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.