation.
"Yes. Here. Hotel."

It was the wrong street, street number, and name. It was also 8 km away from where I was actually staying, though I didn't know he was that far off at the time. The same stoic tenacity that had dropped the price back to 10 Euros made him restart the car. In all, he pulled over about fifteen times to ask for directions. Five of those times, he silently got out of the car, turning it off and taking the keys with him, never saying where he was going. There's a sickening feeling you get, like your stomach being pulled instantly and repeatedly backwards, when you realize that your well-being is being rented back to you. That the only reason you're still somewhat safe is because you didn't pay your driver in advance. That the price of this safety, your well-being, at times it amounts to as little as eight dollars. Safwan was my driver I hired for all day Friday; I had a guide take me around the Pyramids, and another on my overnight trip to the White Desert, and with them I felt this at least a dozen times in three days.

On Saturday afternoon I sat in Sam's living room. Sam is a middle-aged Egyptian man that runs a small tour company for the White Desert, five hours outside of Cairo. On this day, Sam was playing host only to myself and a Brazilian girl named Fernanda. And the "all-meals provided for" meant that his wife was making us lunch, which I actually preferred and appreciated over a restaurant or a kebab stand. Sam was nice to me until he asked where I was from, and from then on all questions were directed solely at Fernanda, all my asked questions went unanswered, and hung heavily, awkwardly in the air of the small room. He turned on the news and expressed his disgust with America before turning back to an Austin Powers movie. Before putting on his Tommy Hilfiger sandals. Before watching his son ride a Superman bicycle. A disgust far more convenient than it is consistent.

My tour guide for the pyramids repeated the same jokes for tourists as other guides along the route, as Sam would with his driver two days later. Verbatim. They must have been the same jokes used for a half century. I heard maybe three or four total facts about the pyramids, and then several times about how the Sphinx was his great-great-great-great grandfather. About how the camel's name was Mickey Mouse... Charlie Brown. I tried to get to know each driver, each guide, wanted their perspective on Egyptian history, or what else their society has been doing for the past three-thousand years, and got flat-out nowhere. I got cartoon answers to human questions. I don't think I'm remotely like the negative American stereotype, but they made no attempt to see me as anything other than that. It takes so much more effort to be close-minded, to ignore facts when they are in front of your eyes, and that was the only effort that they were willing to put forth.

I had a very beautiful four hours on Saturday night. I was camping in the middle of the picturesque White Desert, the sky filled with a continent of illumination, and I sat silently next to Fernanda and our driver/guide Ahmed after having had a bare bones traditional Egyptian meal and the three of us smoked shisha. I sat thinking about my life, and what the moment I was living at that second meant in the overall tapestry of it, the sky above me the perfect metaphor for my memories. A million pockets of light that create something phenomenal when you look at the whole. This is what I wanted to write about in discussing Egypt. But it would be a lie. This is not what defined my experience, but what salvaged it from uninterrupted disaster.

The freeway from Giza to Cairo. DJ Tiesto blaring on the stereo, Safwan weaved us through highway traffic at 180 km an hour in a car that wouldn't turn over twenty minutes earlier. It's not that cars in Egypt don't stay in their own lane, it's that they're never there to begin with. Cars will stack five-wide across a three lane freeway, until they hit the next batch in front which is in a totally different random alignment. A girl sat side-saddle on a motor-bike behind her helmeted father, her hands folded in her lap, staring straight ahead, her face visible as she wore no helmet, emotionless, like she was waiting in class for a lesson to begin. She doesn't hold on to the bike with her hands despite its frequent tilting and darting, doesn't cough despite the visibly ashen cloud of pollution that straddles Cairo, its roads in particular.

The honking isn't merely never-ending, it literally never lightens. On a six hour bus ride from the White Desert back to Cairo, our driver honked at not just every single car he passed up, but he would drive on the wrong side of the road, honking at any cars coming towards him who were in the correct lane. Over a span of six hours, this had to have been over 600 cars. The driver from the airport honked at parked cars. Not double-parked cars. Ordinary. Parked. Cars.

I found Egypt disturbing. And not because it is very unsafe for its residents, and incredibly unsafe for traveling Americans (though it absolutely is), but because of its common theme of disregard. Having been, I almost couldn't care less about the photos I took of the pyramids, since that's not the real Egypt. It's a coincidence, a luck of the draw of history. When you visit, you understand that those are not what defines the Egyptian culture because it is not what they embrace or even attempt to revere. They have an archeological museum with a ton of priceless artifacts from antiquity. In this museum, maybe one in thirty of these is labeled. Visitors have no clue what they're looking at, or why it is important. There are guards, but they sit idly by as children and visitors handle the objects, play with them, eroding them down, smoothing out the hieroglyphics and distorting them with the oil all human hands emit. When you get to the base of the pyramids themselves, you see heaps of people climbing all over them. The last remaining wonder of the ancient world, and 21st century sneakers chip off ends of giant bricks that were put in place thousands and thousands of years ago. It's a disregard for their own history in the museums, for their own safety and for their peers on the road, for common sense and for the basic order necessary to function as a society.

Egypt will be defined in my memory by what I was unable to photograph. It was too unsafe for me to walk around alone at all, let alone with an obviously expensive camera on clear display. So there are images I failed to capture, but also moments not applicable to film or memory cards. Without analysis, without narrative, without pretext, without embellishment, here is what I am bringing back.
Three men bathe a horse in the Nile a mile or so away from where this water is collected for the city's drinking water. A woman walks up and down the aisle of my bus trying to sell the passengers those individual packets of tissues... This is how she believes she will sustain a living. Safwan and I pass a bus with a plywood exterior. A carpet weaving school I walked through, and the boy of five who knew no English but after I took a picture of what he was working on rubbed his thumb together with the tips of his index and middle fingers: the universal sign for demanding money. I walk back on to the bus after a snack stop, and a woman in a full burka snatches her child away from the aisle so that she doesn't touch me (fear? disgust?). The hindquarters of camels scarred from whipping. As we wait for lunch to be served, Sam's son races in to the kitchen to shout something at his mother who is making the meal, and the boy and his parents all laugh at this.... Sam finds it so funny that he translates it for me and Fernanda... He says "Mom, you dog, hurry up with the food!!" And they all laugh more.

I realize in retrospect that I wanted the impossible from Egypt. In a world in which two societies are diametrically opposed, I wanted to achieve, in at least my few days of experience there, a sense of common ground, seeds for hope. Clearly I failed. But I am astounded at how complete my failure was. One last image, but one that I will comment briefly on. On the way back on the bus to Cairo from the White Desert, a couple in their late twenties (I think, she was in a full burka and veil, only her eyes were visible) sit with their two very young children (1 and maybe 2 1/2 at the most) in their laps. The boy is the older one, and when he smiles you see that his recently formed and still growing teeth are already brown with rot, the sides curved in some places from this decay, like the edges of a block of Swiss cheese. A black spot I mistake for a mole is right near his eye, and I stare for almost a minute and wonder if the family will ever have it removed surgically. And the spot moves, because it is a fly. It crawls closer to the boy's eye, and another lands on his lip and scurries in that creepy way that flies do, to the under side of the lip, the interior of the boy's mouth. This whole time, the father is looking at the boy, smiling with a fatherly pride. Yet he never once moves to swat away the flies, even though they are crawling on the boy's eyes and into his mouth. He clearly loves the boy, but at no point does the instinct to swat the flies away ever kick in. Can we be that different? Actions I thought intrinsic, ones so obvious as to be unconscious, even these don't seem to be mutual.

I don't think that my experience is unique, but I also know that it can't be the only one. I met two very nice people that worked at my hostel, ones I was able to speak with only briefly, and maybe my time would have been different if I got to speak more with them, or if I looked a bit less Western. I'm sure there are American backpackers (we're not counting the security of tour groups) that have been to Egypt and loved it, ones that did not experience the discrimination that I did. But it is part of this journey, and an experience that is important, if not pleasant. I now know firsthand what total shit it is to be treated this way, and especially for no true reason that an individual can control.

