Northern Mid-West

The father of a close friend, who is now dead, told me once that he could trace the happiest moments of his life back to a time all his possessions could fit in the back of a car and he could just drive and drive and drive. We were out for dinner at a steakhouse in Melbourne, and I still remember the glitter in his eye, looking back at something he was out of something he had become. He was one of the genuinely great people I have known in my life. He had my enormous respect. But overweight, all too wealthy, owning multiple houses and automobiles, he remains, almost cemented in death by heart attack, exactly what I think about when I think about excess.

In my head, I went back to that conversation somewhere between North Dakota and Wyoming, a few clothes in the back of the old blue Versa, and not a whole lot else. The flat farm pastures slowly got more rugged until the rocky mountains began, iced over in the winter, clouds swirling somewhere just beyond. Small unexpected towns where everyone knows everyone nursed their own breweries and coffee shops and book stores, much to my pleasure when I stopped driving and needed a place to be before starting out again. Bighorn National Forest - certainly the climax - went way up and way down in canyons and along cliffs, my thoughts trailing somewhere close behind. Let's call Casper, Wyoming the conclusion of the first half of another bit of lovely tradition, and the end of the Northern Mid-West.

Mile marker after mile marker, year after year, these excursions, however practical or impractical, have become somewhat sacred to me, a methodical importance I have trouble explaining accurately but which probably explains itself.

My attempt: being alone with nowhere in particular to be and with no specific route to get there and with no one expecting you by any specific time, it centers you. Out there weaving and wandering, there is great value in no one knowing exactly where you are or where you will be next. It is quiet space where you foster you and you come out of it being something more clear than you were before you went in, something that would fit well in the Tao Te Ching when it says:

"The wise are guided by inner needs
and are not concerned with the senses.
Therefore the wise person rejects the
without,
while embracing the within."

The East Coast

Running out onto the beach up to the red rocks and the lagoon, I couldn't help but feel at least a little depressed, if not a hatred for all humanity. A line of bottles and plastic bags and cans spread out where the waves stop in the sand, mixing with dead fish and cow shit and - I'm not making this up - one big hypodermic needle that I only narrowly missed in stride. Black birds bit into the washed up fish and the water itself was murky and gave off a smell, and the whole dark scene together brought forth one big thought: we just ruin everything good and most of us don't even think twice about it.

Across the pond and just beyond that East Coast horizon, the forests of Sumatra are burning and have been for weeks. The sky turns to a fiery haze which drifts with the wind into three countries. People wear masks and cough and wheeze, and in some old chamber thousands of miles away, Congressmen still legitimately debate the science behind climate change and our human impact on the world.

I'll tell you, on my more pessimistic days I have a hard time seeing this all ending well. Like a bad dream, I sometimes vaguely imagine a planet we have rendered unlivable simply because we like living in boxes, we like short-term fixes, and we like things and having things now. That image in my head is always so painfully apocalyptic, and it makes me yearn for a quiet corner of Yosemite in winter, because there I remember feeling something that seemed like no human hand had ever touched.

So carrying all that - thoughts, premonitions, fears for our children - from the East Coast at Trincomalee, you'd do well turning around and going back through the center. There you pass an impossible amount of green, the kind of green where it's actually hard to spot something not green, then paddy fields filling up in the rain, always one worker out there hacking away at something, lean and cut and dark with his shirt off, then a million identical roadside shops that are actually just someone's house with a little shack in front, then Buddhas of all shapes and sizes, at least one for every town, always looking so peaceful and knowing as each person drives on by, then more lazy stray dogs napping in the road under the incredible expectation that every car going 50 MPH will simply drive around them, then at one point elephant droppings lining the highway, but no sign of elephants, but you know they are out there somewhere, which makes you feel a little better inside. 

Singapore, this time

It's the conversations I love most, those that wander more widely as one pitcher of cold beer turns into many pitchers of beer, because you find out in the real world the average person does not want to talk in depth about specific goals for December next year, and what country they want to travel to next (Myanmar would be amazing, but due to their first democratic elections, the Philippines would be more relaxing, while Nepal continues to suffer from a string of bad luck). They do not want to talk about the psychology around going to the gym, or not going to the gym, or the sociological merits of monogamy at three in the morning. They do not understand why a customized leather kindle case means more than a brand new car ever would, because in a present that thoughtful everything you need to know about kindness and generosity and human connection can be found. Most are too busy and pressed to grab a bottle and just walk around the Singapore Marina observing all the strange things that pass you by, before ascending the Marina Bay Sands and drinking $20 dollar negronis as smog blows in from Indonesia and blocks out the sun.

