Who Says that the Body is Merely a Vessel?

More writings from today. The pen and paper agree with me again, their presence a boon to the immediacy of thought.

I was going to drive for a long while today and thought better of it. Perhaps not better, but against, because it was not meant to be a drive representing escape or even a removal of self from inescapable surroundings. In opposition to everyone around me at this moment, I need to be ever-present especially in myself. I find that need for self-presence, for self-preservation, is more than ever a struggle couched in the body, in the movement and placement of limbs, of spatial reasoning: now I am standing here, in this light rain, and now I move a hand to wipe it from one cheek, and now some part of my center tilts slightly to the left, avoiding a puddle or the edge of the road. Symmetry is impossible: even in sleep I seem to be at angles dissonant to one another, one leg at ninety-degrees, the other straight, as if trying unconsciously to hold myself in assertion of who this body is, to whom it responds, to whom it has made love.

There's that too: sex.

That act is perhaps the truest I've engaged in, the wanted and willing of two bodies into and over each other, the ability to create life or even to want to at the heart of it, sheerly miraculous. What does denial of it ever bring us but confusion, that puritanical and torturous feeling that what we're doing (or thinking about desiring to do) is 'wrong' while ever natural and innate force in existence pushes against it. Who among us truly believes that the body is necessarily and merely a vessel for the soul? Would that there were no such thing as 'base' or 'low' or 'crude'. That carnality could give way to its simplest of manifestation: hands in other hands, mouths on mouths, without this residual, religious scrutiny. Who are we but proximal to and always in desperate need of each other, of the blissful disconnect it is when, at last, we are connected so completely to each other and to ourselves and our physical bodies that we cannot help but burst?

Proximity. Distance. These are things heart-driven, catalogs of the spaces people fill, or that memories do, the mileage and acreage of the ways we once brought ourselves together. The inexorable need of the mind to cling to that which was felt and can only be consumed by the body-even in attempting to separate ourselves from this flesh, we use terms that can only be understood through physicality. We do not say we transcend. We say we feel.

Having been raised under the tenets of Catholicism, I do still on occasion entrench myself too firmly in its guilts. Morning-after syndrome. Yet I no longer succumb to its hurtfulness, that doctrine which relegates the mind and the body to separate compartments, attempts to elevate one above the other, is ruthless in its persecution of the physical self. Instead I have gratitude for this body, for its attuning to intensity, to pleasure and to pain. Its indescribable strength, after all it has been through. What it is and what it contains are one and the same. What use be it to say that it is not, in fact, the body that is the seat of all feeling? I want to experience life as a series of cataclysms in the body, excursions into endurance and sensuality and thrill, the bottom dropping out from under the feet so that to find solid ground again precipitates a wild relief akin to joy, so that the mind is able to reach some new conclusion about the weight of a stone or the taste of having bitten the inside of the mouth.

Last week might have been the most eye-opening instance of the kind of wholly consuming experience I hope to continue to have, in one fashion or another: the purely-opened feeling one can sometimes attain only by having an encounter with another person in their entirety. It is not spiritual. It's too decadent for that. Some, I suppose, might more accurately akin it to a perfectly executed five-course meal, or an indescribably fine wine, some sense of illicitness and total indulgence required for the mind and body to meld in their engagement and finally in their understanding of what's taken place. It was a set of courses, of sorts, a meeting not at all by chance but certainly, in the end, not by design, the sort of meeting whose assumed innocence implies that its ending must, out of irony and the world's sense of humor, always be one of resist-resist-give in: a testament to temptation and that which we cannot continue to deny.

Recklessness played a part, no doubt, but really, I was glad and grateful for it, for the certainty that was under the surface all night, for the gentleness and then for what was rough and right and ready to be moved from the speculative to the real. Isn't it the only mystery we are capable of solving?: what that particular skin might feel like under one hand, what angle it is that best expresses our need, what the shape of a mouth says about what can be done against it? To exist in a state of feeling becomes empirical: we know what our limbs know, our state a state of the constance of muscle memory, inextricable from the hum and dance of it all stretched out before and after us, the universe contained in a single human body, there in the bed of on the grass or under cover of semi-darkness, ready to explore and be explored.