I included the conversation at the top between Safwan and myself because I thought it set a pretty accurate tone for Cairo and my experience, and also because it was the only real conversation I had in my three days there. The honesty of his answer was the one time I didn't feel like an American, the one time anyone was willing to let me be just human.

Egypt:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2108388&id=35804394&l=f2e5e02169

Dessert: study abroad.

2009-10-22T10:47:00.033-04:00

John Keats died on Friday. This happened in 1821, in Rome, in a house at the foot of the Spanish Steps. If you're not familiar with Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century traditions, in a time before airplanes, high-speed international rail, and mass communication, Rome sounds like a strange place for an English poet to die.

To be taken seriously as an artist, it was necessary at the time to spend part of your education in Italy, to study in the country that was the cradle and final resting place of so many talented artists, their canons of work, and the fertile period of the Renaissance. If you think this tradition is presumptuous, that's because it is. But it's also rooted in accuracy. It is not that Italy is an oracle, a magical font of inspiration or skill that visitors can wash down with their Chianti. Not artistry by osmosis. Rather, something happens when you look at incredible pieces of art, and I've never felt it more prominently than I did in Italy. A person drawn to creativity is forever changed when he looks at the folds of Michelangelo's gentle marble, sees in his Pieta and Moses the frozen but living emotions that have existed for centuries, thoughts turned granite..... or as that person's eyes wander the wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, where da Vinci's Last Supper commands the vacuous space. He spent four years painting it, and every hour of that effort is apparent to this day. In these moments, the work catalyzes a desire in you, not the same as but also not entirely unlike competition, and you discover that in the highest strata of art, the art itself becomes the muse. You appreciate the mastery just like everyone else, perhaps more so, as you dissect what it is within the work that elicits that reaction, what somehow turns splendor in to a glorious vise. You stand literally at the feet of the masters, and pledge in this moment of awakening to strive for more in your own work because, having seen theirs, you know what vast heights you are capable of reaching.

It is limiting and misleading to portray Italy as merely some campus for the university of the world. All art aside, just breathing in the vistas of Tuscany, the subtle brownscale spectrum of Siena, or watching the sunset over the perfectly-sized city of Florence, (and I stayed urban, so I can't speak of the beauty of Cinque Terre, the Amalfi Coast, Sicily, Sardinia).... these visions transcend your eyes, permeate your senses and convince you momentarily that surely you must have more than five, for nothing could be this vivid otherwise.

For many of my friends, Italy has been the apex of their travels. If I don't completely share the extent of their enthusiasm, I think I can understand it. There are more beautiful places than this, but there is a deep level of our world more palpable in Italy than anywhere else. Over 2,800 years of cultural passion has made the devotion of artists and architects and that reservoir of majesty tangible, attainable for us, and it has made the country feel more like a conduit. A gateway to the days when God still dreamed.

The sunset I watched on my last night in Florence came on the day that is most likely the exact halfway point in my travels. A symbolism not lost on me. And today, my last day in Europe, the official day when visits to cathedrals become visits to mosques and temples, is the one on which I close the chapter on my European vacation, and thus leave behind my comfort zone for something much dearer. Something that, after my experience in Italy, honestly feels a little like a graduation.

The rest of Italy: Venice, Milan, Pisa, and Siena-
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2105923&id=35804394&l=b880dba2a2

Secondi piatti: the divine comedy.

2009-10-21T17:06:00.023-04:00

Italy is a paradox, worthy of Da Vinci's laborious designs.

The country is in no hurry. Locals meander the streets as if crawling on their feet and dinners last hours, and yet people shove one another to pack in to subway cars so as not to have to wait for the next one, the sound of horns on some, if not most, streets in Rome literally never ends, and people will cut in front of everyone else in line at every possible opportunity. It manages to be everything, all at once.

But its duality should not have surprised me. The same national womb gave us both Michelangelo and Machiavelli. One nation managed to inspire and foster the Renaissance as well as elect Silvio Berlusconi. Twice. And he doesn't even keep the trains running on time.

I left Rome 2 days ago, and the best way that I can describe it is that it's the greatest city in the world that I would never want to go back to. I tend to prefer cities over villages, and it holds an embarrassment of riches, historical and religious on an unparalleled scale, and some astonishing pieces of art. Whereas my favorite city I visited during my two and a half weeks in Italy, the miniscule Siena, has almost nothing of any cultural or historical significance whatsoever, and yet I feel compelled to walk within its brown walls once again. Which is to say, spend time in Italy, and you fall victim to the paradox as well.

Its enigmatic duality stretches to the point that at times I thought I was in a different Italy than everyone else had been to. Milan, a major city that I was told by several people to not even bother visiting, held two of the absolute highlights of my time in the country. Its Duomo is the most gorgeous cathedral exterior I have ever seen (and considering my itinerary of the last two months, that is a serious statement), and Da Vinci's Last Supper, a work I considered utilitarian at best a few weeks ago, managed to knock me on my ass with awe in person. And in terms of food, that fun fact you've probably heard, that no one in Italy actually eats pizza, that it's an American dish.... jaw-droppingly wrong. It's everywhere, it's amazing, and maybe ten percent of the orders I overheard in the many pizzerias I went to were in something other than fluent Italian. So hit the next person that tries to tell you that.

And just quickly, while we're on the subject of idiocy.... if you ever get the opportunity to visit Italy, and make it out to Pisa, please do NOT take a picture where you're holding up the Leaning Tower. It's not just that it's unspeakably lame and unfunny, it's what the vast majority of tourists who visit do (saw at least 75 people do it in the span of less than an hour), so you're not being remotely original. So come on, people. You're better than that. (Well, I already know YOU guys are... you're my friends, you'd have to be).

Paradoxes? Duality? That's what we were on? .... Look at the Roman Empire in general. Their entire reputation was built on their romantic paganism, their persecution of Christians. And then they hit the year 380 and make it the official religion. I'm not going to go in to the Vatican issue, but if you ever visit, please keep in mind the whole "Lenders in the Temple" episode as you pass by the gift shops with awkward souvenirs for sale on the actual church grounds. In their defense much fewer than the rest of Rome, but still. Doesn't sit right.

All of this contradiction forces one to submit to the glorious lunacy of Italy. It just can't be taken seriously, and maybe that's what makes your time there so enjoyable. The only way to deal with it all is to laugh it off, and do as the Romans do, preferably with a glass of the house red in hand.

Rome:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2106778&id=35804394&l=70df7e6543

Primi piatti: un chien napolitano.

2009-10-18T11:05:00.041-04:00

If you ask anyone that's been to Italy, I wasn't supposed to go to Naples. That it's the birthplace of pizza and neighbor to the ruins of Pompeii are distant seconds to its rampant crime, or its status as the stronghold of the still existent mafia. But my other options were a lot of beautiful places that don't make sense for a guy to visit on his own, especially in the gloom of October, and I have an over-arching tendency not to follow directions.

I often confuse people, particularly locals, by what I stop to photograph. They pass with furrowed brows, jaws ajar, looking from me to what I'm shooting, and usually repeat this a few more times with increasing curiosity. Even more entertaining, which happens pretty frequently, they'll stop to take a photo as well, then stare at the screen of their digital camera, their confusion heightened by a frustrated failure to understand, before walking off in defeat.

Something like this happened as I walked around the Portici district of Naples, as four children of about 10 outside a dingy church I was taking pictures of saw me and instantly broke in to hurried conversation. They quickly rode their bicycles over to where I stood, surrounding me, and asked in Italian who exactly I was and where I was from. I answered, and just as I thought they were about to City-of-God me, the main boy asked excitedly if I could tell him what his name, Alessandro, would translate to in English. I did the same for Francisco, Giuseppe, and Paolo, and left them with huge smiles as they took turns introducing themselves to one another with their new identities in exaggerated American accents.