It's been that way for years, really, as far back as I can remember, through shifts in a restaurant, the hours after a triathlon, and the sprawling youthful Saturdays with nothing to do but go through boxes of pizza and watch college football games. It happened like this in Austin and Guatemala and New York City and Kuala Lumpur. It happened on a car ride up to Louisville, Kentucky, and back from Shiner, Texas, and another one all the way up to a small place tucked away under Sri Lankan tea plantations. These are situations you can copy and paste in every corner of the world and each time it is good and maybe even a little bit better because time has gone by and there is more life to both catch up on and think back to. It is built for the sentence that begins, "remember that time..." and you think back and remember that time not exactly wanting it to be that time again, but certainly observing the merits of all those many stages of life now gone.

In all of it you realize how rare these groups of human beings are in the world, those where simplicity and authenticity are everything, fresh and adaptable to any circumstance, always keeping to its core. You realize you are lucky to have these unspoken things hard to put your finger on, those subtle comforts, that dose of sanity, which are always just a hop, skip, and a jump away from a place that more often than not pressures you to wear a mask, look normal, eat dull dinners, and blend in with crowds.

A book and back in Texas

It is hard to say at what point exactly a wave of nostalgia fell over me, but The Son, by Philipp Meyer, certainly brought it out. It's a Texas epic spanning two hundred years, and in that, like few novels have accomplished, you see the full depth of an infamous place layered in blood and power and greed. Texas smashed different types of people against one another over years and years and years, one epoch clinging on for dear life while the next quickly unhinged it, and any examination of history makes you realize this all repeats itself again and again. So that is Texas to me: that is, a microcosm, an intense, confined dose of the world as it has always been, just rougher around the edges without much to water it down; a story of survival and opportunity, untouched land to sprawling cities, buffalo to cattle to railroad to oil; a crossroads of Indians to Spanish to Mexicans to Americans, all in so short a time.

"But that is the story of the human race. Soil to sand, fertile to barren, fruit to thorns. It is all we know how to do."

And so in reading about the time of the Comanches, when the Llano spread out untouched for as far as the eye could see and buffalo were more numerous than people, I found myself drifting back to walks and drives and nights on the town around the emblems of my youth. The Fort Worth Stockyards, the State Capitol, old town Dallas, the Texas Hill Country, the Alamo, the Riverwalk, the Arboretum. Small towns that aren't so small anymore, Georgetown, Shiner, Fredericksburg, Greene, Bastrop, Mesquite, McKinney, San Marcos, all dots on a map which millions of personalities from Davy Crockett to George W. Bush once called home. All these dots and black and white photos, street names and old town cemeteries, former flags and constitutions and kings, gun laws and death penalties, cowboys and fraternity kids, arrowheads and oil wells, Texas Rangers and state troopers, stadiums turned mega churches, they add up and make Texas what it is, both a place and undoubtedly a state of mind, and in that an ever evolving identity.

I've cursed it and I've defended it all over the world, and there are parts I love and parts that make me irate, but I am proud my earliest memories are there, and I'm proud to speak of it knowingly when I'm somewhere else far away.

A few predictions

I'm not often wrong when I do make predictions, so I'll paint a picture now as the days roll by: a quiet beach with no one on it, the kind you see in pictures and wonder how there is still a place that remote in a world so developed, where the sand is fine and the palm trees come right up to the water and when it is dark you listen to the waves and look up and see real stars; rain that comes frequently and out of nowhere, one minute absent and the next minute blurring the sky, drifting in fast from the water and disappearing as fast as it came; turtles that come on shore in the night to lay their eggs and mellow stray dogs without a care in the world napping right in the middle of rural roads and curious little monkeys screeching up in the trees, jumping from branch to branch; sprawled out on a swinging chair, head resting in a lap, kindles, paperbacks, notebooks, the sun warming everything it touches; intertwined legs on a towel, drunk off something, talking and talking and talking and talking and talking and talking; not wanting to go to bed at night because you do not want the night to end, and not wanting to get up in the morning because you do not want the morning to end; an overwhelming hard to describe protection instinct, wanting to keep something safe and okay and maybe even yours, and wanting it to see the things you see and enjoy.

