The word, the line, the way

I plucked Charles Bukowski off the shelf at a rare book store in Monterey, after telling the owner how much I liked shops like his. “The best way to support us is to buy a book,” he told me, and so I happily did this and carried on. Arguably one of the more abrasive writers of the 20^th century, particularly when discussing the opposite sex, I cannot exactly pinpoint why this troubled tired old man who authored more than 45 books of poetry before his death struck a chord with me as California rumbled by outside. But passages both obscene and beautiful, as these things go, will forever be associated with a string of memories out along the Pacific Coast Highway in December. It’s that rhythmic flip flip flipping of pages and an assortment of words that function just like songs and like smells.

“We were made to accomplish the easy things and made to live through the things that are hard.” That was something I came across one night just outside Kernville I believe, nestled in the back of my car surrounded by high reaching Sequoias. It had started to rain there on my abandoned campground, the world pitch black outside, and as I look back on that trip and other trips all the way back to the cold sand of last year's Zanzibar, it's hard not to find a few places it fits. For other purposes, The Great Escape I'd also recommend ["I got off my stool and climbed right up the supervisor and then I reached up and pulled myself right out of there. It was so easy it was unbelievable but none of the others followed me"]. And then there's, So you want to be a writer? [If you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. If it never does roar out of you, then do something else.] There's nothing in the world like stumbling across that perfect set of words at just the right time.

I ran with Charles for two weeks, really, sufficiently marking him up and reading out the final page in closure. This was the road trip I dreamed of so many months back in the chaos and the quiet. It was the one I engineered slowly based off the little hunches difficult to explain. Each mile put all that 2014 was and wasn't further and further in the rear view mirror. Yes, Charles and I went together up the curvy roads of Big Sur that fall down into the sea. We went together into the delightful craft breweries of Monterey and San Francisco and Mariposa. We sat atop the lookout over the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset as all the world's couples came and went, and as the bitter wind settled in for the night. I got drunk with him on Polk Street one Saturday when the entire world was dressed as Santa and Elves and Grinches. And we walked together into Yosemite Valley, up and down the trails, leaning out over the Falls, breathing in the cold fresh air.

We are adventurers and explorers at heart, and so adventuring is merely connecting with our long-standing roots and our instincts. This is how we advance and this is how we heal. The next hill will be something new, a chance for us to spring out from ourselves into the million hills that follow, eclipsing where we were before. The next fork in the road will be the biggest decision of the day, one that trumps all the decisions you ever made before because it's happening now. The next tank of gas will be infinite freedom, because of how far it can take you [and for the record, it's quite far]. I cannot describe what that does to a person, or how that opens you up. I cannot explain all that means to me.

But for what it's worth, beyond all that, I am myself again, with an extra kick in my step bursting forth into a new January, and that is the me I've always known. You may have known him too. “In the totality of all things, of course, our petty agony is stupid and vain,” another poem declares. “But I feel that our dreams were not.” 

Far from you

I think I'll always be too far from you
Just past that sunset
Under some other moon
And I know that doesn't work
The maybes, the somedays, the hazy tomorrows
That may never come.

But I wanted to let you know
That I took a walk today
Alone on a hilltop
That looked off on a big mountain covered in snow
In a place so far removed
Even the satellites cant reach it.

It was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen
And I thought of you.

The man at the bar in Monterey

Bill told me a lot of things, that man at the bar, but he had that rare demeanor of someone who more often than not is asking for details as opposed to speaking of his own conquests and aspirations and vacuous desires. We went back and forth on a lot: the strange path my life has taken, balancing risk and adventure; the ins and outs of San Francisco, which soon I will understand; his challenging personal situation, one that made him look tired, which at one time I could certainly relate to. It was refreshing all around, over a couple cold pale ales, and in my long history of sitting down at random bars in sidelined cities, clamoring away from most conversations that just don’t seem to end and people who do not know when to shut up, I recognize you don’t run into Bill-like characters every day.

I should explain more about Bill. He is seemingly straight-laced, probably early 50s, no children, recently divorced, and a financial planner. Naturally, in one of my more introspective moments, expecting a bland and by-the-book response, I asked him for advice. I asked what he would recommend to a young budding 25 year old who wants to balance experiences these days with security in future days, and as a response, he gave me without hesitation two short stories.

In the first, a client with an especially well-designed retirement package found out one day, out of nowhere, that he had terminal cancer with a year to live. That money, as these things go, would then go to his only son, who has proven himself to be especially irresponsible and impulsive in his late adolescent years. There was understandably a tone of tragedy and hopelessness to this one.

Then I was told of a man who, though everything is done, continues to come back to Bill seeking advice. Bill tells him the same thing again and again: you are fine, you have done everything right, now go do what you want to do and enjoy. “But I just don’t know what to do with all this spare time,” he continuously replies. Arguably some retirement stories solicit more empathy than others.

In a world where we are all navigating future outlooks and obsessing over risk, and perhaps even some utopian time yet to come, this all meant a lot to me from the horses mouth. There may come a time that I wish vaguely I had set more aside, planned this or that, had a 401K going at 23, and many other fiscally responsible ventures. That time may come indeed. But I’ll never regret those days cruising slowly up the Pacific Coast Highway, and the night I landed in Monterey, before that great storm blew in out along the Pineapple Express.

Back in Seville

I cannot tell you what it means, or the strange paradoxical thoughts that run through my head every time I fly in and out of Seville. It holds such a special place in the recesses of my heart, somewhere that creates longing for things that will never be, and longing for things that of course, shouldn't be. Let's be honest, Seville is close minded, slow moving, stagnant in many ways, enchanting to the masses only because it is historically rich and culturally flamboyant. The way my old Spanish host brother speaks about it is reminiscent of what I said about my own Texas suburb when I was young and could not wait to break out of the cookie cutter brick houses and checkered roads to explore other parts of the world. He, like me, feels the burden of his hometown. Things are always romanticized by the foreigner around for the long weekend, while the true realities on the ground are apparent only to those with a long-term and more permanent view of the place. This is to say, I do not belong there forever.