I mention that I feel gratitude, when I should say that I also ache, with the ache of the romantic and selfish: I want to see this man again, to feel the room open up like so many mountainsides giving way to glaciers, which is to say that the naturalness of it I had not felt before, the feeling of hardness and unease being eroded. He smiles. It's bright and I can somehow picture a thousand more nights spent doing things very similarly. This must be the enactment of that old cliche-the meeting of kindred spirits.

Then (and over and over) I realize how foolish it all sounds and I have to laugh at myself, at the parody of myself that I become when I allow myself to think this way, allow the idea of anything close to domesticity and its bliss to infiltrate all my tirades about borders and infinity and stepping outside myself ruined by all the musings I have about this one man and then I recall how little it took for him to win me over, how there were wide streaks of bronze in his dark hair, and I think that this, too, is the world, this one entity, who has a name and a unique taste and has set foot on the earth in places that I have not, the totality of him, and of us, and of what unfolds when two such beings meet and come together, finding that the horizon has no span so great as their two bodies, and so begin to search for what it is to feel and therefore to be.

Old Thoughts on New Feelings (old and reposted)

We live in a world that constantly enforces messages of love and tolerance and eradication of hate. It's important, true. But I hate. I think I hate every day of my life. It may be buried, or suppressed, or left behind in favor of things more important. But I hate.

People say "I prefer the term 'strongly dislike'". They say "Hate is a powerful term". It is. I never dispute that. Would it be silly to propose that hate wakes me up in the morning? That it motivates, although it can cripple? That it's (gasp!) healthy, in a cathartic, energizing way?

I'll tell you what I hate; in this case, 'you' refers to whomever chooses to read this. Following this, please suspend your assumptions about which person 'you' refers to. I don't mean to be cryptic. OK, I do. But I also mean to be universal, so that perhaps it's easier to understand.

I hate the realization that I wasted, willingly, those years of my life that I spent with you. There were two of them. It's not a long time; it's eternity. I lost those two years because I became the wrong person, and that person took over. I hate YOU. I hate your newfound willingness to be a father. Where did that come from? Emphatically, you were the opposite when it counted for us, and the results ruined me. Those are two years in which I lost my family, lost my sanity, lost my purpose. I lived with and for you. And hate is what came of it. The fact that I hate you pulled me out of bed for days after you supposedly left my life, and now I find myself back in the ring and back in my old self because that hatred pushed me to prove that I could once again be myself and on my own and better.

I hate religion. If everyone went out, questing, one day, and found an empty field, and laid there for a minute, or an hour, alone, perhaps the peace we all need could be found. Instead, we hide behind reams of paper and lists of doctrine, expecting to find guidance. Pass the collection plate. Your five dollars won't buy you salvation, but it might buy the church some new lightbulbs. It's a little ironic that I hate religion because I think religion breeds hate.

I hate eggs. Eggs IN something, such as cake batter, fried rice, etc. are perfectly acceptable because I don't have to see them. Eggs in any form involving scramble, omelette, poach, or otherwise are terribly, horribly, no good very bad. I can't deal with it. It's a texture thing. Just thought I'd clear that up for everyone, in case you cared.

I hate your fear. You're afraid of two women kissing. You're afraid of two men inclining their heads to rest against each other. You're afraid of trans-fats. You're afraid of the inner city, an inner city YOU created. You're afraid of rising gas prices. You're afraid of men in turbans. You're afraid of ME.

Yes, I hated "Borat". I was expecting a film-length version of the kind of satirical, devious dialogue that has made "Da Ali G Show" famous in Britain. Instead, I got Sascha Baron Cohen looking REALLY unattractive, when he is not that (he's actually rather good looking), wrestling with an obese, hairy man. If I wanted to see that, I'd turn on some 'Jackass". I want my nine bucks back.