So the days keep rolling by, July, August, and September, in a steady way, where you aren't gasping for breath or making giant leaps of faith, nothing radical, outlandish, or improbable, but just putting one foot in front of the other, like each step is the most natural thing in the world, even if those steps stop tomorrow and even if they wander on forever.

I went to India

I stared a man with a deformed arm and massive tumor square in the eyes, not looking away, as he asked for change in traffic on one of a thousand roads. I am guilty, like most, of ignoring things unpleasant to us by just not looking at them at all, but this time, for whatever reason, I decided to shift my ways. So I watched until the cars started moving, and this I found brings forth an interesting array of questions, those that grow progressively bigger, like why him and not me, and how you live off of coins, and what it must feel like to be so invisible, and what social mobility means to someone living and dying in a slum, and finally, how any of this even mildly gets fixed when you are looking at such large numbers of needy hands. I know talking about poverty and associated resilience is a dangerous cliche, infused too often with a peculiar glamor when in reality there is none to be had. But I have enormous respect for the blips on a map, those who live and die forgotten, and if whenever the lights go out for good and all our great cities grind to a halt, I think it will be these people who learned long ago how to survive on nothing that will end up surviving the longest.

The car horns - erratic melodies of the great subcontinent - never stopped really: on the street outside my hotel room window when I woke in the morning and went to bed at night; on the impossibly cramped side streets weaving like arteries through Old Delhi; in front of all the bustling temples, mosques, and occasional churches stacked side by side in prayer; and all the other places you would like to find escape but instead were inundated with noise. This was India by initial observation, a sprawling mass of land soon to be the world's most populous country, potent in tastes, sights, and smells, dirty, dysfunctional, and utterly chaotic, and somehow working day after day. At no point in my life, I confess, have I ever been drawn to this place that is so many small places, so many people's romantic dream, but it is something I think you should do if you want to really talk about this day and age and not sound like an author describing a scene that takes place somewhere he has never actually visited himself.

For my mom's birthday

One image that always stuck with me was a baby in a satchel strapped onto a mother's back somewhere out in rural Guatemala I could doubtfully find again. It was fascinating to watch really, as the mom ran about, washed dishes, and swept up the floor, the baby like a kangaroo in a pouch, bouncing up and down, head bobbing back and forth, eyes wide but calm during these vigorous and abrupt movements. It was in this distinct moment I remember thinking for the first time that children are not as fragile as we think them to be. Complicated strollers and backward facing car seats are for peace of mind as much as all practicality, and it is just a fact children grow up quicker in places that are not immersed in so much luxury. That baby, it occurs to me, is three years older now, living in a wooden shed with an aluminum roof, and unlikely has he ever left a radius of five or six square kilometers. This memory and associated thoughts join a number of others when I think about my own mom, mostly because out there in the world you see how many ways it could have gone if even a few small things had been different.

I am grateful for what I got, and the complaints are few and far between. I grew up well and easy, and while there were plenty of things to question, love in that house was never one of them. I think this factor alone has the greatest impact on the people we grow up to be, and said another way, you can get a whole lot wrong as long as that part is still right. A wonderful documentary called "Babies" tracks the first two years of four kid's lives from Asia to Africa to the USA, and in that, you see both what is common and what is different about how people are raised. I think the takeaway, or what I chose to take away, is that character is less impacted by a hut in the bush or a high rise apartment in the city, and more by what happens within those structures.

There is no point to this other than outward appreciation: for a mom who brought me up with love and other fundamental tenets, and showed great selflessness in that endeavor, as many mothers and fathers do; for her tireless support in my five years far far away; how she bounced back after deaths and endless departures, as many of us must; how she helps other people feel better day after day. I have enjoyed getting to know this person, my mother, from a very young age, and I will enjoy getting to know her now in a different stage. This is all so very short and basic. I will probably spend all my life trying to get the above words just right. It is one great ineffable really, telling our parents exactly what they mean, and I only wish I remembered more precious bits from all those bittersweet years, evidence and inspiration to draw off of in the night, to show all those things you feel.

Somewhere in the foreground, I see this building slowly, brick by brick, the foundations of a time I might play a similar role to some small being, and I think back on my mom and dad and all the other mothers and fathers I have seen try and succeed and fail and fall somewhere in between, and that famous Hodding Carter line always seems to fit in somewhere:

"There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots; the other, wings."

