Keep Austin Weird

It is, and always has been, one of my favorite places in the world, with so much of something you can't put your finger on that you just can't quite find anywhere else, something you feel when entering the country BBQ restaurants and live music venues and localized businesses and when walking in front of the state capitol and when entering a new bar that didn't used to exist but is now the most popular place in town. You feel it when university kids blend with lawyers and technology entreprenuers who then mix with Whole Foods aficionados and coffee shop hipsters and cowboys. You feel it when passing the rich estates out by Lake Travis where you used to ride your bike, and around the Hyde Park condos you used to call home. You feel it in the buzz, most accurately defined by the age old city mantra: keep Austin weird.

So my old life met my new life, in the best of ways, during a few days back in Texas when December turned into January. As these things go, if you tune in just right, you step back and can clearly see all the good things that once happened alongside all the good things that happened once you were gone. These things are both true together, one not cheapening the other, and you find a balance with it, not longing for something different or nostalgia for what once was, but recognition that there is a peace and a rightness when one situation no longer exists and a new one now does.

Because I ultimatley believe life happens in phases, and I have always found my rhythm when I let myself float, without struggle or fear or a need for direction, but a trust in what life has in store when you ask the right questions. Like this, my life has gone, stage by stage, year on year, this time my right hand held by a left hand cloaked in lovely knit mittens, while my own left hand turned a wheel, driving in delightful silence down Lamar, up Congress, on 6th, 5th, and 4th streets, passing the intersection of Rainey and Driskill, up 620 by Lakeway, slowly along the drag via Guadalupe, all before taking Interstate 35, like so many times before, up away from it all in another big triumphant goodbye. These are the old routines probably best kept old routines while a new city booms in the background.

Whenever there is a setback and things seem unclear, whenever I get unsettled amidst uncertainty, I take comfort in the historical unwavering path of growth and progress which tells us: there are many wonderful things that can happen; many of them will happen; most of them are invisible to us now, but yes indeed, there is a way for them to happen. 

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.