Still though, Seville has its allure for me, both permanent and impermanent, like some distant, vague, second home now with a family that accepted me years ago and does again each time I come back. The brothers are like brothers, cousins like cousins, mother like mothers, and for brief moments of extravagance, it feels like I grew up there amidst them all. I find this remarkable because it embodies all I did to become apart of something so remote and foreign, which I say not to toot my own horn, but to state a fact about my existence. The articles for traveler magazines that write about food and flamenco and the old churches along the Guadalquivir and warm summer nights under the stars say nothing about what it takes, all the sacrifices you make, to call something like that your own in a language no one understands back wherever the hell you were before. "When are you going to move here, rent a flat, marry a Sevillana, and start a family?" one of the cousins asked me this time around. "We could be neighbors again," I responded smiling, and sometimes that seems like the best idea in the world.

The hardship is the reminders of course, that come in various shapes and sizes, that I'm not and never will be Sevillano, and the realization that in fact, I wouldn't want to be either. I will always come back, maybe for long stretches at a time, and go to clubs with Carlos and look at all the lovely people, none of which give a damn where you are from. I'll continue learning new words that probably aren't even understood north of the Andalusian border, but that generate a giggle each time they are said. I will take runs along the Guadalquivir and drink by the water on Calle Betis. I will talk in English with the newest American student living in my old bedroom and tell him how great his situation is and how much he could do with it even though we all know he will leave soon and forget everything. I'll take that Spanish girl to lunch again and again and toy with the idea of what if because it is fun and excessively irrational to think about, our own personal episode on "Espanoles por el Mundo," even though the table between us might as well be here to the moon. The view from the rooftop, or las Setas, or the highest church tower. The view from the river, or the bedroom, or a table out in front of Miami at night, peering down San Jacinto. So many views from so many different angles, and so many memories from so many different stages of life all rolling over onto one another.

I love these things but am utterly frustrated by these things. I believe after all these years that the allure sits in that paradox alone: I'm there truly, as much as I'll ever be, as much as I think someone in my shoes can be, unique, exotic, superb, but it all remains something just out of reach. For every beautiful moment of success, of recognition, of fluid adaptation, comes ten in rapid succession that bring you back down to Earth.

But that one moment is worth it every time. And that's why I'll always come back again. 

Those lights across the way

The 1970s flickering light display of the Intercontinental Hotel that comes through my kitchen window each night evokes a certain kind of nostalgia, for what exactly, I'm still not sure. My immediate thought, as I sit and write this now, is the radio towers across from Mt. Bonnell, that brought comfort on good days and bad days, cold afternoons and warm nights, that time back in Austin that might as well be another life. I must have spent days up there spread across various points and phases, on dates and with friends and more often than not alone, mulling life over, looking down at the expensive waterfront properties and wondering in the silence of the night what I'd need to get there too.

But the reds and yellows and greens could likewise be more Nigeria-centric, reflecting a time when this whole socio-economic Nigeria project was a hopeful enterprise, which comes when anything is new and fresh and yet to be tainted by things like basic human greed and selfishness. I've seen videos taken from helicopters high above Lagos when Nigeria had just become Nigeria, and in so many ways, my idea of those buildings in faded shades of roughed up colors is what I see across the way right now. The country has changed very little, but has also probably changed a lot.

Nostalgia is in the end, a personal emotion. It draws on your own unique longings and memories of what is and what was. It plays on your desire to feel those things again. Was it freedom you felt? Was it comfort? Was it wonder? Was it needing nothing but the cash in your pocket that would buy your next tank of gas to another small forgotten American town? Was it that sense of excitement flying over the landscape of a new country you didn't know yet but surely would soon? Was it this need, without logical explanation, to have someone in front of you again and be able to put your hand on their cheek? I have felt all those things, and many more, and more than anything now, as I sit here, I feel the need to throw 2014 in a sack and shake it around a little and there is no better place to do this than out on the open road.

New images sprout to life. In one such dream, I am weaving along the Pacific Coast Highway all the way up past Big Sur to Salinas, the true John Steinbeck country, and then continue all the way to San Francisco. And if I have gone that far I might as well keep going because off to the right on the map is Yosemite, where John Muir spent endless summers in his cabin, before dedicating his life to its preservation. It would be a shame to not sit and see what exactly all that was for. Further north still it's wine country, which is a part of any country I have learned graciously to love. And then perhaps a final culmination in Redwood National Park, where some of the oldest living things on Earth tower peacefully above the forest floor as they have for a few thousand years, if anything just to remind you subtly, when you start feeling big, as to how small you still are and how short your life is. "Oh shit, we just killed something older than Jesus," a druggy remarked to his friend after accidentally burning down one such tree recently in South Africa.

What about sleeping in a shady cabin in the woods, or my mom's couch, or my dad's spare bedroom, or the back of the old Nissan Versa shivering in the cold? What books would I pluck off my shelf and toss into the trunk and draw on at various points along the way? What does cold weather feel like to your ears and your nose (I have by now long forgotten) as you tie a scarf around your neck and throw a hood over your head?

These are all new experiences, and old ones. They are fresh starts, quiet spaces, views, smells, and sounds. They flash in and out of my mind in tandem with the lights across the way.

Johannesburg Nights

There is something wholly blissful about cold light beers on a rooftop, watching the middle afternoon sunlight turn to the extravagant colors of Sunday dusk. People constantly alternate between sunglasses and no sunglasses, hiding behind occasional pillars or the shadow of the person on their right. People laughing, standing, sitting, moving, buzzing, interacting, living. You can order your brunch now, or later, or after this beer or that bloody mary. You can have a drink now, or later, and who really cares; just whenever you feel like it but you should certainly have another. The DJ plays a song you don't really hear as anything but background noise and a beat. This peace, this casual conversation without any rush, is intoxicating. It is what in my mind Sundays are made for. It is one last beautiful man-made pause, a footnote, a moment of fleeting contemplation, before the rush of the week begins.

And then the day turns to night, which in my case might be the last sunset I will ever see in South Africa. That makes it all the more urgent, this being present in the various tiny moments of splendor. What follows is a flurry of packing and repacking and sporadic lunches that come when you usher yourself along quickly from one intermediary place to another, and then the trains and the cars and the customs line and its passport check with an officer who for the first time in your life, actually cracks a joke, and then another, and then you fly and watch Invictus on the plane, Namibia and Angola floating by out your right side window, but fixated on Morgan Freeman's depiction of Nelson Mandela, all because it feels right, that one last dose of a country before it is gone again and completely out of reach, accentuated in that final moment when the South African Airways flight attendant on the television screen in front of you says, "we wish you a proudly South African goodbye" in a lovely accent with a smile, all before falling again back into the chaos and the unearthly smog and the Third Mainland Bridge that shoots you out forcefully into the tremendous city of Lagos. But for those last few moments with good people and a beer sweating in your hand, on some deck that you could never find again, you can enjoy.

