On angels with dirty faces.

"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.

"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.

****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).

"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.

"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.

"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 serpent'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.

"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.

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