Wandering downtown in my everyday backpacking uniform of a white v-neck and jeans, I was caught in one of the most torrential rainstorms of my life. After one block, my shirt was essentially transparent, weighed about 4 pounds from all the infused rain, and (along with my scraggly beard and unkempt hair) gave me a visage closer to that of one of Italy's mangy stray dogs than its fashionable, bundled-up citizens. Not really to dry me off, but to at least cauterize the faucet running off my face and shoulders, I was kindly offered pocket tissues in a church, butcher paper in a market, and finally stumbled in to one of Naples' most heralded pizzerias: a hole in the wall with 4 tables and cooks that slide the pies into the ovens while smoking out of the side of their mouths. After taking my order, the waiter gave me the look of fatherly empathy I'd grown accustomed to over the past hour and a half before disappearing upstairs for a few minutes. He re-emerged with one of his own used t-shirts for me to change in to. Something I'll keep forever that encapsulates so much more than any cheesy souvenir ever would, or that any photograph could convey. I'm thousands of miles from anyone that knew I existed before 2 months ago, let alone cared about my well-being. But looking at that shirt, or remembering the outstretched arms of the woman in the church, the grocer with his thin sheets of yellow paper.... that fact is easily forgotten.

I walked back out in to the cramped alleyway, rainwater spread atop the black stone of the street like icing. The revenant sun was bouncing off of it... a welcome warmth, a reflective shine so bright that nobody could see a thing, and the rainstorm a memory only present because my shoes were still soaked. But Naples reminded me in one afternoon everything I need to know to survive.

If you can weather the storm, the sunlight will positively blind you.

Naples, Pompeii, and Florence:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2106379&id=35804394&l=908d5dfd66

Seeing double. / Chronicle of a life foretold.

2009-10-06T15:12:00.030-04:00

"You can tell a lot about a person by the places they choose to travel. Some people are drawn to Ireland, Amsterdam. For me it was the Philippines. On the surface an orderly democracy, but barely concealing a world of complete chaos. A place I instantly felt at home." - Alex Garland, The Beach*

"I have decided at twenty-five that something must change." - Bloc Party, "Kreuzberg"

I met my doppelgänger. In Germany, of course.

The story of Berlin for me begins in Bruges, a week before my actual arrival in the city. My hostel in Bruges was above a pretty good restaurant/bar (I think... I only experienced the second half). Just past 5 in the afternoon, which on a Friday is Bruges' Cinderella hour for sightseeing, the only two other people there were a backpacker my age named Johnny, from Derby, England, and a guy named Chris who was from, well he was from everywhere, splitting time in Belgium and Brazil (where he owns a beach resort I'm planning on visiting in the not-too-distant future), but originally from London- a proper bloke that not only should be in an early Guy Ritchie film, but would be the one played by Jason Statham. The only match for the local beer (Bruges Zot- go there and find it... it will change your life) was the local conversation. One round turned in to each of us picking up a shout a-piece, and a few more for good measure before the three of us headed to another restaurant/bar in the next village over for countless (and I do mean countless) rounds of Jupiler and Hoeegaarden.

Traveling this long, meeting this many people, you know in less than one beer whether you get along with someone enough to trust their opinion. With Chris and Johnny, the head hadn't even settled on our first round. Johnny's favorite city was Berlin. And Johnny has great taste.

One of the shitty times as a backpacker is arriving in a new city at night. It's depressing enough to think that you've lost the majority of the day in transit, but before you make it to your hostel to see that all the good beds are taken, you first have to navigate dark unfamiliar streets in a language you can't speak with your luggage silently screaming your status as a tourist. When this happened in Prague last December I was nearly mugged for the first and only time in my life; in Moscow, my very first night in Europe on these travels, I got lost for nearly an hour, trying to make sense of signs that read "крупнейший" .

Thursday.
I arrived in Berlin's Kreuzberg district at 11pm breathing frost. But it was a chill that awakened me, a brisk night walk past graffiti covered buildings that put me more at ease than the sight of flower pots would have. Berlin is another sprawling city, like New York, Paris, London, Chicago, where districts hold far more character than some countries I've been to can even dream of developing. Kreuzberg is kindred to the Lower East Side, the parallels between the two composed of the thick lines of several passes of spray paint. Or tethered by the undulating aromas of Turkish food next to Italian next to Indian food. Kreuzberg was the opposite of an echo. A precursor. A glimpse in to the life I'll be living in 3 months time when I get to New York. My crash education and embrace of the street art that is present throughout the city, my quick ability to decipher the labyrinth of the S-Bahn/U-Bahn system, my immersion in the history that has shaped our modern world, all with Kreuzberg as my base. If my new home is to be like this (which it is) I will be content. A new life that can compete with the one I am leading now (he writes as Italian islands pass by his train window).

Saturday.
The 19th anniversary of the re-unification of Germany.
I began the morning at the East Side Gallery of the Berlin Wall, taking in the rejuvenated beauty of its politically pointed artwork. A few hours and many sights later, I walked through the expansive Tiergarten, meandering vaguely towards the central celebrations near the Brandenberg Gate, but far more concerned with the journey than any fleeting destination. Seeing an unmarked path to my right that lead farther in to the wooded area of the park, I hesitated only briefly before taking it. I soon came upon a gate that held a large garden containing stately yet subtle features, a few gazebos, an anonymous Grecian-style statue of a mother and child bearing alms of fruit to an unseen god, twin bronze elks, a small fountain. The waning flowers that this garden held on a cold October Saturday were not mesmerizing in their beauty but in their mere existence, for each cluster of flowers was accompanied by a small sign marking the date of when it was planted in this garden (got to love German meticulousness). And that's when I became aware that I was not really in a garden, but a time capsule.

Berlin is arguably the capital of history in the Twentieth Century. It was here that the Nazis seized and held power, pulling the majority of the world in to a war they were antagonizing. The city's capture coupled with Hitler's suicide in a bunker below it (in what is now a car park that locals take their dogs to shit on) marked the end of this conflict in Europe, only for it to then re-emerge as the epicenter of the Cold War. A city divided in to quadrants, but realistically into two parts, a division that became concrete in 1961 when the Berlin Wall was surreptitiously erected by the Soviets essentially overnight. The end of the Cold War was marked not by events in Moscow, or Washington, but by the breaching and dismantling of the Berlin Wall. (An event which had as much to do with Ronald Reagan as it did with David Hasselhoff, so let's dispel that fraud of an assertion right now). Point being, for a fifty year stretch there, to watch Berlin was to watch the world. So when I stood in that garden and saw a plaque for Gloria Dei, 1942, what I really saw was the Battle of Midway.... Anne Frank going in to hiding. Gloire de Dijon, 1853 : the Crimean War. Lavender Lassie, 1959 : Fidel Castro coming to power in Cuba, the USSR escalating the space race, Ben-Hur and Some Like It Hot. Alchymist Rambler, 1956: West Germany banning the Communist party, Soviet troops suppressing the Hungarian uprising. Ghislaine de Feligonde, 1916 : Germans bombing Paris with zepplins, the battlefields of Verdun and the Somme running red and ashen from all the slaughtered youth. A garden, but not Eden. That would be boring. Rather a garden in which time ceased to be linear, and was a flat one-dimensional disc on the ground before me. All became equal, and history could be read all at once on a pink and white petal rather than a yellowed page.

Monday.
The story of Berlin ends for me (for now) in Switzerland. I left the city late Sunday night, more out of the duty of seeing Italy in detail than my desire to depart. Friday was my first real look at the city, and I had the privilege of experiencing a massive amount of it, probably the most I've seen in any one day on my travels so far. That night I had a dream. An actual dream. Not the bs pick-up line we've all heard way too often, or a hopeful fantasy that I could control, guide. This was a dream that I could not wake up from right away, and thought of really as a nightmare up until last night, when I finally understood it. In the dream I was in my hostel in Berlin that I had just gone to sleep in and I woke up to see a person sleeping in the bottom bunk across from me. He awoke, rolled over, and looked at me. And he was me. I was instantly pretty terrified, and first checked that I was actually me by looking for the tattoo on my bicep. The one-of-a-kind work was there, but it was on his as well. We both claimed to be me, and what frightened me the most is that I didn't know which of us was telling the truth. Justine, one of my oldest friends in the world, was for some reason there as well, and she could not tell the real me either. This panic went on for what felt like ten minutes, before I finally managed to wake up.

