A Smattering of Snippets

Hello, how are you?  Let me introduce myself before you give me that face, cockeyed and with the crook in your neck:  I'm the same wanderer you've seen day after day, tracking the thin trail from desperation to some great, ragged precipice of living.  I'm guessing we've been looking at our feet this whole time, all from the looks we're giving each other at this moment.  I'll tell you what I've been doing.

I'm writing pages in a bible I'll read in my next life.  All my adventures, picked apart verse by verse, all the big players wearing vermilion robes and lions' pelts.  I aim to start secret societies, marked by the well-coiffed bouffants and glass-less eye frames, tracing geometries of m social lives.  They will sprinkle it into their own stories like grated cheese.

This is a story of an inside wanting out.  How about yours?

...

It's not the falling, it's the never flapping your wings on the way down.  You're an angel you know.

Like when you let go, saying you'll start back up, easy-like and with a swagger.  But off go the reins, and out go the the habits, the good ones, like closing the orphanage for a simple lack of care, good habits left to exposure, starvation.

So, go ahead, flap those wings, stand up, shake the dust off.  Bring back the orphans, the downtrodden duties.  Clean, feed, house them, nurture, love them.

They are your unclaimed children.

What it takes to travel the world

I want to travel the world, to see the sights with a capital "S", to meet people with interesting stories, told over dinners and lunches and drinks.  To face adventure and use my wits, learn languages and...

So it's nice to dream big, but how do I get there?

There's quite a few big names in Travel: Ernest Hemingway, Richard Branson, Tim Ferriss.  Those three I pick for completely romantic reasons.  Not the amorous kind, but for the aplomb committed to their adventure, the facility which they navigate the logistical intricacies, and the paths that they have blazed for the smart-alecs like me who can't seem to conjure the genius to make it happen.  But I'm working on it, oh boy you bet I am...

Now, I've been reading the blogs lately, one after another, in quick succession.  It's a testament to our indigo-child information smorgasbord gobbling generation, gathering the data into our memory's voracious cheeks, to be digested at another time, as if that happens with a snap of the fingers. I buy the books promising financial freedom and the largess of location, all read with pencil in hand ready to scribble my aha's and oh-yes-this-is-what-I've-been-missing's, like breadcrumbs.  Those seem to get picked off first like the crows that comprise my shortcomings in short-term memory.  I feel doomed to highlight in an ever-changing rainbow of cheap dollar-store markers, marking ink to neon-blotted paper like a pre-school water-color and newsprint collage.   I might have an affinity to this meta-masochism, taking joy in remarking my reread territory, circling the travelogue kaabas in my fantasies.  Ooo lala, oui oui, my cute French girl, arigatou sweet geisha.  My angels beckon me.

Now, the missing link is the cash.  If I could pay in enthusiasm I'd be halfway to Machu Picchu, pondering the Incas in my new llama-wool hat, puffed woolen balls dangling from the earmuffs to ward away train-boredom at four A.M. after the raucous drink-a-thon in the drinks-cart.  My how travel brings the dreams.  The money, yes.  I am trying a million things as a creative expat of the sylvan nation (read: broke college-aged individual).  Ebay millionaire books, odd jobs, freelance writing, voice-overs, anything profuse talent can buy in minimum wage and skill-less income.

I might mention that my it's the "emotional instability" that forces me to go from one job to another, the excitement to start and the heart rending ennui that soon follows from boredom and watching bad decisions being borne from the top to trickle down like caustic acid rain forced upon the workers to water the weed farm.  Bad product man.  Why bother?

But I have my dreams, I verily say unto you.  These dreams keep me going, and writing, and playing guitar and watching movies at one A.M.  If life is to find meaning, all things being equal, I'll do it my own way, be-damning conformity (in the least ironic way possible, natch).  I'll lose my hair and fret over my fingernails, sweat come rent-day and promise to pay back my roommate for the eggs I needed this morning.  But they are mine and there's no way you can take those away from me!

I digress.

So, if Quantum Physics has any say in this, and oh yes I will botch what this guy says just for you, if I can dream it I can do it.  So to you I say, what it takes to travel the world are dreams, and maybe you'll see me sometime living mine.