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.”