It took me until last night to realize that I met my doppelgänger. And he is Berlin.

I can't describe it any further than that, and am positive that I would sound really idiotic even trying.

I agree with Alex Garland that you can tell a lot about a person by the places one chooses to travel (Having been, every enthusiastic Amsterdam review I hear in hostels, tends to elicit an eye roll, a shift of my lower jaw). But you can tell even more about a person by what places choose to travel to them. That is a defining moment in the life of a backpacker, if it ever comes at all. And I am inexpressibly grateful that this came in Berlin, as opposed to Liverpool or Bern. That the city that I embraced closer than any of the thirty or so I have been to thus far requited that affection. That I can now look at a map and see a mirror.

*My copy of The Beach is in a box somewhere in Pennsylvania, and Alex Garland is not as prevalent in Italian bookstores as I was hoping, so this is a paraphrase, but pretty close to the original.

----------------------------------

(post-script) Incredibly long entry, so thanks if you've made it this far. I actually feel like I've said nothing about the city itself and want to very, VERY briefly. Given the city's history, I anticipated before my arrival that it would fascinate and sicken me, and if I were to read this post from your perspective, I would be a little dismayed that one of my friends found some sort of union with a city with such a dark history. But Berlin is not merely cognizant of its past and hurriedly rushes past it (like the BMW Factory in Munich did). It is proactive in its apology, as well as phenomenally artistic. There is no monument called the Holocaust Memorial. That is because there are five or six separate ones, and a new one currently being built, to honor all of the groups of victims individually, not only the Jewish dead, and they're all centrally located. This is in addition to an incredibly moving Monument to the Victims of War and Tyranny, and a prominently-placed recognition of the Nazi book burning of 1933 to call attention to us to never allow something like that to happen again. And in contemporary times, as I alluded to, it is a Mecca of street artists. Not simply worthless tagging (although that is of course there as well), but true artistry in a subversive, sometimes illegal, form.

Berlin:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2104926&id=35804394&l=a1003e77fe

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2105381&id=35804394&l=67f870bc6b

You don't have to put on a red light.

2009-09-28T12:48:00.037-04:00

"Not quite the Jazz Age euphoria I was expecting." - Marc Hauser

Amsterdam is for amateurs.

If this shatters your travel dreams, or insults your personal judgment from your own experience, My apologies. Well, not really.

This isn't the post for the full Tourist vs. Traveler analysis, but all you need to know is that Amsterdam is claustrophobically saturated with the former, while I consider myself decidedly the latter. Paris was stricken with the same problem, but the city itself was diverse enough in its neighborhoods and nuance to accommodate this, to give refuge to those who seek a little more than the mainstream. Amsterdam is a circle. That is what it looks like on a map, and walking its streets is a loop of coffee shops, canals, garish tourist souvenirs, and rows of bicycles on endless repeat.

That's the setting. As for the cast of characters. As I was checking email on my laptop after checking-in, two guys at my hostel used the only public computers in the building to listen to techno music videos on YouTube and write down the lyrics. For forty-five minutes. This was followed a few hours later by a conversation a girl from Spain had with a 28-year-old World of Warcraft-obsessed guy from America. A guy that is terrified to go anywhere that they speak anything other than English. Luckily Amsterdam and Paris still fit this for him, but he refuses to go to Spain. "Its just so tough because everything's in a different language." Contrast this with an excerpt from a conversation I overheard in Lithuania: "Oh, South America.... to do South America right you have to go for at least a year." Two ends of the spectrum. Tourist and traveler.

This guy in Amsterdam, he's been here for 3 days, by his own admission hadn't seen any of the city or its sights yet, and he spent today lying awake in his bunk for hours, waiting for 3 British guys he just met yesterday to wake up because he didn't want to walk around on his own. He'll cross an ocean, but walking those last few hundred meters is too much to bear. I don't get it. Last night with that girl, he talked about how much he wanted to go to Prague.... how he heard that you could live there in luxury on 10 or 20 dollars a week. What's his source.... a Lonely Planet from 1993? Do people really think the world's just that simple, that there's still some undiscovered-yet-completely-tourist-friendly magical city in Europe waiting for America to rescue it from squalor? This isn't rural South America or South East Asia. If you expect your money to go an absurdly long way, you're going to have to travel just as absurdly far to reach it. And every inch of it will be outside of your comfort zone.*

Back to those ever-napping British guys, the Jonas Brothers wannabes in my room, they're wearing those matching fake silver necklace and bracelet links they sold at the mall by the inch in the late '90s, wearing them without any irony. Velcro shoes. Those canvas cinch belts from 7th grade. They stayed out last night to a pretty normal hour, about 130, saying 2 o'clock would be quite generous... and so they slept in today. Until 5pm. Fifteen hours of sleep in a city they've never been to, never seen any more of it that you can't already see on a dorm room couch while playing Gran Turismo or Madden, no more than you could see from an ambiguously-damp sofa in a frat house garage while fighting the stale smell of weeks-old spilled beer. These are your options for smoking buddies in Amsterdam. If I had my own friends along with me, some of you guys reading this, I'm sure I'd feel differently. Not much as you'll see, but a little.

If you're coming here for the liberal stance on drugs, just understand that you're coming for that: the stance, not the substance. Coming from the West Coast you can take it for granted that you live where Oregon, Hawaii, and Humboldt County crop is easy to come by... how much better do you think it honestly gets? I only smoke on rare occasions, but if I'm going to, I expect it to be damn good. The lesson of Amsterdam is that mere legality and prevalence does not ensure quality. No, this isn't the Mecca to travel to for an amazing high. This is the Disneyland of Drugs. Fear and Loathing in Frontierland.

Amsterdam's other trademark. I didn't get a hooker (tell me no one actually expected me to get a hooker...), so I can't supply any first-hand insight, but I can relay a story I heard from a girl in Estonia that instantly became my favorite on the trip. This is how her friend that was backpacking relayed it to her, so I'm paraphrasing mostly, except for the last line, which is indelibly etched in to my memory. "After traveling for a few months, and not having any real luck, I thought I'd treat myself to a hooker in Amsterdam. Most depressing sexual experience in my life. She was barely 16 and so emotionless about it. She just laid there, and the more bored she seemed, the harder I tried, and I got really frustrated and wanted to impress her or make her feel at least something. So I went to switch positions, and she just said in this monotone voice 'That will be 25 more Euro,' ..... so I just lost my erection and left."

This is the Amsterdam of reality. Give me Bruges, give me Manchester, shit, give me Vegas. Or just give me a train ticket to my next city: Munich. Oktoberfest. Now this I can guarantee will be another amateur hour, a shit show waiting to happen. But somehow I feel like the chicken dance will make it all better.

*On a quick tangent, this is where I mention my gratitude to one of my best friends in the world, Kelly, who is traveling that absurdly far distance to see me in Thailand. I'm sure it will be pretty far outside our comfort zones at times (especially when we do the bungee-jumping I inexplicably agreed to). But I don't want it any other way. If you want to travel countless miles to live the exact life you left behind, go to Sandals, go to Disneyland. And I guess, sadly book a flight for Amsterdam.

Rotterdam and Amsterdam:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2104587&id=35804394&l=21f1fa4d5f

Little-known facts about fire.

2009-09-13T15:47:00.036-04:00

"We're gonna build something this summer." - The Hold Steady

In baseball, this is known as a change-up. I feel compelled to write a progress report, especially given that today marks my 40th day in Europe, since there's probably some symbolism in wandering for forty days and forty nights. But my writing is a little too flowery and hyperbolic for self-analysis, and since it's been a pretty amazing time, the last thing I want is to sound self-congratulatory. So instead, here are a few smaller musings from the first forty days. More utilitarian than anything. Consider this a sorbet between courses. Or the flicker of fireflies at dusk.