These were the Johannesburg afternoons and nights: that humble dose of civilization, where things - the little details people only appreciate if they have spent time to the truly dysfunctional and compromised countries of the world - function naturally and as they should until the end, and your entire being, the parts of you always on guard because everything is something - a risk, a con, a challenge, an obstacle - finally sits back and takes a breath and that is all there is. 

Abuja to Lagos

A chance set of circumstances put me next to a young American guy on the flight from Abuja back home to Lagos. He wore sandals and baggy pants, and sported an impressive beard, which by any standard satisfies the typical NGO look spread across Sub-Saharan Africa. In Nigeria however, nothing is as it seems, and I soon discovered he was into commercial farming, owning about 200 acres in the North of the country. When asked how a white American happens to end up in the middle of nowhere growing a variety of grains with four tractors, he said it was a random and unpredictable series of events.

Knowing the challenges operating out of Lagos, Northern Nigeria is hard to imagine. He enlightened me on a few of the things he deals with, including crime, lack of basic infrastructure, and spiders, scorpions, and snakes ("always watch where you step!"). A prominent Indian businessman was recently killed when a cobra came up through his toilet and bit him while on the pot. "The worst are the people though," he said. "I am always armed. Since all my staff are pious Muslims and I am Jewish, I was watching the Gaza crisis closely. Didn't know if one day they would all revolt and cut off my head as retaliation. Luckily nothing happened." The conversation had an oddly casual tone of voice when referencing such things the average population would hardly take so lightly.

We talked about his wife, too. He married a local Nigerian he met one day at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development while getting his land titles sorted, and fast forward to present day and his current flight will lead to another flight to watch her give birth to his first child. As a footnote, he advised me as a rule not to mess around with the average locals here, because there are a lot of diseases. I assured him I had no intention, though he was particularly concerned, in that case, about what I did for girls. We also talked taxes, which he hasn't paid in ten years. He doesn't expect anyone to come after them now in the remote corners of the Sahel. "But you're a suit and tie guy," he said as he motioned to my outfit. "You definitely have to worry about that stuff."

I wish I could have recorded the conversation. Too many jewels are now missing, lost forever, just hours and days later. All in all, he was the most ridiculous human being I have met in a long time and probably a little bit crazy, but he seemed happy, genuinely happy - that aura of confidence someone has when they need nothing from you or anyone else and are just along for the ride - and that is more than most can say in most parts of the world, and I appreciate that in somebody. The whole 55 minute flight got me thinking, or more helped me remember something I knew already, which is that there really are a million possible ways to live your life, more than one could ever dream up or think suitable for themselves, combining the big decisions and the little ones, and it really is never too late to wipe your slate clean, pick up the pieces, buy a ticket (yes, that part of it actually is that easy), and start the whole thing over again. Whatever it takes to find your own niche; whatever it takes to live your own life. No matter how far flung some people end up, and how off their rocker some people seem, I will always respect the hell out of a person who at the very least has the courage and the balls to try and figure things out - in practice by doing, and with much less talking, which is really the only way.

This Ebola Story

The Ebola outbreak in Nigeria came and went, in what many countries are adequately calling a success story in West Africa that could be a containment model for others. Given Nigeria's mostly collapsed healthcare infrastructure, underfunded and incapable of caring for its 170 million people, this news came as a surprise to many, not least of which me. The lingering effects remain - temperature checks at airports and mandatory hand sanitizer in restaurants - but people now return to the more pressing and dangerous aspects of business as usual in Nigeria.

This makes the conversation of panic circulating around America most ironic at a distance. From an airport lounge in Abuja, my attention was briefly occupied by CNN's fearful account of "Ebola in America," where Wolf Blitzer talked about hospital missteps in Dallas that could get another few infected. This follows an influx of social media accounts full of baseless arguments - doomsday scenarios that Ebola will go airborne and kill us all, despite the fact heart disease is much more likely to bring about our early death given the bad food my country continues to put in their mouths knowingly. I think there is a romantic association with Ebola, one of certain death and gruesome last moments - the epitome of a mysterious disease out of African jungles - and the 24 hour a day news culture of the United States always requires content. The fact is, Malaria does and will do more damage 1000 times over to this continent each year, but no one stays awake at night fretting about mosquitoes. Liberia and Sierra Leone are African tragedies that pose more a threat to American conscious than they do to American lives.

Being the only American passport in the room, I looked around curiously at Nigerians also watching the news. I am not sure what they were thinking. It's been a long few months, and this country has a lot on its plate, but I imagine to some extent there was a sense of amusement at what exactly Americans - with their nice hospitals and emergency response systems and qualified doctors - consider scary in a world full of unpredictable and improbable events. The things that should command our attention rarely do. 

Unraveling Nigeria, if you can

If Nigeria’s corruption had a heart, it would no doubt beat at the Transcorp Hilton in Abuja. As you sit with a coffee and charge your phone, you can almost feel the dirty deals and the suitcases full of cash being exchanged all around you in the light of day. I’ve heard up the road at the Sheraton – another five star hotel in Abuja – a particular bar is stocked with “nightcrawlers,” or, the most grotesque sort of prostitution that hits its heyday when oil workers are in town. There is a reason the word Nigeria is synonymous with these sorts of things.

I’ve been to Abuja multiple times now, for this and for that. On my recent trip, the national petroleum corporation was on strike over pensions, and so, with all the gas stations shut down, our driver was forced to buy on the black market, side of the highway, at three times the price – from the same people who would normally be working at the gas station, now simply siphoning out of the station’s tank. Across the road, cars were lined up behind an Oando petrol truck, the driver having pulled over and partaking in the same exercise. The company gets its cut at market price, and the employee, or thief, or whatever you call it, pockets the rest. A good day for him, and just another day in Nigeria.

The Federal Capital is a world away from Lagos – organized, paved, and feeling like a real Western city. It was built for government some years ago after colonial rule, when rich policymakers basking in the glow of new oil money from the Delta decided they needed something more functional away from the messy metropolis they alone had created. With this in mind, I find Abuja the most tragic as I fly out at night. You see one perfectly manicured circle of light, and then complete darkness as far as the eye can see. In a country of 170 million people (though no one knows the exact number), there are also people as far as the eye can see, but still no lights. And this again, is Nigeria; the insulated bubble and all the rest that is forgotten.