KL

The ride into Kuala Lumpur from the airport takes thirty minutes on the KLIA Express. It is a fantastic train really, clean, organized, not crowded, and it has the little flat screen televisions that tell you news and random facts like where petroleum comes from and why a particular football star does not want to return to Marseilles. You speed through tropical marshes and greenery until the concrete slowly begins, tall suburban high rise apartments, more and more congested, then arriving at the city center and an impressive skyline topped by the Petronus Towers lighting up the night. I have come to love Malaysia, my second time in, and looking at it all, this impressive array of complex infrastructure and architecture and design, you think for what must be the hundredth time if this concept of America paving the way in everything, so popular in election season rhetoric, is perhaps a concept that should be revisited by the masses. A friend and I once weighed the benefits of dropping every high school graduate from the west in the middle of China with $1,000 and telling them to find their way out, in order to better mold foreign policy. The more I am out, and the more I go back home, the more pressing and more pertinent I think this idea becomes.

In any case, I went straight to my Whisky Bar on Changkat Bukit Bintang, for a dose of sophistication and a cigar. Sitting out on my chair that hasn't changed since I sat there last, I watched the most interesting group of people walk up and down that electric street, ladyboys on the prowl, old white men in town for vague hazy reasons, and backpackers lugging their luggage and spreading their dime as far as they can. It is a melting pot of people really, where a Bangladeshi boy trying for college waits on an Australian businessman who sits next to a girlfriend from the Philippines half his age, whose family back home is assumedly supported by that relationship. I always find myself gravitating towards these concentrated places where everything comes together, vice and incredible goodness, hand in hand, all out there and visible to the attentive eye.

From there a whirlwind, too compressed, as these things always are. A rooftop dinner and the Kuala Lumpur skyline, a helipad full of wine, a club full of Asians jumping up and down, a taxi ride, a short night's rest, a hangover, a trip to the suburbs, powerpoint presentations that do not end, more wine, more food, more talk, the good kind, the best I can remember lately, all bleeding back into the KLIA Express, the world in reverse, the concrete slabs, the green marshes, the airport and the big full ocean below. 

I'll tell you what it's like for me

Back in Seville, my old host brother got a dog and is dating someone now, but I'm not sure how much else has changed. I think about him often but don't catch up often enough. I think about all the family there really, nesting away in Triana, another year or two older. Out from their house I still remember that shuffle of people coming across the bridge and walking down San Jacinto and people drinking their small lunchtime beer or gossiping in the surrounding plazas from 10pm onwards, old men with canes and a newspaper and young girls in love with boys on scooters. All that Spain is to me can be defined by that feeling in the air on a nighttime stroll, that very street, the buzz, the smells, the humming of voices.

And meanwhile in Colombia the streets are packed on Friday and Saturday around Medellin's Parque Lleras, a similar language spoken with a different tint flowing through the air. I miss my salsa school and mountain views and go-to restaurants and the Velvet Cafe where I sat one day and met a person who just immediately without rationale felt different after meeting so much of the same. Gone, gone, gone is that country now, brought to life only in short lived moments when I shut my eyes and put Bomba Estereo or Romeo Santos on as background noise. How lucky we are to have such beautiful places and such beautiful people to miss. How empty would life be to have never had those things at all?

I remember the toxic smog of Nairobi traffic and the pureness of the air once you escape, which is still today on this very day no doubt toxic and no doubt pure. When you go far enough north towards Nakuru you come to a hill that peers out on the Great Rift Valley, the real cradle of humanity, a coming home of sorts, and there it looks like the world goes on forever and never ends. One trip took me beyond this point to Meru County, remote, untainted, in the heart of Kenya. The national park was full of wild animals and no one on the road and in all my months in that country, full of so many bitter memories far too vivid to this day, I extract a few happy ones from this tucked away part of my mind, looking out at elephants as they looked back at me.

And meanwhile in Nigeria, Lebanese millionaire playboys still take their armored cars out and run through the decade long motions - work, clubs, drugs, boat to the beaches with the female flavor of the month, and back again. It's a place that harvests vice, more dysfunctional than you think a place can be without entertaining a civil war. I'm glad I was there and saw what the world can be, and what the world will continue to be, because none of these themes will change, but it is not my place to decide on the reoccurring cycles of people, much less countries, that are also reoccurring today.