I used to hate the fact that I felt hatred at all. Hate has flayed me in many ways. It forced the razor across. It sat beside me and poured the wine and loosened my tongue. It turned me on my heel and kept me from fighting for years. It blew things up. It built them.

But it's also become something I've decided I must live with. It's useless to pacify myself when I know that hate is what brought me here. I hated what I had become, so I used that drive to move my life. And I'm sitting here looking at the picture that pops up next to my name, and I know that finally I am capable of great love. Polarity. One doesn't exist without the other. What you do with both is up to you.

Writing with A Pen and Paper Again (transfer from leather bound journal from Nicole)

These notebooks are mean to be for entries of travel, and yet I find myself writing already, about the journey starting to take place in my gut, my head, and my heart.

This book is beautiful. I asked for things recycled, used a little, bound frail-y and maybe stained. Books to carry the old fingerprints and pen scratched traces of my friends-I can attempt a home where ever I am, one of walls and street sounds and inclement weather, but ultimately I am nowhere without these people whom I love and whom I hope in many ways that I somehow am.

I told Jeremy today that I've been preoccupied, as it must be for a river nearing spring and its inevitable, slow-coming breakup, freedom and fluidity and movement built up under the surface, nearly broken loose but for a little less night, a little more sun. Change is a force welling up in me as if held back by ice, by the sudden passing of time from one season into another. I hope this propulsion lasts. Joining the Peace Corps is a frighteningly real decision now, but, as I told John (and my mother, and everyone else) it is time for me to do some good in the world outside of myself. As there must always be, of course, I feel a certain level of fear. That is indeed the definition of the sublime: that which moves us to both awe and fear, something so near to divinity and to heaven that we are cowed by it at the same time that it is beautiful.

I hope this is subliminal, for I can think of no better way to experience all the fear and awe in the world, with its terrible and unavoidable and consumptive beauty, than to immerse myself in the grit and richness of men themselves, in their cities and ruins and niches, in places I have never been and to whose people I am a stranger. I hope to work, to become lost in the way the farmer and the architect are, because work is the backbone of civilization. To work is to survive. And I hope to write-something I haven't been doing enough of lately-just as Hemingway and Snyder and Pound did, men immersed so thoroughly in another culture that they could finally begin to see all that was lacking in their own. Radicalism in all its forms has paved so many ways. Gone are the days when one could hop a cargo ship for a few dollars and travel the world, the way they did. Yet at its heart, that which is radical stems from, I think, a deep need to reassert humanity overall, over a situation or a status quo or, more simply, over oneself.

In the most earnest of ways, I suppose, this is at the core of my travels, of what appears to many to be an abrupt change or a flagrantly reckless undertaking. In order to reassert my own humanity, the utter confusion and sheer joy and overwhelming gratitude of it, the thanks one gives when, upon seeing the sun break through the clouds, it becomes apparent that each beam is an equal distance from the other, so that it creates a fence of light, and whether it is to guide us to the gates of heaven or to keep us out, we can no longer tell, and for a while longer we must walk the world, life itself the only way in or out of those gates, or into the sky, or towards ourselves.

People Are the Catalyst, Always

n Which I Have Another Stupid Existential Crisis:



I do this sometimes, and can only conclude that it must be a product of several deplorable personality flaws.

I do not like to wait. And I do not like not knowing.
Sure, in some cases waiting is fine. As in: I have been waiting far too long for this delicious pizza to arrive. I had to wait to see what was making the terrifying noise around the corner. I've been waiting a long time for this.

I tend to NOT be fine with waiting to accomplish something, whether that be getting the laundry done, or, in this case, disappearing for an extended period of time. There's something very unsettling about it, a feeling of tenterhooks and hospital waiting rooms, the kind of feeling you used to have as a child while waiting for Christmas morning: full-on nausea coupled with exhiliration. Perhaps it lies in needing to know that you are capable of doing what you've dreamt about doing.