Screams for equality are echoed all over the world, in varying degrees and stages, but it cannot be much worse by any construct of reality than what happens in this country. Champagne bottles are popped by hands roped in Rolexes every Friday night at Spice Route or Escape, while the infamous Makoko Slums sit just up the road, hovering above the water on stilts and built with layers of trash. Back in Abuja the election campaign has informally started with banners – which teeter on outright propaganda – lining the highways and bridges and lightposts. “Having performed so well, Nigerians demand…” it says, with a smiling President in his trademark hat looking out gleefully at nothing. I was told before arrival that Nigeria is the best example of what happens when a country does everything wrong. Hopefully, by way of this example, the newly rebased biggest economy in Africa can instruct a few others on how to do things right.

It’s no surprise then that bombs go off in the North and school girls are abducted (and still not found) and the formidable force of Boko Haram expands their caliphate and takes more ground in the country, mirroring the brutality of ISIS in the Middle East. In Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, Richard Dowden challenges Westerners who sigh at another news story on violent Africa, apathetically changing the channel, accepting as a subtle half-truth that “that’s just is how they are in that part of the world.” He argues:

“… I sometimes feel Africa is not violent enough. If Africans fought back sooner against theft and oppression instead of allowing themselves to be slaves to the rich and powerful, Africa would be a much more peaceful place. Instead, African patience allows exploitation and oppression to thrive until everyone loses their temper and explodes.”

Marginalization creates a vacuum that must be filled by something. This can be a movement for good, such as when Martin Luther King marched on Washington and peaceful protests bred the despicable black and white photos of America in the 1960s. Likewise, it can be an Islamist assault on Western education, fought against by underpaid defense forces accused by Amnesty International of torture and outright human rights abuse. As always, the people who lose out most are the civilians and families just trying to go about their lives but stuck hopelessly in the middle.

I go back and forth on a seesaw that balances the realities that made up my former life – Starbucks, football games, homecoming mums, television shows about weddings, television shows about people with sex tapes, hearty evangelical churches the size of stadiums, white picket fences protecting gardens and green space – and what I see out my window these days. Most businesses write on their gates, “please do not urinate or defecate here,” and I think this is a distinctly Nigerian problem. Most houses write “this house is not for sale,” combating a typical Nigerian con, dubbed a 419, in which fake agents sell houses already occupied, and the unsuspecting movers show up one day surprised someone already lives there, and has lived there for years; the fake agent is nowhere to be found. It's true that the deeper you dive into any issue in Nigeria, the further the rabbit hole runs.

And more: I've seen sheep and chickens muddle their way through city traffic; I've sat in Lebanese armored cars; I've sat with the Ministers who make this country run; I have stood with the guy selling gum and mints outside the bar, hoping he will eat tonight; I've talked with the guy at the American consulate who denies and approves visas that get people out, or keep them in; I've danced with two extravagant young newlyweds, who's names I still don't know; I've drank too much Hennessy with a prince. And I've seen the lives of the rich and the poor weave their way in and out of one another unlike anywhere in the world, and somehow, in a way that transcends comprehension, it all works; messy, corrupt, wrong in every way, tragic because it could be done better, but it works and people survive which is all we can do in the end.

In true Nigeria fashion – the naija factor, as some people call it – not even leaving is easy. On Friday night, after being lied to for two hours, it turns out all flights back to Lagos are full, except a protocol officer in a yellow vest promises two seats on the last flight out – Dana Air, which had its license suspended last year after its corrupt CEO neglected safety regulations and a plane fell out of the sky. We pay double the price and then some; it’s the only way, and I wonder what I’ll do at some future date in another country where a handful of cash does not solve all your problems in one go. Next to the officer, a guy sits at a computer wearing a shirt with a better motto, one that speaks to all this terrible mess, the place that should fall apart but never does, the chaos of Nigeria’s infallible heart, constantly beating all around us. “The ghetto is my reality, am from the city where your hustle determines your salary.” The plane takes off, and lands sometime later, and the country keeps stumbling along. 

In and Out of South Africa

Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope over 500 years ago, circumventing Arab traders and successful finding a sea route from Europe to the East Indies. This cemented the legacy of Portuguese naval might, and proved at the time, that Africa did indeed have an endpoint. It was named "Good Hope" later, replacing "Cape of Storms," almost suggesting "good luck" given the number of shipwrecks that occurred in those unpredictable waters where ocean and currents smash together. It is one of the real landmarks of human existence, still serving as a halfway point between journeys for boats long at sea, and still carrying some romantic obsession in modern times. The obsolete lighthouse looks out from the bottom of the world, flashing its light in the fog and the rain, all the way down to Antarctica.

And so the tip of South Africa blossomed before me, some 500 years later, like a bright beacon of civilization in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Out beyond the colonial blocks of Cape Town, it felt as though the many worries of my life twisted and turned around Chapman's Peak Drive, before spinning off into nothingness or falling down the cliffs right into the sea. Past the Portuguese padraos all the way to the Cape, I hiked the last remaining cliff to the end of it all, where every nationality converged for seemingly the same picture. Then I meandered my way back down the peninsula to Boulders Bay, Simon's Town, and Fish Hoek, all lovely little formerly Dutch and British communities with one foot in the past and one in the present. The panoramic views sprout again over each hilltop. At one lookout I overhead someone say, "eventually you just stop taking pictures because the beautiful views don't go away."

Thoughts of Nigeria are everywhere these days, that corrupted, intense, mess of a place always dancing on the brink. Two greater paradoxes do not exist on one continent: the majestic view of Table Mountain reaching into the sky and dubbed a new wonder of the world, and then as an afterthought that one time I saw a woman with spread legs and a hiked up skirt peeing aside the public highway in Lagos, sheep scurrying about in the urban background. I was told from the beginning you have to get out of Nigeria to remember the world is not like Nigeria. You have to get out so it does not break you. Thus the Rainbow Nation of South Africa was as necessary as it was desired for a few bright days in September.