I lost 15 pounds in the first 3 weeks I was gone. A lot of this had to do with the stomach parasites I got in St. Petersburg that sent me to the hospital in Estonia, but luckily I've gained most of this back, and don't look quite so Emile-Hirsch-in-Into-the-Wild. On top of this, I was attacked by bed bugs in both St. Petersburg and Vienna, the blisters on the sole of my left foot are so multi-layered that it looks like a topographical map, and I have a 24/7 piercing pain next to my spine from my 28-kilo backpack. Just so you don't think it's all amazing foreign beer, priceless art, and exotic food.

In Barcelona, they are still constructing Antoni Gaudi's life's work and masterpiece of a cathedral, La Sagrada Familia. Construction began in 1882, and will not be complete until at least 2026. This is comforting to remember when I get down on myself for not being perfect at 26 years old. The night I came to this renewed peace of mind, I was at a 5-story club with five other people from my hostel. "Time to Pretend" by MGMT came on, and when the line "I'm feeling rough, I'm feeling raw, in the prime of my life" hit, we all made eye-contact that can only be described as feral, grabbed hands and sprinted to the dance floor.

I received one of the best compliments of my life last night, from a total stranger. I didn't begin talking to the 3 Dutch girls in my hostel room in Liverpool until after the lights were off, when we were all reduced to nothing more than voices in the darkness and ideas from a void. After discussing my travels so far, my plans that lie ahead, and a good deal of world politics, one of them said, "You have fire in your voice." According to her, this made me dynamic, even when I was nothing more than a sourceless sound. I don't know why, but I really like that.

I had the privilege of waking up the city of Warsaw. My overnight bus from Lithuania got in just before 5 a.m., and after dropping my bags off to a bleary-eyed hostel staff, I walked the length of the city's center (around 4 or 5 km), and was able to be alone with it's old town square and mermaid statue, the Chopin monument in Lazienki Park, the city's well-kept gardens. This only deepened and cemented my strong ties with the city, the paradoxical feeling of homecoming when I'm 8,000 miles from anywhere really familiar. Walking thru still vacant streets afforded me a few hours of meditation on where I was in my life, both geographically and emotionally. And as the rest of the city woke, I felt oddly proud of it, as if in observing it at sunrise I could see the potential it held that others would experience only later, in the hours to come. And don't listen to anybody, it's infinitely better than Krakow, which is essentially just a watered-down anonymous European city. There's not a ton to see in Warsaw, but it possesses a tangible sense of the Polish culture that Krakow lacks.

In Slovakia, 3 Italian backpackers I met made me a pasta dinner and were so disappointed with how it turned out (actually it was pretty decent), that they bought me beer all night to make up for it. And when I get to Milan, we may meet up again, as they promised they could do much better with fresh Italian ingredients.

Of the hundred plus buskers I've seen/heard, I've been tempted all of once to actually give a few cents, and that was to a couple in Riga playing an instrumental version of The Cranberries' "Zombie," with a really hauntingly prominent violin. In Paris, one gets nauseated from all the subway musicians. Trying to ignore the beggars however has been a bit harder, particularly in Eastern Europe. An elderly woman in Lithuania in particular, who had one exposed and empty eye socket, and crawled backwards on her hands and knees. You don't just shake off something like that.

One more note on Barcelona. Managed to get swine flu. So I had that going for me. Which is nice. Feeling basically back to better now though.

The closest that I will come to self-analysis, or a final grade on this progress report, is a recurring image I've had to propel me, a visual mantra for my travels. And it is either fiction or non-fiction, I'm not sure, although I know which one I want it to be. But it isn't my place to judge, just my time to continue.

Somewhere in Europe, there is a candle burning at both ends. But with every passing second, the flames inch farther away from one another, grow in size as they inhale, the oxygen nourishing what was once something that merely flickered in to a steady roar of heat that swells brighter, hotter. Still just flames on a candle, but ones rapidly becoming capable of providing warmth to loved ones, illumination to strangers, as potential is consummated. The wicks shake off the ash, their weave grows tighter, become a solid rope framework keeping the surrounding facade of wax balanced. The candle does not become extinguished in the four winds, rather amplified by them; where they normally snuff out a flame, here they work towards stoking it. And even when this candle sleeps, it wakes up stronger, more alert, hungrier for more.

----------------

One last bit. I'm not actually keeping a private journal while I'm gone, not a detailed one, so this list is really more for myself than anything. But it's what songs have meant something to me in the places I've been. Arcade Fire at the Louvre, Radiohead in Warsaw, The Fling in Lithuania, Frightened Rabbit this morning in Edinburgh. A few people asked me to do something like this before I left, but it's not like I'm expecting everyone to start making a playlist or anything. Although it would be a pretty kick-ass one if you did.

Leaving
Muse - Starlight
Bright Eyes - Clairaudients (Kill or Be Killed)
Bright Eyes - If the Brakeman Turns My Way
Bright Eyes - Another Travelin' Song
The Kooks - See the World
Spoon - All I Got Is Me
Russia
Bloc Party - Pioneers
Bloc Party - Plans
Regina Spektor - Carbon Monoxide
Brazilian Girls - St. Petersburg
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium
Coldplay - Life in Technicolor II
Maximo Park - Russian Literature
Estonia
The Faint - Take Me to the Hospital
The Lonely Island - I'm on a Boat
Finland
Architecture in Helsinki - Like It Or Not (Version 2)
Snowden - Anti-Anti
Snowden - Dreams
Snowden - Between the Rent and Me (Captain Crunk Remix)
Brand New - Play Crack the Sky
Sigur Ros - the ( ) album, Untitled 4 specifically
Latvia
Kings of Convenience - Homesick
The Cranberries - Zombie (instrumental)
Poland
The Kills - Tape Song
The Hold Steady - Constructive Summer
Muse - Map of the Problematique
Austria
Rilo Kiley - The Good That Won't Come
Rilo Kiley - Better Son/Daughter
Germany
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Around the World
Editors - Munich
France
Foals - The French Open
Carla Bruni - Quelqu'un M'a Dit
Arcade Fire - Wake Up
Spain
Counting Crows - Holiday in Spain
Nappy Roots - Work in Progress
MGMT - Time to Pretend
The Decemberists - O, Valencia!
England
The Smiths - London
Arctic Monkeys - Crying Lightning
The Clash - Hateful

Untitled, one.

2009-09-02T16:28:00.027-04:00

Today I stood on holy ground. I have never thought that, nor even knew it was possible for me to do so, until I looked out at the English Channel from the sand of Omaha Beach.

The blood of the thousands of American soldiers killed on D-Day, the blood that changed the color of the ocean, saturated the sand until each grain was engorged and could hold no more, mingled with the grass and roots of the forest on the sloping hill above the beach, this blood also consecrated this spot, and the other battle sites all along the coast of Normandy that on that day would open up to swallow the lives of thousands of young men, swallow their lives and swallow all the promise that the future would have held for them, everything they would achieve if not for this war, this place, this enemy that they were thrust against, these boats they were crammed in to, this part of the earth that they very simply had to take away from others, by the use of guns, and explosives, and intimidation, but those others had guns and had explosives and had intimidation as well, and they also had momentum, had a foothold, had the strategic advantage of needing to simply hold ground, wait for the Allies to tire themselves out wading through the ocean waters and then up the beach and then up the hill, dodging bullets and mortars with every step, finally they would make it to where the Nazis were positioned, and only then would we see whose guns, whose explosives, whose intimidation held sway, and on that morning, on the very spot that I was to stand today, 65 years later, thousands of men with limitless promise became corpses, while another thousand became nothing, their bodies were never found, their annihilation was that complete, but they didn't really become nothing, they all became martyrs, and for me, with my toes nestled in the sand that is now their sepulcher, I recognized that they all became gods.

Seeing the waves of the English Channel break on Omaha, and the gorgeous coast and the forest above, it was impossible for me to really picture that day, or to visualize the carnage that existed in all directions. And that's exactly as it should be. The sacrifice these men gave was so that we all need not picture that. But rather that we enjoy our freedom, savor our happiness, and if anything silently acknowledge what the price for our livelihood was. Not all gods ask for tithes or affirmation; for some, a solemn recognition alone suffices.