I've wanted to go to Ireland since middle school. Someplace with castles, and rolling hills, and where one can get lost in a rich history of literature and war and agriculture. (It's not that those things do not exist in the US, as I'm sure there will be plenty of debate over the merits of culture in North America.) I need, in an almost-desperate way, to be where no one knows me.

I was talking about this with wolfs_rahne the other day. It seems that, eventually, if you've lived somewhere long enough, and usually, when you've had jobs in that place that entail face-to-face customer service, you end up with an obscenely entangled social web. Lots of people know who you are. Many of those people might think that they know you. On occasion, you've dated, or had drinks with, or passed in the grocery store, various and sundry members of that web. And ultimately, people who DON'T know you, or know you only fleetingly, or even, sometimes, people whom you consider friends, begin to define you by pulling on their end of some strand of that web and scrutinizing what it's connected to. You become definable only through your relationships to other people. It becomes impossible to move freely. Something's always pulling you back, like one of those absurd games on Japanese TV: a giant bungee cord strapped to you, mentally and emotionally, that denies you the ability to fly under the radar, to move about psychically, to no longer feel that you're obligated to apologize for something you said at the bar the other night, or for kissing someone you didn't realize you shouldn't have, or to explain what you were doing hanging out with John Smith.

I have a massive case of insatiable independence. I need, with an inexplicable strength, to get out. To move around in the world. To become immersed in a place that I don't know, that doesn't know me, that I must learn to love and navigate and engage in and barter with. I love Alaska, don't get me wrong. It will always be home; I'll always come back. But I need to become like the expatriates: Pound, Hemingway, Stein. To go somewhere foreign and somehow blend in.

Part of this I blame, without his knowledge, on Travis, who's brilliant and bright and seems to be able to move about in the world as he pleases. Where do people get the money for this, by the way? I realized the other day, in the full and unwarranted throes of giddily preparing for him to return to Anchorage, that for whatever odd reason, I was projecting this sense of anticipation onto him. I barely know him. He surfed my couch for one measly night, this boy-poet who's a cross of Dylan, Kerouac and Joyce, and left just as quickly, and yet, for all his transience, I had somehow decided that he'd be coming back to me. He's not mine.

I dwell on things that I know won't linger because I am stationary.

Yet another reason to disappear from here. I feel like I lack accomplishment because of people like Travis. Were you to measure 'accomplishment' as amount of time spent slaving over term papers, or over some job, or in sheer workload, I'd have them all beat. But I haven't accomplished WHAT I WANT for myself, and he has. I dislike, in a huge way, meeting people who make me feel small, or less intelligent than I am, or what have you, and Travis, through no fault of his own, is capable of that, because I am stationary. Because I have stopped doing things for myself, stopped dreaming and started focusing sheerly on the struggle to maintain a daily existance. I haven't thought outside the box of employment, bills, and obligations for months.

Maybe I'm exaggerating this. Maybe I really am, at the core of it, just as desperate to find a soul mate and turn into some horrible Plain White T's song as everyone else. But I don't think so. When I reach out for something, in my own head, it's always a scene of travel, of philanthropy, of ultimately returning to India and eschewing completely everything that's tied me to my own life for so long. I have to give something back, whether it be to literature and writing, or to the profundity of that cosmic overflow that results from experiencing the human experience fully, or to the place I was born, that needs love and aid so badly. I cannot be stuck like this, sitting at a desk all day, just getting by.

There's a Yogic saying..."God dwells within you, as you." I want to open up and let it out.

The Long Beginning of the Beginning of the Way Out

My friend Brandon, whom I thought was just doing the whole Euro-tourist thing, has just informed me that he's actually MOVED to Madeira, Portugal, which looks like...


that. (see below)

The new plan is to fly into Lisboa, Portugal (which costs the same as flying to Dublin and back), and then stay with Brandon on Madeira for a while. There are lots of good under-the-table jobs earning cash to busk for bars and pass out flyers and such, which we'll do til we both have a fair chunk of cash saved up, then take Brandon's motorcycle up through Europe, over to France, where we'll ferry to Dublin and then hike across Galway on the Western Way. Then we'll fly out of Heathrow or another major airport and meet my family in Okinawa for Christmas.