I got excessively drunk with strangers in old wine country around Stellenbosch one afternoon, stumbling along in and out of a five-farm tour. Wine terminology, the procedures, the protocol, and the elevated status of reds and whites and pinks, it still tends to be over my head, but I can appreciate a good drink with the best of them. I can mimic behaviors, nod when asked for thoughts, pretending to know what I'm doing, and hours later and by days end, none of it matters anymore. Nine of us who began the day with a reserved greeting passed a bottle of white around the back of a van laughing at the end, and Ebola and pollution and traffic and corruption and poverty and dirt and inefficiency and the entire terrible world of Nigeria seemed very far away and like it would never come back to me again. "Wine brings people together," our tour guide said at the beginning, and reminded us of again at the end.

In one great culmination, I almost burst into tears at breakfast on my last day when a waitress brought me an omelette and big latte and I realized how fresh and good and affordable it all was, and even more, how much the deep crevices of my body had missed and nearly forgotten exactly what real food was. It is amazing when you wake up and realize the simple things one country can make you appreciate. And likewise, there is no feeling more terrible than boarding an airplane that leaves the best place on Earth for another stint in the worst. My black South African waitress laughed when I said I live in Nigeria, telling me she was not aware white people chose to live there, and I do follow her logic at times. However I remain firm in my belief that there too remains great value in the dark parts of the world, and returning to the dark parts of the world again. Even if there isn't, it's sure too late to go back now, so we might as well make the most of it until the end of it all comes, I pack my bags, and run off somewhere else. 

Until it hurts no more

In truth, I’m embarrassed to talk about it: the terribly abusive, destructive, controlling relationship that defined my 2014; all the accumulation of incidents small and large that are impossible to explain to anyone because they simply don’t exist within real world circumstance; that time at the hospital when my head was pounding with infection and I was the sickest I’d ever been; that time pulled over and searching the grass on a dusty road in Zanzibar; that time flat on my back on a hill overlooking the opening waters of the Nile; that time on an empty Nairobi road at dusk panting and out of breath and screaming down the alleys and up to the rooftops for all the world to hear; that I still have dark circles around my eyes because something was sucked out of me that will take time to gain back; that I neglected and even rid myself of perfectly good people for her, and that I didn’t make any friends for all those months because I didn’t want to deal with the complications I knew even the simplest of friendships would bring; all those nights where I sat on the floor of the shower and let hot water run over my head because it made things quiet and simple; that I was conned into things that cost money, only to have money again and again used as leverage and held over my head; when I punched that door and nearly broke my hand because I was so angry at where my life had gone; when I cried and covered my eyes at an airport in God knows which African country (they all run together now) because I remembered for an instant that I was good; that I was the best I’d ever been, the best version of myself, and all that positive energy was allocated to a consuming hole in the ground; that I gave a second’s notice to the selfish flurry of Africa when my grandmother sat dying on her bed; every time I wrote an untrue word about it, as if I was trying to convince myself how great my reality was, while equally trying to fool others who could see right through to the deepest sort of misery; that I stopped reading and writing at all, because I just couldn’t; that I still struggle to read and write that fluid pattern of true words; that my mother could see the deep change in me the day she arrived after so long apart; that I actually felt guilty for not buying a stupid postcard of a waterfall; the fake accusations, the fake cries for help, the fake injuries, the fake falls, the fake threats; that I dead bolted my door some nights, and once locked myself in a bathroom, because it turns out, I was a bit worried after all that the fake everthings could become something real; the grotesque and fiery look in the eyes of someone who blatantly wants to see someone else hurt and suffer; that my relationship was a project, and not a relationship, and that it sometimes even felt like a rescue mission; that I believed her truly when she said it wouldn’t happen again, or that she was really trying, and that I just do not understand how difficult it is; that I inextricably linked my professional life to something I had no ability to control, and that it all blew up in my face; all the talk, stupid in retrospect, about support, when I’m the only one in the world that ever did; that I did not remember my own worth, and that I didn’t have the strength to leave, until I finally had the strength to leave; that I made the worst sort of compromises, believing the value would one day come; that I ever for a second tried to convince myself that this, any or all of it, was normal, when the truth is – there is no other way around it but through curses – it was the most fucked up and inexcusable array of things in the world.

I tell you, I have woken up in the morning and fallen asleep at night to the lull of true evil in a person, and I don’t much care to see it again. It’s baby steps now, back into real life. I am angry, just plain angry at it all, and it would be lying to say otherwise, but I can still say that even given everything, I do not hate, because this only breeds more hate. I have come to realize in the depths of my aloneness, that hatred rules you and gives your power away, and God knows, I’ve given enough of my power and inspiration away to last the rest of my life. This is the last I’ll really speak of it, but it is important to say in all its finality and let out one last roar: I acknowledge the legacy of this time will forever be ugly things. And now we move on to a new time, with better things. 

To Come Alive Again

I can feel myself getting stronger now. My face is a bit older, and worn down around the eyes, but my skin has good color, my veins and pumping, and the muscles seem more toned. I look at myself often in the gym these days, examining all the new weaknesses, like scars, that have sprout up from God knows where. There was a time I was in the best shape of my life, and felt I could do anything, but those days are behind us, sickness and whatever else having worn a lot of it away. Much has happened for 25 years, certainly more than I bargained for, but I'll get back there again - that immovable impenetrable resounding place - I'm sure of it.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.

You see, I had a repugnant feeling of death two months ago that still lingers with me from time to time. If I'm being honest, it has just been a hellish year, full of heartache and sadness and sickness, a paralyzed life of sorts spiraling out of control from Africa to the rest. There were some days I just sat next to a dripping IV and prayed the days would go faster, making deals with myself, that I would write off this entire precious chunk of life - how many weeks, one, three, eight? - just to fast forward to the end. That is a feeling I do not want again, and I mean ever again in my life. With each burn and each breath, panting hard on a treadmill or churning away in the pool, sweat dripping off my face, it makes it all melt further and further into the background.

Into the Furnace

"El culo del mundo" is what my Spanish friends elegantly used to call an undesirable place they never want to go. Nigeria certainly falls under this category, and I recently said that phrase back to them when asked how things were where I was. One of the most corrupt countries in the world, and recently ranked the third most unlivable, is not appealing to international flight crews either. An Etihad attendant told me they always post the Lagos route hoping someone will on a whim swap it (they never do), not even wanting to touch down, disembark, and leave 35 hours later, the company not even allowing them to explore outside the hotel. I told her a bit hopelessly that I'll be staying a bit longer, long enough to not really see the endpoint, what drove me here, or where this mess really even began. In short, my few months in Lagos by a number of standards, will effectually constitute the worst and most unwanted place I'll ever live.