I imagine the cafe culture of Melbourne still carries on, as do the waves that pummel the Great Ocean Road and the runners along the Yarra. All those people I never met, and the tiny percentage  of those I did. I was so young, and too inexperienced to have context for it all, but certain parts stick out through my 21 year old eyes: seeing the Southern Cross through the clouds each evening; the flying foxes scattering the sky at dusk; the cold tram ride to work each morning; a bottle of wine alone one night on a park bench. I really don't know if I'll ever go back, to these places that were once all there was, but I hope to, like everywhere, if it is in the cards. There are so many places like this now, and yet so many more to see.

Where's that Dutch girl I travelled with for four days around the Great Barrier Reef? I have no idea really. Or the Australian I smoked a deadly cigar with on a hill in Guatemala? Those Turkish girls from a night out next to Istanbul's glowing mosques. The students around Honduran ruins?

The divorced financial planner at the brewery on my epic ride through Monterrey. My only real one-night-stand, on my final few days in London. The Egyptian that joined me for an illegal midnight swim on Qatar's side of the Persian Gulf. The actor from Breaking Bad I saw roped with a blonde at a bar in Cape Town. The prostitute I spoke with for awhile one night in Abuja. The President of Tajikistan whose hand I shook one afternoon in Brussels. The potential ladyboy who delivered a foot massage in Bangkok. The Argentinians and the rental car that circumvented Tenerife. Ex girlfriends turned wives turned parents in far off places. All these people I've lost track of, nearly forgot, and to my knowledge are out there living on somewhere. Hello and goodbye, hello and goodbye, the list goes on and on.

I am fascinated by these connections, the ones we have lost and the ones we still have and the ones we didn't even realized happened. I am fascinated by how the realities continue, are happening now, in every corner of the world without us. I am fascinated that there are billions more I will never see. So at present, this is the scope and how far the world extends for me.

I cannot describe to you the paradoxical feeling of both great fullness and great emptiness that accompanies having been everywhere and hardly anywhere still, and wanting to be all those places at once. This feeling comes often and with great force, and it is the benefit and the drawback of a life that has expanded so big. 

From Sri Lanka

One part I have come to love is the birds outside my window. They nest in the trees that rise up and peak a few floors down. They start chirping at any hour of the day or night, but I prefer it best when I rise in the morning, tropical sounds, off some relaxing rainforest mixed tape. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what kind of birds they are, but occasionally you will see a bright green parrot or a yellow beaked black bird and other times fearless ravens all flying between the brush, and it could be any one of these. They are sometimes accompanied by miniature squirrels, smaller than I have ever seen, running along the rooftops, and then if it is dusk, giant bats come out by the hundreds for feeding, their silhouettes flapping against the dimming sky. Nature, above all things, points you here. It is indicative of this small island in the Indian Ocean, and a reminder of where you are, how many miles you have come, when the buildings and the roads and the cars all start to look the same.

The morning run takes me with the birds, out of my apartment down a buzzing street until I reach that gaudy government building that signals the beginning of Viharamahadevi Park. Past the big statue of Buddha and down the cobblestone paths, the sweat is noticable already pouring off your face in the equatorial humidity. The captured heat of the grass and the trees and the pond encapsulates you as you tune into your breath, the pace of your steps, and the subtle looks from those around you, all very reminiscent of that one afternoon in Singapore's Chinese Gardens. There is a special feeling to a run in this part of the world, almost spiritual in this weather, where the rain can come at any moment when the skies are still blue and then vanish without a trace leaving curious little puddles in the street.

And that is how a day begins, before a suit flies in and characterizes the rest. How different are things in Dallas and Austin and the rest, where all those people from past lives scurry about fighting and finding their way, one person in a crowd of millions, with one or two overarching themes soon to define a decade? I gauge often the merits of both - there certainly are merits to both -  but to be honest these days, a brief examination of all the lives I could have had, normally plastered over people's Facebook walls and Instagram accounts, provides all the motivation I need to keep moving and wait patiently until I find the right kind of rest.

So I arrived here in this place, fittingly welcomed by a tropical downpour on the cusp of monsoon season, with so many unquantifiable things put behind me and any number of new things laying ahead. That was that. Old colonial hotels beckon afternoon tea, plantations sit waiting up in the highlands, and a thousand untouched beaches on far corners of the island call out to my Saturdays and Sundays just a train ride away. There are new routines to find and be made, and even a little trust in life leaves no doubt a piece of writing from January 2016 will proclaim how all this could not have been any other way, another lovely year in the books which one does not get back.