I'm so stoked on this.

I want the experience of time as something largely inconsequential, something measured by the basest of things: hunger, thirst, a need for a place to lay a tired head. As something measured by nature: sunrise, sunset, a time when the fish are active in the mouths of the coves, the point at which a sweater comes out, or comes off, or when a plant blooms out into the morning.

I want to be where schedules, such as they are, are reserved for busses and trains. Not for people. Not for life.

Travis said something last night that I very nearly laughed in his face for. He was telling me about this friend of his who's a monk, who's been devoted to his monastery (Hari Krishna, I believe) for almost 13 years now. This monk-friend just recently decided to return to university and study for a degree in divinity, which Travis finds "sad" and "ridiculous". Then he told me how he and his best friend from Brooklyn used to visit the monk and spend the night staying up talking to him "about the world", and that he (Travis) was pretty sure that it was those talks that had made the monk decide to "change his life".

Someone can try to lead by example, try to exemplify what must be done to change. A person can spread stories around the campfire, can write a letter, can talk a blue streak about how easy or hard or necessary that change is, but the simple truth is that, ultimately, the only person who must get up and walk across the threshold and meet the world anew is YOU.

No one can change your life for you.

He's also one of those well-read, intellectual types who prides himself on the sheer volume of what he knows. James Joyce. The cultural secrets of the Middle East. The exact location of the Fertile Crescent. This in turn made me realize...

I hope never to be an expert on ANYTHING, because with expertise comes the crushingly sad realization that you will never again experience the sheer sensory/emotional onslaught of that thing in itself for the first time.

Throw me from an airplane into a jungle where I know the name of nothing, not a single flower or bird or beast. Not one. I want to be new there, to hear all the stories and myths and urban legends. To have to ask "What?" and "How?" and "Why?". It's how we learn as children, that constant stream of inquisition until finally, one day, we are able to bear the depth and breadth of the world on our own, and our own stories arise from it.

In the end, with all his idiosyncracies and self-assuredness and air of intellectual and spiritual superiority, Travis is just like everyone else who sets out on these kinds of adventures. He's just a kid (we all are, no matter what age), who's far from home, and is homesick, and needs someone to hold onto him, needs to feel grounded and safe and loved in a way that only other people can provide. This occurred to me last night as I was on the verge of sleeping in the armchair because he was making me so nuts, and had commandeered my bedroom. And then I realized that for all his hyperbole and semi-acting (he was reclined on the bed listening to Bob Dylan and looking forlorn), he needed a hug. He needed someone, not to talk to, but to lean on. And so I let him.

Someone else (Jeremy) is on a quest to prove to me that, to ideally open the mind and free the thoughts, one must take hallucinogenic mushrooms. To that I say, RIDICULOUS. Where's the authenticity? I want everything I perceive to be completely authentic, unfettered by drugs or drinks or someone else's opinions. There's nothing any substance can open me up to that I'm not already waiting for, a child posted near the mail box waiting for a package, the package containing a decoder ring, the decoder ring itself one giant leap of faith.

The world is a neverending string of perceptions, of sight and sound and smell and of the feeling of being part of it all, the collective consciousness of people, their crumbling cities, their fallible laws and governances, their hearts.

Every day now I wake up and go do something, routine or not, that makes my chest feel like it's furling out on itself like a fern and there's nothing to stop it doing so, and I think that when I stop walking out onto the world with this painful and storm-like and totally overwhelming sense of pure love, I want someone to take and lay me out on the banks somewhere to die, because I never, never want to stop being so in love with living that it moves me to tears each day.

The world is still flat. I'm ready to jump over the edge.