I woke up first night to a dense tropical West Africa rain, straight out of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I asked myself from the confines of my bed why I do this, going off to places where kidnapping stories run rampant, the police are toll booths, the diseases that much more ghastly, and the list goes on. With such a short life, why spend any time in the terrible places that run under every sort of dysfunction and keep trickling by, when New York City and Los Angeles and even the peace and quiet of Austin are very much within my reach? The answer I continue to fall back on is that in this time alone behind high walls, surrounded by misery and repression and anger, and a country imploding on itself from all directions, there continues to be great value - in finding what you're made of and what is left in the dark spaces when you truly are all alone.

When you put cargo on board a ship, you make that venture on trust,
For you know not whether you will be drowned or come safe to land.
If you say, "I will not embark until I am certain of my fate," then you will do no trade: the secret of these two destinies is never disclosed.

The faint-hearted merchant neither gains nor loses; nay he loses: one must take fire in order to get light. 

Moving on

I was beside the bed alongside my mother, holding my grandmother's hand when she took her last short gasp for breath just hours after I arrived. Five years of cancer treatment, mostly centered around the lungs, had finally caught up with her, and I felt the heart stop beating and the skin go cold to my touch. Her eyes, which had been opened and dazed for a number of hours, closed profoundly on their own. Then she lay still and peaceful like she was in a deep sleep, and just like that it all was done. Having now experienced it first hand, I find it was one of the most surreal experiences there is, being that intimate with someone else's death. Before people died in a far off place, disappeared, and what's left sits abstractly at a tombstone in the ground. Now life comes and goes through your fingertips, and that is how fragile and tangible a thing it is.

My grandmother was there when I was born. My mother says it was my grandmother's hands alone that quelled the pain of childbirth, and that when she took them away it became unbearable. There are lovely photos of me, small and tired, wrapped up like a burrito watched over by my grandmother's smiling gaze, and I think there is a lot to that, me being here and her being there, with 25 years of separation. As the peculiar people that run funeral homes rolled her out of the house to be cremated, it felt mostly like this miniature cycle that makes up many larger cycles had reached some sort of fruition, and now a new one will begin.

I went for a hot run the day after she went, up the farm roads surrounding Cleveland, through grassy fields blowing like waves in the breeze, and rusty barns showing no sign of activity. To be honest, I felt coated in death and stagnating bodies, the breakdown of our bodily systems, the physical demise from age and unhealthy lifestyles, and I just felt the need to be alive again. I took deep breaths and felt the burn in my legs and the hot sun pouring down on my skin. I paid special attention to the little sparrows gliding in the wind, and the smells of North Dakota countryside. It was just over a month ago I myself sat stagnant on a hospital bed, my body fighting off a dangerous and invasive infection, and it is not too much a stretch - given an influx of horror stories - to say things could have gone down a bad road quickly.

But the cars roll along the highway outside my grandmother's house like they always have, and I am still here, the pace of things just a touch slower. A robin hops up to the window, and the trains rumble by outside in the night. Baby birds cry out from the houses for their mother to come back with a worm, and I still remember those glorious feeders, attracting all kinds or yellow finches and red sparrows, that used to sit outside the door. Grass from the old bog at the corner of the yard is tall and untamed, reminiscent of my old summer playground and annual project. The gardens that never quite worked. The garage that never grew organized. The artist hobbies that were just never realized. It could all be my childhood or now or sometime in the future, just missing one of the integral parts, the woman who made those memories and visions a reality. Things keep going; they move on quickly.

Views from above

Flying still remains something relatively new and exciting to me. The shapes of the clouds and the rapidly changing landscapes are always beautiful and beckoning from above, particularly since I may never see them from below. I found flying over Greenland especially majestic, watching the glaciers flow and break apart right into the sea, before expanding out into smaller and smaller icebergs. The perfectly manicured fields of Azerbaijan a few hours before, just after the mountains around Tehran, were also a lovely sight through the clouds, fed by the winding rivers out of the nearby Caucuses. The integration of small things can all be clearly seen from 30,000 feet, all the parts adding together. I remember back in the Kilimanjaro Region, even the snowy peak that bred countless stories of the past can only be seen from a plane during rainy season.

The last and latest flight leads to my grandmother, who is going through a period of her life we will all have to eventually face, indeed, one of the only things we all have in common. I cannot imagine how difficult it is, the daily, perhaps hourly challenge of being brave and accepting the physical demise of age, knowing absolutely how one's story must end. I have put myself in her position a number of times, from the perceived safety of youth and distance, and I have come to think that in this peculiar final isolation is the comfort of knowing everyone there is has gone through this before, every generation for a hundred thousand generations of human history, so it is the natural order to embrace it with open arms. Dying is as much a part of the interconnectedness of things as a new child being born. Snowy mountains turn to rivers that flow into the sea, then condense and fall as snow atop mountains. Trees fall over and rot and turn into the soil that feeds other trees. Thematic catchphrases aside, I really see life and death as one inevitable circle bigger than ourselves, which makes me feel very wholesome, and it needs no talk of heaven or hell or the straight rigid lines that carry us there to make me feel that transitory life itself is a spectacular thing.

Beautiful words come out of the tribal nature of Africa, away from the world of nations and borders and all the Western infused "emancipation" of the last 150 years. Who is to say that if the world had maintained the ideology of small communities bound by families, tied to and integrated with the land in which children still grow up outside free amidst the animals, it would not have been a better and more simple place? A bushman replies, "I am as young as the most beautiful wish in my heart, and as old as all the unfulfilled longings in my life."

Low Points, and Room 242

It's really the longing that hurts most after two weeks in the hospital.You see the bright sunlight out your window and the trees rustling in the breeze and you want to be there walking freely. You want a home cooked meal that doesn't taste like hospital sheets, and a few new episodes of a show you'd never watch, just because you cannot bear another rerun. You want to sleep in, and the beeping sound to go away, and to rip all your bandages off for a good hot shower. You want the aching in your veins to stop, and people to quit pricking you with needles of various shapes and sizes, and that drip drip drip, watching antibiotics enter your body, to never drip again. You just want to go back to how things always were during the normal times when you felt good, which of course weren't appreciated because normal never is. It is a sad truth of life we don't value things like good health until it is taken, the same way we tend to neglect good people until they die, leave us, or travel far away. Life in the hospital is wrapped up, suffocated, and constrained by IV chords, and you stay strapped down to a bed in ways beyond the physical.