Intermediary

The intermediary place was New York City, which puts me in good company. It has been the intermediary place for how many people throughout human history? How many writers toiled away on its city streets and never published anything? How many artists whose name I have never heard painted in a run down studio? How many twenty-somethings tried to make it work in shared beaten down apartments full of strangers? How many people in suits withered away working 80 hour weeks hoping they would succeed? How many weary travelers? How many immigrants? How many romances? This city is always changing and redefining itself, as are the people in it, and that energy you feel when you get out in the middle of it all.

So for three days I put my feet to the pavement and explored and wandered and got lost while visualizing again all the infinite crevices I could one day call home, and all the manners in which I could potentially make that happen. In the background sat lovely conversations woven with food and coffee that turned slowly into beers as the day moved on. All the various micro-niches worked themselves in and out of sight and by walking and tuning in to your surroundings you realize not a single city block is left untouched by some profound past event, whether remembered or not remembered by the average outsider like me. 

And again, that was it, a start and a stop. Up again from JFK and out across the Atlantic, Soho and Brooklyn and New York University and all the fountains around Washington Square continue making noise further and further into the background. The future ushers in tropical rains, tea plantations, and a whole new set of unknowns.

In and out of the Aburra Valley

I grow unnaturally excited these days at the sound of salsa music. The rhythm to me demands movement and a migration of people to open space, linking hands, looking into one another’s eyes, and then the steps and twirls begin. It is beautiful when done correctly, when seasoned veterans intertwine like they have known their partner their entire lives. It is romantic even if it is not romantic, passionate even if there is no sexual passion. It is improv, never the same, and it is based off feeling: the strength in which the woman holds your hand; how she twirls when instructed; and the manner and confidence and delicacy in which he the man directs. Of the many things I think back on from Colombia and my month in the Aburra Valley, this dance and my progress in learning it makes me smile a lot in the end. 

Thousands of miles away now, other things also come to mind, things which make up a month just too short to justify any drastic changes or life alterations but just long enough to feel important. Sipping a coffee in Parque Lleras and having a Sunday run in el Poblado and drinking a pint in Bogota Beer Company were just a few of the gorgeous routines that settled in shockingly little time, all to the backdrop of Spanish language. This is a familiar process, developing routines and then uplifting them, a theme of impermanence and constant change. It has come to characterize my last five years, and while there are of course trade offs to this style of life (aren't there with everything?), this time left me musing from the 740th step atop Guatape, on just what sort of toll this takes. How many times can you say goodbye just as it got so good? At what point does perceived obligation take a rest and you just go where you want to go? When do you drop everything on irrational chance, and when do you maintain the course? These are the questions that sit in a grey hazy middle, without straightforward answers, that to some extent haunt you, tossing and turning up and down the aisles of the plane that takes you off somewhere else in the night.

My first image and last image were the same, rounding the first and final corner with the lights of Medellin spreading out into the distance and maneuvering up the hills on the other side. This will forever be ingrained in my head and associated with this point in my life, another profound transition, alongside this lingering feeling that Latin America feels more like a distant home than anywhere else in the world, and like somewhere I belong, a borrowed culture, somewhere I fall back into in stride and will certainly swing by again.

Post number 99

It's a milestone of sorts, but I'm just glad I did it: taking the time to mull things over as they happened, jotting down a few notes and ideas along the way, and putting words to the dreams as they took shape in my head. In truth, I'm still not sure what to call it, and any attempt has always seemed incomplete - part blog, part journal, part mindless rambling, part introspective thinking, partly for me and partly for the public realm. It is not ever only one of these things.

I sometimes go back and edit a cringe-worthy sentence I've since outgrown. I sometimes read a line multiple times and remember exactly how I felt when I wrote it on that specific day any number of years ago. I sometimes write an entire post in ten minutes, and other times edit for weeks before deleting it altogether. I sometimes write five in a month, and have at times regrettably skipped a month. Some I felt I couldn't not write, while others I almost couldn't bare to write. Some I think are decent, and some I think are tedious. Some I wrote drunk and some I wrote tired. Sentences have grown more tight and observations at least a little bit more true. There is just no method or blueprint to this thing. It is consistent and it is constantly evolving, and I like that more and more as we creep up to a century mark with an expanding body of work spreading out behind. It makes me wonder what I'll write next and what viewpoints and what victories and what sorrows will make me want to write more.