This stretch of coast is absolutely gorgeous, worthy of being the altar of their deification. And the cemetery above where nearly ten thousand American dead rest, where gods sleep- it is kept immaculate. For this alone to be the case made me swell with gratitude. This cathedral was not abandoned. But as my visit was nearing its end, I saw a team of groundskeepers spread out around the many acres of graves. One man stood above his large mower at the end of a row that was closest to the ocean, closest to the beach below. His frozen position was just enough to catch my attention and I watched as he stood silently, looking at down at what I assumed must be a faulty machine. And then he crossed himself. And what I mistook for confusion was really silent prayer, and he began mowing the grass above the graves of men he held in such regard that even in fulfilling an everyday task, he wanted to show his respect, his gratitude for everything that they died for, everything they gave up and could not live for.

When in the future I think of Omaha Beach, this image will come easy. Not of carnage, but of legacy.

Omaha Beach, as well as Paris and Versailles:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2101951&id=35804394&l=420c3bea04

Paris, in monochrome:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2102144&id=35804394&l=d236612a22

What an ugly way to say butterfly.

2009-08-31T01:28:00.011-04:00

I am a blatant racist. I can't help it. I flat out hate Germans.

This is not a holdover from the last post, although, let's be honest, that doesn't help. In my travels both before and on this trip so far (not in America, before you all get offended), maybe two of the eighty or so people I've met from Germany have been decent. At best, decent. The Eurotrash stereotype of the guy in acid-washed zippers-everywhere jeans, horrid sunglasses and constantly listening to techno, or as Corey Irwin would say "the douff-douff" music? He comes from Hamburg. Frankfurt. Berlin. And as far as women, they gave us Heidi Klum. That's about it.

And so they've collectively fucked up in general, annoying but no one thing overly egregious. I've given the Germans another chance and, following the pattern of the early 20th Century, then they really dick you over. I'm up at 5:30 am in Paris. And it's not to watch the sunrise, or beat the queue at the Louvre. Its because I confusedly woke up to the sound of retching, and still groggy thought "why does it smell like awful wine?" Oh. Because there's a lake of vomit on the floor of my hostel room. Right in the center of all the beds. Not even an attempt to make it to the bathroom, where if the guy failed on the way you could at least applaud the valor. No, he was already back asleep, the smug smirk of accomplishment on his face. And this degenerate of a flatmate.... he comes from Dusseldorf. Cologne. Stuttgart. I still have 3 days in Berlin on the horizon, and a return to Munich for Oktoberfest to change my mind, but we're not looking good at the moment here.

You know the really hot girl at the bar with the complete douchebag? You want to try to rescue her, give her an intervention, but she's insecure, has a long history with him, is a little too far down that road to see reason..... Yeah. That's Vienna. It deserves so much better.

Austria has been home to some of the greatest composers in history: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms (ignore Falco for a second). Even if they came from somewhere else, it was in Vienna that their talent bloomed. And so one walks the streets of Vienna as if the architecture were amplifiers, the streets and buildings evoking such wondrous music to match the opulence of their edifice. It has inspired not just classical music, but a bit more recently the quirky score of The Third Man. Mandolins and accordions and staccato improv, and that somehow produced one of the great accompaniments to a film ever. This is what Vienna should sound like. But begin to immerse yourself in the city's people, interact with the locals, and you get the AM radio static that passes for the German language. These are the very lips of grandeur, and they're forced to spew cacophony, the letters g and f by the dozen.

If not for this tragedy of linguistics I could see myself living in Vienna. It's majestic, still touristy but nowhere near as bad as Paris, and in some ways even more beautiful. But it's saddled with one of the most horrendous languages to survive the tumultuous centuries of European history. Latin is dead, but we still have "geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung" as a way to say "speed limit." Juliet's lament about a rose by any other name: disproved.

Now, about that queue for the Louvre......

(Vienna):
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2101472&id=35804394&l=dc4d0dcfae

Comparing notes on a disaster.

2009-08-25T09:56:00.000-04:00

Nothing moved on the day I went to Auschwitz. The pristine weather Poland in summer had offered the previous 3 days was swallowed by a colourless void of sky. The heat remained, but was now sourceless, the sky so full of clouds that it seemingly had none at all. It hung like a dull, recycled canvas. Even with the train carriage's window down, the air was stagnant, claustrophobic as the countryside passed by. I poured water down a throat that stubbornly remained dry.

My predominant emotion was apprehension. Visiting the grounds of Treblinka in December grated my emotions further every minute I was there, and that was without any remaining buildings on the grounds. How would I cope now with entering the very structures of a death factory? And Treblinka was something else Auschwitz was not. Silent. Secluded. In the three hours Corey Irwin and I were there, we saw maybe four other people on the grounds as well. I am forever listening, but Treblinka was quiet enough to hear. An imagination invites. Treblinka obliged. At Auschwitz there is not the retreat of creativity. Merely undeniable reality.

These bricks held screams. The bullet holes in concrete were made just after lives were ended. The two tons of human hair in the room before me- that was washed, cared for, fretted over. But then came Auschwitz. The endless piles of shoes, both adults' and children's..... those were purchased, polished, a source of delight, even brief, material pride. But then they stepped on the platform at Birkenau II. Individual tragedy on that scale is not something that the mind can digest fully. Honestly. It isn't. Even for me, who attended potentially the leading university for Holocaust study in America. I've eaten dozens of dinners with survivors, read reams of history and first-hand accounts, in Night and Fog seen the most graphic footage that exists on the camps. And still, when actually on the grounds, my intellect fails me.

Understanding is not found in the face of atrocity. Horror as confrontation is not horror as comprehension. Even if you succeed in part, begin to fathom what this place means, you are thrown off-balance, stopped once again. For there is laughter at Auschwitz. On the walk from the train station to the site, you pass a neighborhood, hung laundry drying, playgrounds in use. The three-kilometer gap between the camps? That's filled with houses, a lot of them, seemingly unaware they are entrenched between the echoes of the basest evil man is capable of. People eagerly pose for photos beneath the cruelly-worded gates ("Work Will Set You Free"). People want to remember that moment. I had a difficult time taking any photographs, had to force myself to so that I could reflect responsibly on the experience years from now. Inserting myself in such a setting for all time was not just unappealing, it would be sickening. A teenager stood in front of a maze of barbed wire that surrounded a watch tower and a sign that read "Halt" while miming the stance of an SS guard. He just barely held his laugh in long enough for his photo to be taken. That's what the compounds the horror of Auschwitz. We seriously don't fucking get it.

Elie Wiesel, the popular face and voice of the Holocaust survivor, spoke at my university, an incredibly rare honor I was privileged to attend. He discussed a thesis of re-interpretation regarding the myth of Pandora's Box, and how it relates to looking back on his experience after these many decades. Pandora disobeys Zeus, and in doing so unleashes all forms of plagues and evil throughout the world, dooming humanity to immeasurable misery. And at the very bottom of the vacated box, she sees the silver light of hope. We all sleep easier knowing we have this one gift to combat all our struggles. But Mr. Wiesel stressed the forgotten premise of the entire story, the one that shifts the paradigm. The box contains all the evils in the world that can torture us. And hope is in that box. So why should we view hope as anything other than the cruelest evil of all? The one deeper and more lasting than all the others....

During the speech at Chapman, it was a thesis I found clever, memorable, thought-provoking. At Auschwitz it was a thesis proven true. We proclaim "Never forget," vow "Never again." But this ignores the killing fields of Cambodia, the ethnic cleansing of the Balkans, the bloody rivers of Rwanda and Darfur. Even the most casual look at history exhibits that hope in the face of horror is at best proven moot. At worst, exposed for what it really is. This may not apply to the everyday life at home (I haven't grown that pessimistic), but for a few thousand acres of the Polish countryside and the hundreds of other places like it, a list expanding by the day, it is impossible to argue otherwise.

---------------
(postscript) These are the emotions I feel right now, a time in my life unique in that I have just visited Auschwitz. But it is not a weight or depression that I will carry with me, so as my friends, don't worry. I realize how negative the above sounds, but I wanted to give you insight in to this moment, as well as reassurance that I will use this experience as something to learn from and grow. In short, I will bounce back. I have a tendency to do that.