Things can always be worse. The nurse told me one night I was easy and that patients are often admitted for three months and can't roll over or go to the bathroom by themselves. A few weeks earlier I was shown the general ward of Kenyatta National Hospital, where a number of victims of a recent Al-Shabaab bomb blast in Nairobi were being treated - in a room that resembled an airplane hanger. Illness comes in many forms, and I was lucky that a short series of invasive procedures and a steady flow of drugs, standard from today's perspective, ultimately saved my life. 150 years ago the case may very well have been different, and that is always a powerful thought to let settle. As life slowly and gradually gets normal again, it becomes very clear how unimportant some things are I made very important for far too long. We drive ourselves to the grave, I think, always chasing after something. It is such a trick in life to realize you are free and that you need nothing.

I felt sick the entire drive home on a cool Friday night, with seemingly more questions than answers. One of the worst feelings in the world is looking at your body, or life, and not knowing exactly what troubles it. Without that spout of knowledge, you don't know how to fix it, and we all just want to be fixed when we sit alone and ill, our minds left to run wild. There were a few scary nights in there, up late in the dark sweating and aching, wondering what would happen next. I have little doubt I will sit at a bar in a city where sickness is less extreme and treatment more organised, someday far off in the future, and talk about that time I got meningitis in Africa, realizing that probably made me better, my story more interesting, and my spirit more resilient in the end.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Four Masai children no more than ten years old carried small whips alone on the side of the road. I didn’t see them for long, as my car rushed by, but their job was presumably to care for what must have been a hundred goats, and at this instance usher them across the highway in unison. Knowing as little as I do about the pastoral Masai culture, I know that these animals are life as much as water, and you do not have to look far to  connect and compare white children of the West who cannot even pour cereal at that age without making a mess. It is a fact of life that children grow up quicker in the third world, as a matter of necessity as much as it is culture. The more these sort of images accumulate the more you redefine what it means when someone says someone else has grown up sheltered.

Up the road, past domesticated goats and wild baboons, sits the Serena Hotel at Lake Manyara – part of one of the most successful hotel groups in East Africa, having perfected the art of getaways in complete isolation. For days I stayed there around Easter, watching the rains come out of the nearby mountains and spread across the lake in varying waves and shades and layers. This is the green expanse of the Kilimanjaro Region, where rolling hills and flat grassland exist as one, and water is everywhere during the rainy season and carves its little niches in streams and puddles and misty downpours. It all created a delightful sort of stillness, one absent over the past few months of my life, where you sit and close your eyes and there is no urgency and you just listen to the birds and the bugs make their noises. I believe that in this space you find everything – the words that fit on a page and the rights and lefts your life requires next – and I do trust it’s there waiting even when it feels far away.

“…and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.”

Easter is always a peculiar time, whether in the solemn streets of Seville during Semana Santa, the old cobblestone pathways of colonial Guatemala, or an isolated lodge of a heavily Christianized African nation. I hold every age of human history to the same explicable standards. As I have trouble believing a man could rise from the dead in today's world of zombie pop culture, I do not find this plausible 2,000 years ago at a time the most respected cure for common ailments was bleeding a patient to balance their four humors. But people continue bellowing "He is risen," believing its importance, its tangible benefit, and how much private attention is given to our lives while billions continue to suffer based on chance and geography. I've always found organised religion to the most convenient thing in the world, because you don't have to do a damn thing, yet you believe you've done everything. 

Down the cliff, falling away from the Serena at the base of the Lake, sits a Masai Village. There the goats sleep alongside the people and the people live in grass huts you only find nowadays in museums that say “this is how they used to live.” Hippos live in the Lake and elephants in the surrounding plains and the herders have to think about protecting their livestock from lions, and this is one of their challenges. Thanks to Christian Colleges and missionary expeditions, these villages celebrate Easter too, and whether that makes their lives better or worse or the same, I'm not the one to say. In Africa, as is true anywhere in the world, the elegance and the harshness sit side by side, but perhaps Africa just can't mask its paradoxes as good as the others just yet.

I didn't see Kilimanjaro until the last day; the low lying clouds and the periodic rains kept the tallest mountain in Africa hidden from view. The snow-capped peak was only visible for a time out my right-side window, ascending and descending quickly back into Nairobi - back to suits and ties, impossible schedules and deadlines, phone calls and emails and meetings, and all the various tenets that make life so busy again. The paradoxes, for better or for worse, function in a way that sometimes make a small cabin with a wood stove in the middle of the Canadian Rockies with a pen and a beer alone the only thing in the world that makes sense. 

The Smoke That Thunders

The torrential downpour at Victoria Falls, on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, is not the average way to turn twenty five. 500 million cubic meters of water plummet 100 meters into the gorge each minute, and there just aren't many places - if any - like it in the world. From a helicopter you see the real prowess of it all, spreading out 2 kilometers, the mist shooting up into the air and visible from miles away. I stood at the adjacent island for quite some time, soaked from head to toe, water coming and going from every direction, entranced by the way nature does things, and how simple and complex that can be.

The Kololo Tribe, living around the Falls in the 1800s, called it "Mosi-oa-Tunya," or, "the smoke that thunders," and as I find true with many tribes and pre-colonial, pre-industrial nations around the world, living before the era of telescopes and microscopes and science, they have the simplest and sometimes best way of explaining things. We can know very clearly how something works - that a basalt plateau has many large cracks filled with weaker sandstone, and that over the course of 100,000 years the falls recede upstream, eroding the sandstone to form these very gorges - but no one really cares when they look out at it. We know we are seeing something miraculous, the culmination of a million tiny and improbable factors over a period of time much longer than we will ever witness first hand, and that is quite enough.

One of these very witnesses was David Livingstone, who explored the Zambezi River in 1855. He was the first European to see the Falls, and in the most British of ways wasted no time honoring his home country by naming the site after the Queen. "No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England. It has never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight," he said shortly after discovery. People have come and gone and thought similar thoughts since the very beginning, no matter their level of intellect, and these are things I always find comforting. In today's world, we are hardly ever alone. Consider the best things and the worst things, and someone out there has no doubt been through it before, survived, and died an old man better for having done it. 