For now, I don't know why I do it and I do not pompously believe it has any lasting impact, but late at night when I open this up and click back on a random month of my life, it brings me great happiness to see a general progression of things, all the little stepping stones from the world's multiple corners and chance encounters, people who once morphed us, mattered, and now do not. It is my Marco Polo journal, my graduate school thesis, my nobel prize winning speech, my Ted Talk, my manifesto, my last words, and all that is both insignificant and significant in my life. If I died tomorrow I recognize, like most of us must, that there wouldn't be much to show in the grand scheme of things, and absolutely nothing for the history books within a hundred years; I'm at peace with every bit of that really. But I would feel happy knowing I left this little bit of me behind, floating out there somewhere, with no importance placed on the fact that someone or no one will ever find their way here.

Secretly though, I think I do see that happening. I see someone one day reading a page and thinking how much that applies to them. Then I see them getting up, walking out the door, and carrying on about their day.

All the little Africas

Out past the dilapidated roads of Lagos further and further into the countryside, things get strange, but this is not a Nigeria-only phenomenon. Stay the night at an inn in West Texas, or eat breakfast at a Waffle House outside Little Rock, and you are sure to see a fair amount of strangeness too. People there and in all such places I find more hardened to the elements, more enclosed, more absorbed in the little worlds that don't change as much or as fast as they tend to in cities. For me it will always be something worth seeing, something worth sharing a coffee with in the morning or a meal with at night, a chat that reminds you just how many little niches there are out there, but after a week I am crawling back to civilization, where the buzzing energy of people and their broad fluid ideas surround you.

I reached that week-long threshold in an ancillary Nigerian state of 3 million, but out there it really is a whole new level. I learned, for instance, that the entire pipe system of this no name province is decades old and made of asbestos, which I then thought about later in the shower before turning the water off. Meals each night were passed alone in a dining hall next to a blaring evangelist preacher on a television that no one was watching but no one bothered to change. I will forever look back on those meals, alone in a room, overshadowed by an animated shouting Prophet Akanda, wondering if this was a low point in my life or one of the most interesting periods there will ever be.

One day I rode on a scooter and found it infinitely less pleasant than my moto-taxi in Kampala, and likewise in Bangkok, and pretty much any motorcycle I have ever been on in my life. I elected not to do that again. I was dropped at an open air informal market to buy apples and crackers, cloaked in a suit after too long a day, and never in my life have I felt more out of place, middle of nowhere, somewhere in Nigeria, dimming light on the horizon, people yelling "oyibo" in every direction, an impossible distance away in both time and space from what I and many would consider a normal existence where girl and guy meet in coffee shop and two months later curl up on a couch watching the cinematic version of On the Road. You just have to laugh about it sometimes, or else you might cry. You have to decide if the conventional life is for you, and then just how unconventional you are willing to go. Blazing back down broken roads after a week in the boonies, Lagos, Nigeria never looked so good and so forgiving when its buildings popped up across the sky in front of me. When Lagos starts to play that role, I realize your reality has gotten obstructively warped.

It's challenging to explain, the cynicism you start to develop. The Africa of my littered memories is a thousand things, East, West, and South, and not all of them are happy, leaving me in a constant state of cross-checking reality with whatever it is I used to know. But I feel like if you've done this place right, if you've done it long enough, if you've ventured a bit into the heart of what makes all the little bits add up to a whole, you just cant look back on everything with a big smile on your face, and that's okay, right even, because I do not believe everything in life is meant to be happy, uplifting, or inspirational, wrapped in colorful flowers from the world's paradisaical escapes. We do no one any service when we apply masks and pretend things aren't what they are. It brings us no closer to the happiness within ourselves, which, you know, can exist anywhere, no matter how far out we land.

In town again

One could even argue its good to be back here, but that is hard to explain to the average person. The turmoil of Nigerian elections is just around the corner, capped with more Boko Haram violence in the North of the country. Oil prices have plummeted, dampening virtually every aspect of the economy. Companies trim budgets, people wait, and the dysfunctional that has always been here pushes the place forward into another year. That is the state of Nigeria in January 2015.

But there is no question in my mind now that the Lagos supercity of 20 million has an allure in ways I have yet to fully understand myself: something that draws you back, something you miss when you're away, something that you love to hate. It could just be a feeling in the air. Some say it is optimism, or a culture of aspiration. "Africa's first city," the recent National Geographic feature story said. That feeling in the air, that bustling energy, you absorb and it becomes a part of you. You start to enjoy the fight, the chaos, and the toughness that grows up from within. It's the same thing the drew that businessman in a South African bar to say Nigeria is something he must do before he dies. It's that thing that keeps most people away. It's what happens when you tell people not to come because they won't get it, and there just isn't any need for them to. It's all of these things lumped into one.