Auschwitz and the rest of Poland:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2101153&id=35804394&l=22664e38a1

Play crack the sky.

2009-08-19T03:45:00.000-04:00

That I may dream of Suomenlinna.

Its history, being an 18th Century fortress built to protect nearby Helsinki, is merely a side curiosity to me. My visit was not about its history but its aesthetics- of the grounds, the sea, and the sky above. Its mortal history only dilutes its effect, for it has a central and inescapable quality of eternity about it; learning of the human hands that laid the bricks only cauterizes the wonder.

Standing on its cliffs, my perspective followed the line of the cannons still pointed out to sea, and I watched as storms rioted over the Gulf of Finland. Storms so far away, that I could see their clear borders, and the wave of sunlight that would follow soon for those on boats underneath. The sky meticulously ran the gamut of greyscale, the clouds the gauzy layers of organ tissue. This was not a tourist destination, it was a setting for our earliest history. This was watching mythologies form. Where unnoticed humans arrive to witness concepts hold court, time and wisdom debate one another. If this is not where Earth began, it was close enough that the feeling is still palpable.

I have little to tell you about Suomenlinna, but much for you to see. Please look through the pictures, maybe listening to the Sigur Ros album ( ) as I did while walking the grounds, for a deeper experience.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuajaniak/sets/72157621957599583/

Lessons learned from rocky iv.

2009-08-08T22:10:00.000-04:00

"You said you were going to conquer new frontiers,
Go stick your bloody head in the jaws of the beast..." - Bloc Party

In Moscow, it is never possible to not be in Moscow. New York and London are chameleons, offering nuances and pockets secluded enough to either forget the urban sprawl, or so authentically diverse that you must rethink what city, even country, you are currently in. Even St. Petersburg has some of the ambiguous elegance of several European cities, a massive version of Prague, an exponential Budapest. Not Moscow. Moscow is a leviathan, an eternal presence that looms, not above you, but directly on top of you. Not always a crushing weight, but a presence undeniable.

This trip always had a sense of urgency for me. Not only because my time to do such drastic things is dwindling frightfully low, but also due to the precarious status of many of my destinations; if I couldn't see them in the next 5 years or so, they may not be around to. Angkor Wat is crumbling, Hiroshima's ghosts are fading (literally, we'll come to that in December), and I fear that Russia's politics, and thus its borders, are freezing back up once again.

This annoyance turns tragic when one gets to meet the Russian people themselves. I found almost all of them to be extremely friendly, if not equipped to be tourist-friendly, though nothing in Moscow is. Basically no signs (one in every 70? 80?) had an English translation, and outside of my hostel staff, in 3 days probably 5 people I came across spoke enough English to struggle through a small set of directions, or a lunch order. The usual reaction to hearing English was utter bewilderment. And this is the reason that I wanted Moscow to be not simply a destination during my travels, but the city to begin my time abroad.

Leading up to this trip, the standard reaction was "Oh my God, you're going to have the time of you're life/so much fun/an absolute blast." And I will, but I also somehow need to stretch a sizable but fixed amount of money across the span of 5 months, 30+ countries, and 3 continents, without taking any new money in during that entire time. To see everywhere I want to, to financially actually make it through to mid-December, this can't be a giant gluttonous pub crawl, or at least not a non-stop one. This lesson could not be absorbed in the tempting and familiar comfort of London, or the opulence of Paris. But rather Moscow. Whether it's baptism by fire, or the hazing of the expatriate, that tone of unfamiliarity had to be set. Not discomfort but the necessity to avoid the complacency that any comfort inevitably brings. And what better locale for such an aim than Moscow.

Relentless, unapologetic Moscow. The size alone will crush you. By fast rail without any stops, its diameter is 90 minutes in all directions before you even hit the suburbs. 156 metro stations latticed throughout its faceless, repetitive geography. There is actually little of major note to see there- the Kremlin and Red Square, and whatever much smaller attractions appeal to your personal idiosyncrasies. But the main draw, what made it more rewarding an experience than St. Petersburg, was the nearly-tangible atmosphere that is as omnipresent as the hammer & sickle is in its architecture (seriously, everywhere). You can see photos of the onion domes of St. Basil's, wikipedia the history and significance of the Kremlin, but you will never even begin to comprehend what Moscow means until you are enveloped in its bloodless grasp.

That sounds like a condemnation, certainly a hyperbole, but what other city can inspire even remotely that, simply by its existence. Simply by walking its streets.

------------------------

(post-script)
Walking these streets is what I did most of the time, and meandering around the gorgeous underground metro, taking in the sights of both the people and what the people themselves were seeing. Though I did so with my own soundtrack. Despite being several years old, and having heard it countless times in all ranges of moods, Bloc Party's Silent Alarm will now always be linked to Moscow for me, "Pioneers" and "Plans" especially. In truth, "Pioneers" will probably be my anthem for this voyage as a whole, but also perfectly encapsulates its audacious beginnings. Also, Regina Spektor's Soviet Kitsch was a beautiful accompaniment to the delicate grandeur that is Red Square at night, which was my farewell to the city. So if you browse the photos below, if at all possible, pull up those songs to go along with them.

Moscow:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2099609&id=35804394&l=d9ae5998c6

St. Petersburg:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2100146&id=35804394&l=a0efba73fc

Overture.

2009-07-30T15:28:00.001-04:00

"When I make it Moab, I'll get my canteen filled.
There's nothing that the road cannot heal." - Conor Oberst

Can an agnostic make a pilgrimage?

Not a trip.
Not a journey.
A pilgrimage.

My road trip was born of a kaleidoscope of motives. The necessity of getting my car to Pennsylvania from California, the consummation of a decade-long desire to cross America with friends, of experiencing cities I should have long before. 2,500 miles of break-up sex with the country I'm so anxious to leave.

Most of the stops were obvious: Chicago, Denver, Omaha the logical equidistant choice between the two. But the first night wasn't as simple. Vegas was too close, too tempting of a money drain, too familiar to me. Mapping the trip online, Cedar City, Utah seemed to be the only city of any size on the way to stop off in. But it was such a boring option, at best a waste of a night.

There's one more thing this road trip was to be: a prologue. Five days of travel to prep myself for the five months of wandering across Europe and Asia that begins a week from today. The appetizer. The overture. And that's why Cedar City didn't feel right to me. Yes... a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But that step should at least be a purposeful one.

Lacking a launch pad, I at least had a mantra. There is nothing that the road cannot heal, taken from the Conor Oberst song "Moab."

Moab, Utah.

Without knowing why I chose it, I did. Even if you can't see the tumblers aligning, falling in to place, that sound is unmistakable. Moab. I was drawn to it, without knowing why. A week ago, one of my oldest friends and I got in my car and left Los Angeles for Moab, Utah- a 50 mile deviation from our path, but one I was compelled to explore. Even on the way there, we had to pull over at least a dozen times on the 70 East to take in the wondrous nature that surrounded us. Your eyes can breathe deeper than your lungs.

A quiet night in Moab, and the next day hiking throughout the town's signature attraction, Arches National Park. We stood on the earthen floor surrounded by stoic giants, silent as awed children. We did more than inhale the view; we tapped deeply in to that Jungian Eden, the collective unconscious. A vivid, overwhelming rush of memories made by strangers, but remembered by me. Visitors from all throughout the country, the world, drawn here. To Moab. And they were everpresent, the eager ghosts of their faded wonder reawakened by our arrival. An experience I've savored only once before, in Brooklyn riding the Coney Island Cyclone. Two places entirely dissimilar, except for their fundamental effect upon the visitor- to strip away all layers of preconception, all idiosyncrasies of personality, to penetrate deeply, immediately to the single common denominator all humanity shares. Call it our basic innocence, the soul, the Atman, the karma... as an agnostic it is inexpressible, unclassifiable. But no less real, no less mesmerizing, no less available. If you find the right setting.