* Nota Bene: I realize how utterly I am proving his point here, by writing an entire blog based on what Travis said or did; all the world's an ideal and we merely hypocrites, every one.

Nomenclature and Need and A Little Wonder

Ruminate.

I hate that word.

Makes me think of cows.

I'm on a roll, man, just letting things turn over and over in my head on the way to this journey, this completely crazy pilgrimage I'm making to places I've no good reason to come as a pilgrim to, since it's nothing so simple as prostration, nothing like a prayer.

Realized a couple other things today, the result, I think, of having been so stagnant of late, mentally, anyway; I haven't been digging deep enough. (Possibly that's why I haven't been writing as much...Huh.)

I always wonder about people like this: the kind who change their names, or at least begin introducing themselves as someone else, or who speak in accents, or suddenly begin fabricating pieces of their history. People who attempt to remove themselves from their own histories, somehow, as if that alone is the sum total of what it means to identify; as if with that self-imposed, false change they can somehow become someone else.

Nomenclature is self. An etymology. Maybe you weren't named after anyone. Does calling yourself by another name erase the past, truly giving you a new introduction to the world? What's in your head doesn't change, and if it does, it's insincere.

You are your history, and that is in fact what draws people to you, the interconnected lines of your self and your past and the name attached to all of it what they want to trace back to find you. I've always wondered what it meant to be nameless. I have had three names in my life, each of them a gift, each of them a marker of where I've been and what I've done:

Rupa, the name my Indian ayah gave me in the orphanage at first, until one of the Christian sisters said they wanted an English name to put in the adoption catalog.

Baby Helen, the catalog name, the one my parents picked from the pages of small faces, the one that stuck with me until I came to the US.

Michele. My mother's cousin. Its root is Michael, beloved of God. (Someone's God, anyway...). Other people have this name, sure. And yet because it is attached to me, it becomes mine, becomes the door behind which I stand, waiting to greet new people, to tell them stories and let them in.

Sometimes we exist in a negative space. What we aren't. Where we haven't been. What we don't and can't know. Once again I reference Travis.

Travis was so dejected on Monday... he had said something about his brother having a hard time, and then told me I was acting like I didn't care. It bothered me. I'm a pretty caring person, often to my own detriment, because I want to fix everything for everyone and prove to them that they can power through things, can survive too. He lay there just staring at the ceiling, listening to what he thought were sad songs, and looking blue, and I disappeared. Had to, under the weight of the emotions of someone I didn't really know, who was filling up the room with his inflated sorrow, with his air of having the weight of the world on his shoulders. I stayed out of sight for as long as I thought appropriate, for as long as it took me to muster the resolve to finally realize that to be lonely in such close proximity to another warm and present and understanding human being might be the worst feeling there is.

And I finally just hugged him and was like, "It's not that I don't care. But nothing I do or say can change what's happening to you, within you, and I don't know you well enough, and this is still your experience to carry. Not mine."

I cannot change your circumstances. I cannot make your brother happier, cannot take you to him, cannot change what is the inevitable and ever-looming outcome of whatever this situation is. It is not mine to change, or even to try.

It was almost as if he truly believed that by intervening, he could change the fact that his brother would feel some pain, would be betrayed (his girlfriend had threatened to break up with him), that no matter the energy I pushed out into the space between our bodies, this would happen. Neither of us can predict what it will be; nor can his brother, nor could the greatest clairvoyant on earth. This will happen, and this will pass, or linger, or hover for a while, and all of it is vital and irrevocably tied to who we are and why.

Was talking to one of my favorite-of-favorites earlier, Dani, who's well read and well traveled and bubbly and awesome. I subjected her to yet another version of one of these rants. But I've been thinking...

I want always to be ignorant. (And before, dear reader, you gasp in astonishment...) Let me tell you why.

The first time you ever witnessed a snowfall, in your memory stands out as complete immersion in whiteness. In cold. The first knowledge you'd ever encountered of a world stripped bare of green and growing things, its bud and blossom replaced by shining flowers of ice, with hills upon hills of cold crystalline hills that weren't there before, that would disappear, although that you didn't know until later.