In the background, you join in on the yelling matches when no one is actually mad and all the incessant car horns begin to sound like birds chirping, everyone just talking to each other. You hate all the stupid and unnecessary problems that arise, but then love the little inconsequential victories you achieve over them. This surprises you, creeps up on you, until the point that you arrive back in the horrendously dysfunctional Murtala Mohammed International Airport after a few months away and seemingly exit your body, separate yourself from former ideas of what's pleasurable and what's deplorable, and it just doesn't feel that bad anymore. We are probably all a little crazy here in the end.

So I'm back now, for who knows how long, and despite all the many layers of that decision that should probably keep me up at night, I've been sleeping well lately, as well as I can remember, and that says something about each passing day. I understand none of that invites you here. It just perhaps explains the nature of things, and why on Earth I'd come here again.

Cruising around Bangkok

By motorcycle taxi was the best way, I found. The many roads of Bangkok tend to grow congested at any hour of the day owing to an array of tightly woven bottlenecks on top of poor planning. One traditional taxi ride was all it took, and then in moving from one place to another I joined the hoard of beeping scooters dodging in and out of cars, forming their own tiny side lanes in a way you don’t think is possible, and yet, it all works again and again.

So that is one way to do it. You would also do well to walk and walk and take in a hefty portion of real Asia until you are tired and don’t want to take it in anymore. At the MPK Centre, for example, you are inundated by fake Calvin Klein underwear next to “I love Bangkok” shirts which is one floor above a million electronic stores built atop one another selling carbon copy Beats Headphones under 10 USDs and shady phone unlocks. Down roads like Silom, tailors call out for you to take a peak in their shop, next to massage parlors where ladies (and ladyboys) request you do the same. Then later at night, a visit to Patpong road, one of the more well known red light districts in the world, brings you face to face with Thailand’s unfortunate sex tourism industry. The oldest business in the world is on display in full bright colors, still going strong. “Every girl on stage is available for your ultimate pleasure,” one sign declared, and there were no doubt more than a few takers behind those seedy blackout curtains.

It was never too much, at least I can’t say Thailand was for me. On the contrary it seemed perfectly balanced, every terrible intersection next to a quiet alley, a go-go bar equaling a quiet cafe on the river. Buddhist thought describes the quest for a state of Nirvana, only achieved through the “middle way,” that moderate place between pain and ecstasy. It is hard not to see how this translates into the overall mindset of a people embedded in the day to day happenings of their lives. It was all peaceful in the chaos, something kind and soft spoken in the air. 15 million tourists will no doubt note similar attributes on their 2015 journeys, go back and tell their friends, ushering in next year's wave. I was lucky to be one of them nestled in for a few perfectly lit days in January under that lovely equatorial sun. 

Yosemite, in retrospect

The renown Ken Burns documentary called it “America’s best idea,” and it would be hard to argue if you’ve ever meandered along the paths of Yosemite or Yellowstone, Glacier or Grand Canyon. The idea was this: private interests and profit motive tend to corrupt and decay our great natural treasures, and so those treasures deserve to be protected for future generations to enjoy. Here was born our system of National Parks now over a hundred years old. If you had any real American childhood at all, indeed to call yourself American, you must have visited one of these with your family some summer long ago.

And so with great pride in my country’s preserved diversity, I found Yosemite one winter afternoon, and will always be grateful I did. How to describe the overwhelming sense of peace in that valley, fed by endless waterfalls, overlooked by the icons of el Capitan, Half Dome, and Glacier Peak? Do you know what complete silence sounds like against the cold on your ears after being inundated by the choir of cities day after day? You will just have to go and see.

Patriotism itself goes many ways, but someone boasting about the real beauty of this country showcases pride at its best. Tell me how big it is, and how different the rainy days of Seattle are from the sunshine of Miami, New York City's bustling from the laid back vibes of Venice Beach. Talk about the little crevices you have seen, those you want to see, and how you could spend your entire life traversing all of our states and not see it all. I devour that conversation.

The world grows smaller and smaller. What once took more than two days from San Francisco by train, horse, and carriage, now takes under three hours by car. Civilization approaches, and yet, the Yosemites few and far between live on.