Moab. A reminder that tapping in to the collective unconscious is not a one-way transaction. Justin and I stirred up the memories of a century of visitors, famous and anonymous. But we also deposited our emotions, our innocent elation, back in to that intangible reservoir as well. The closest an agnostic can come to infinity. Pilgrimage by happenstance.

(more photos)
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2098648&id=35804394&l=aed563481e

Road trip soundtrack:
Conor Oberst - "Moab"
Counting Crows - "Omaha" & "Holiday in Spain"
Tapes 'n Tapes - "Omaha"
Common ft. Kanye West - "Southside"
Kings of Leon - "Frontier City"
The Cardigans - "You're the Storm"
Taking Back Sunday - "Where My Mouth Is" & "Everything Must Go"

The twice-a-year addict.

2009-07-17T21:53:00.001-04:00

"If you find yourself alone, riding in green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium." - Gladiator

This is the moment where the polygamist becomes the full-fledged traitor.

A child of America, thus a child of sport. No matter how strong a Europhile I may be, I cannot deny my love for the great American pastime. Baseball. Not my favorite sport, (nothing can touch the beautiful game in my passions), but only baseball can rival football (by which I mean soccer) for transcendence. It's piecemeal attrition. Politics. Ecstasy. Greed. A choir of 50,000 breaths hinge on a pitch, the crack of an ash bat, a runner's sprint to second. Games end in unbridled elation, only for everyone to realize there are 161 others just as important. All those victories yet to capture. All those emotions yet to be swayed.

My love for baseball doesn't mean I'm in a fantasy league, or can rattle off obscure decades-old stats, or even the rosters of my favorite team, but I get a rush from merely sitting in the grandstands.... I don't think it's strange that Roger Kahn's descriptions of Pee Wee Reese or Roy Campanella can bring me nearly (nearly) to tears. I think it's strange if it can't do the same to you.

My confession is that I've had 2 loves. The Cleveland Indians I grew up following, and the Los Angeles Dodgers, whom I know far more intimately, whose majestic park I've been to 40? 60? times in the past 15 years. The Dodgers of Jackie Robinson. The Dodgers of Elysian Park. You have to be there to appreciate that name, why the grounds around the ballpark carry that title. That's where I stood yesterday morning, visiting the stadium to pick up tickets for that night's game. I purchased the seats, aware that they would be for my last game here for I don't know how long. Years at least. I turned around from the ticket window with them in hand, and looked up to see the view above. The view from Elysium.

It's a view I've seen before, and one that I would see again several hours later, with the full spectrum of the skyline lights bursting through the palm trees, under a rich violet canopy of night. It was also the view that fans had leaving the Kirk Gibson pinch-hit home run game, the view during the summer fervors of Valenzuela and Nomo. More than a view. A Rubicon. What cemented the pendulum of my loyalty in favor of Dodger blue, even over the team I was born in to following. Traitor? Maybe. But I don't find it strange that it meant that to me. I find it strange if it can't do the same to you.

This shift has very little practical impact. I'll be in Middle East during the World Series, and living in New York by next baseball season... in both cases far from the view from Elysian Park. But if you're looking for practicality, don't start with baseball fans. Even if I only attend 2 or 3 games a year, can't tell you the batting order Joe Torre favors, or what pitches were in Sandy Koufax's arsenal, the love remains the same. My rationed presence only heightens the senses, devotion magnified by distance. Until the next time I hear the crack of the bat echo throughout Dodger Stadium, join in the chorus of roars. Walk through Elysium with the sun on my face, taking in the view.

Los angeles, i'm yours.

2009-07-05T20:30:00.002-04:00

I prefer microcosms, not mosaics.

In remembering a country or a city that I've been, I don't try to recall the dozens, or even hundreds of moments that make up the bank of memories that I have about it. Not when I want to define what the city itself meant to me.

Such focus is much easier the shorter you're in a certain place. Living in Los Angeles off and on for 18 years , I don't know what that moment would have been if you'd asked me a week ago. I've had lots of nights I love to remember, a few that for the life of me I can't, and a wealth of friends to populate the vast majority of both, as well as many, many more.

Last night for the 4th of July, I went to see a movie under the stars at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, one of the few things in Los Angeles that even the L.A. haters are forced to admit is something unique to cherish about this city. The setting was enhanced by the fact that the film was Jaws, a quintessential American movie to watch on a summer night. But I was cold, hungry, still hungover 14 hours after waking up, annoyed by a drunk lady who repeatedly fell into me while stumbling back and forth between her friends in front of and behind us, and a little impatient for the movie to finally start. All the while the DJ's continued to spin, moving away from the ambient filler of instrumental tribal electronica, eventually to a few Michael Jackson songs in a row. And with that, you could sense a sort of collective cathartic appreciation, and even a few people standing up to dance at "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough." And then the inevitable happened. They played "Thriller." And even cold, hungry, hungover, only-somewhat-coordinated-white-boy Joshua got up to dance with his friends and the thousand other people there.

The music faded, as did the unabashed smiles of dancing in an actual graveyard to "Thriller," and one of the greatest summer movies ever made started playing, while we sat surrounded by the daguerreotype silhouettes of trees against a sky that held the quality of soft steel, peppered with the firework bursts from surrounding celebrations, and I thought of the word "fraternity." A word that, if you remove your initial instincts of Greek letters, keg stands, and hazing that may or may not involve livestock, can really be a powerful concept. One that relays a collective, unspoken harmony. The idea that you can be surrounded by a thousand friends you've never met.

This is how I will remember Los Angeles. Not the congested freeways, the pathetic exclusivity of clubs, or the hordes of Lakers fans that arrive just in time for the playoffs. But rather the absurd feeling of unity for those few hours in the simplest of pleasures. It was that moment of the embrace when you clutch just a bit tighter before releasing for good.

The ubiquitous explanatory introduction.

2009-06-26T13:16:00.000-04:00

I don't know what this is, or what it's going to be. At times a travel blog, at times a celebration of some of my passions, and almost always a way to remind you that I have an amazing taste in music- for proof of this, just look to the right.

I don't know what this is, or what it's going to be. I also don't know where I'll be sleeping in a few days, or what country I'll be in in a few weeks. For those of you that really really know me (which, considering the esoteric target audience that a first blog post must draw, is most of you) you also know that this is a pretty strange, uncertain time in my life. Do I know what I'm doing? I'd like to think so. But I'm not going to answer yes or no to that. Which is a long way of saying, I'll probably focus on answering those more immediate and over-arching life questions at the start of this paragraph before I worry about deciding on a theme for a blog I impulsively started last night.

I don't know what this is, or what it's going to be. I've had an off and on relationship with creative writing classes since early grammar school, and have tried short stories, journals, screenplays, and many other orphaned projects that I intended to pick up again.... someday. And I hate that word. That's exactly the reason I've decided to pack up my life and go backpacking around the world in the middle of the worst economic crisis in almost a century. Because looking at my abandoned script ideas, and notes for short films, I know that someday almost always fails to roll around. And I'm really sick of looking at a map of Europe, or seeing a picture of Angkor Wat, and mentally saying "Someday." I'd rather be penniless with a fortune of intangible memories than possess the safety that staying home for a steady paycheck can give me right now.......

(Which brings us to the title of the blog. Too nihilistic? Too Panic(!) at the Disco? The distant, distant also-rans in the name contest were either too pretentious or too corny, i.e. "When the Bars Align." And I'd rather not let alcohol summarize my life. Just enrich it from time to time. Yes, I feel this title fits me, and more importantly, I think it's a postive statement about the path I'm about to take, not a condemnation of the place that I'm leaving behind.)

.......And having given up on so many earlier writing projects, I should warn you that my prose may be uneven, unsteady, and blatantly rip off Chuck Palahniuk's pacing or Ernest Hemingway's complete disdain for punctuation, coherent sentences, and ability to stick to a theme (the last of these already being exhibited right now). But that's another plus of starting this blog. If I intend to be writing and producing documentaries in a few short years' time, I'm going to need to get used to writing. As well as finding amazing things to capture on film (or digital memory cards as the post-modern case may be).

No. I don't know what this is, or what it's going to be. And I think that's a good thing. We'll find out together.