I'm well into my 25th year now, but I still think back on that weekend trip down south: the roaring sounds, the fresh smells, and the invisibility that turned to visibility as the spray of water came and went with the wind. 25 years is a drop in the ocean. There are some things - from a family to a river to the stars - far bigger than ourselves. Seeing it that way is both humbling and empowering. As we sit and tell ourselves our lives are volatile, hopeless, and out of anyone's control entirely, trying to keep our heads above water on a day-to-day basis, things just keep on moving, so we are best suited to find some level of peace in the short time we have - and guard that inner peace with everything, because without it there is nothing. 

In Kisii

A long drive in Kisii County at night reminds you things can always be worse. As the car rumbles along winding dirt roads ripped to shreds by the rain, up and down the hills and mountains, past coffee farms and villages made of dust, people walk who knows how many miles in the dark. They clutch kerosene lamps if anything at all, guided by the little path they have etched many times before. Like too many parts of Africa, people live not so differently than they did 500 or 1000 years ago, their houses thatched together with grass and the night real night without any electricity grid. You think everyone - the little Carnegies and the Rockefellers of each generation - can forge their own way in life, until you see those condemned to the bleakest of circumstances with no hope of going anywhere at all. They don't teach you that in American schools, because it's not the American way. 

I have sat a bit defeated on the floor of my shower, letting hot water rush over my head, too many times over the last few months trying to flush out noise and volatility. It's hard to write or talk or do much at all under such circumstances, the basic foundations of self whipped around and turned to mush. But the beauty and the tragedy of the third world is that you don't look far for perspective; human life is always harder and a bit more real around every corner and back alley, and in places you once thought safe. The paradoxes don't make things easier, but provide a framework to compare and assess and work through your personal trivialities. 

A volcano just went off in Guatemala - one I sat and looked up at on many peaceful nights alone - and seeing the photos for whatever reason took me back to many places and many times, and they felt very near to me. On the cusp of my quarter century, Picaya is a reminder that things just keep moving and evolving and time doesn't give a damn how slow or fast.

Back In Sync

I am in a relationship now, and that is something I either would not or could not have said out loud for many years under a wide variety of complicated criteria. It is a new concept, and a pleasant one, simplifying life through complete transparency. As I look back on a million people I have come to know, I'm not sure how the bad ones sleep at night disguising facts and figures as subtle half-truths. My head feels light and airy on the pillow, with nothing to hide from the world.

Likewise, it is both a powerful and a terrifying thing to look at someone and know they have all of you. It requires profound levels of unconditional trust, and that's how trust must work. It puts your fate in someone's hands, and hopes they are gentle with it. It makes you feel out of control, and you either decide to be okay with that or end things now, recognizing a loss of basic fundamentals. The reality is that no external forces can affect levels of trust between two people. Trust is something decision-based, solidified and broken by two people unto one another, and in the midst of this process - testing the waters and feeling and being - you certainly do not have to lose yourself along the way.

I'm not sure what all this means or where it goes. I couldn't tell you what the prospects are or how far I could potentially fall. These are the risks we take with relationships and it comes down to the simple question of what we are prepared not to do based on an array of factors and expiration dates and what ifs that may never happen. I live my life, and have for awhile, in spite of these factors or fears. You do what you do with the person who makes you feel no one else exists and you spend time with the person who keeps you up at night stranded in isolation amidst your thoughts. Whether I look back and curse myself or pat myself on the back, I would not do much differently starting the end of 2013.

I traveled with my girlfriend - another odd word for me - around East Africa for New Years, and thought back on the Hemingway quote that said something about the need to travel with a women to really know her. Not many people have traveled with their girlfriends in such places, and that is something worth remembering. It all wasn't simple, but it was good, and that is the range of life these days. Good things do not have to be simple, but in fact can rip us apart and put us back together. 

The New Year

I sat awhile with my feet in the sand on the first day of 2014. Funny little crabs dug holes and buried themselves alive while children danced and played games only they understood right into the Indian Ocean. White people and black people and everything in between walked up and down the beach, talking and holding hands and sometimes fighting as people seem to do too much on vacations and getaways. As the wind picked up and the sun went down, I walked back to my simple beachside guesthouse and poured a quiet glass of wine.

The first day of the year brings with it strange little thoughts and simmering hunches, and I always find it sad when people are unwilling to either look back or look forward because what’s done is done and what could happen is unpredictable. The man-made concoction of New Years Day is a delightful chance at evaluation and divination. You are where you are because of what you’ve done, and if you aren’t where you ought to be than you did something wrong or misguided and inadequate along the way. Likewise, if you want to end up anywhere in particular, you must have some foresight and direction and not show up to the theatre unprepared. This is the beauty of toasts: you clink glasses together and speak aloud about resolutions past and present and open yourself up to a little bit of truth and vulnerability. You sit and talk candidly to people about what can be changed and what could be better. I find myself loving this sort of transparency more and more as time goes by, and any chance we get to do so in a socially acceptable way does not deserve to be scoffed at by people who "hate new year's resolutions."

December flew right through elephant sanctuaries and giraffe centres and tortoise trusts, permeating out into the East Africa and melting right into the light blue sea around Zanzibar. I clinked my own glass of champagne there, and thought about the year that has come and the year that passed. 2013 is difficult to say goodbye to, futile a thing as that is to say. Years of such fullness, filled to the brim with different joys and sadness and delightful unknowns, do not come to everyone and are challenging to repeat. I reflected back on memories both simple and profound embedded deep within the cracks of New York City and Nairobi, Austin and Antigua, Doha and Seville, all coming together to form a overwhelming year in review. I thought about the thousands of miles covered by plane, train, boat, and car, and the thousands more that surely will. I wondered why some people exit our lives when we thought they would stay and others enter them unannounced. I wondered why we always drift back in our minds to the same places - far off lands with different smells and sounds and auras - when left alone to our own devices. Then a drank my glass and then another, and the newest section of life, the great unknowns and undecideds of 2014, were ushered in for better or for worse.


The faint-hearted merchant neither gains nor loses; nay he loses: one
   must take fire in order to get light.


There are a lot of things I’m not sure about these days - too many to make anyone feel particularly comfortable and enough to make one lay anxiously awake at night - but I do feel my future self from some ambiguous age saying with a little smile, “you won’t look back and wish you had settled with X, Y, or Z. You are doing just fine with everything you know. You will know a lot more soon, and I can assure you, there is just no need to worry. Now go enjoy the bright sparkling stars above Zanzibar.”