The first taste of what would become your favorite food, whatever it is. Something rich or salty or sweet or tart and strange, that you couldn't get enough of for that moment, or in fact, forever, but that you'd never have guessed until you began to wake in the morning and move through the day just grasping at its essence and longing for one.

The first kiss. The first realization that two mouths are made just for this, this strange and sometimes frightening mix-up of lips and teeth and tongues, of breaths mingled as one like a tree and a strangler vine, neither one knowing any longer who feeds upon whom, often a fast and fleeting pain on stepping away, as if a quick splinter has broken off, found its way into the heart.

Who but the ignorant are open to the experience of something in itself as wholly and terrifyingly and liberatingly new?

BE FALLIBLE.

Be vulnerable. Be confused and mystified and yes, be ignorant. Be a child in all the ways that children are innocent of themselves as full of ego. Make mistakes, for god's sake, make mistakes. Break things. Cry. Put them back together. Laugh about it.

I'm listening to this damn song by Manchester Orchestra, and it's not the most inspired thing, for sure, but that's the other thing, man: I am proud, yes almighty, I am PROUD of all these things in me that are mundane, that are commonplace and full of sameness, the sameness that comes with knowing someone else somewhere finds these things entertaining or exciting or worthwhile. For who, in all their difference, has ever refused entirely to fall back on a guilty pleasure or a common ground when faced with the utter awkwardness of meeting new people?

Bad reality TV. T Shirts in Brand Name X, the same ones in the same color and cut, every time. Snickers Bars. Plain Chap stick. That fucking obnoxious Garth Brooks song about friends in low places.

It comes on and everyone begins to sing and no one looks at anyone like they've just crawled out from under a rock, and the beers are still flowing and the whole place lights up with, yes ladies and gentleman, sameness. The sameness that draws us all out onto the dance floor to lock arms and stomp and throw our heads back, regardless of what the guy next to us is wearing, or how he ranted on about the Cubs game just 5 minutes ago. The sameness that tells us it's totally chill to strike up a conversation with the girls behind us in line about the sale the other day, and how hot it is, and how down the street there's a great thrift store that sells dresses. The sameness that buoys us up in a foreign place when, forgive us one and all, we see something written in English, and beneath that a crowd with smiles on each face.

BE MUNDANE. Let it connect you to that dude in the coffee shop, or that girl you keep seeing in the elevator at work, or the couple sitting next to you at dinner. Let sameness and mundanity and silly lacks of idiom bolster your courage until soon you're chatting it up with everyone you see and eating with your fingers and bellowing the words to some song you thought you didn't know.

If you choose to live your life as an enigma, when will you ever become beautifully and seamlessly a part of your surroundings? You cannot drown yourself in human experience when all you do is set yourself apart.

...and just like that I've up and written another novel about nothing at all, and I'm drinking green tea and eating Good N Plentys and practicing my bad French so I can learn to disappear. It tastes like tree bark and sugar cane and Ouzo and there's nothin' else going on in my head but beach and sunlight and water.

Into the Wild, and Why That's a Bad Place to Go (reposted from Facebook)

What I don't understand with all these books and movies," Talerico tells me, "is why they don't tell the stories of the people who survive. The ones who have forged a life here?" (Matthew Power for "Men's Health Magazine": The Cult of Christopher McCandless")


I figure it's about time for me to weigh in on this Into the Wild bullshit that everyone keeps talking about. For the record, and initially, I actually really like Jon Krakauer's specific brand of somewhat-sensationalist writing; his book on Everest is incredible, I think.

But Christopher McCandless, people, should not, NOT, NOOOTTT be a martyr. He should not be idealized. And I'll tell you why.

Christopher McCandless ventured forth into what most term the wilderness with absolutely nothing of value. A .22 caliber rifle is good for very little save bagging small to mid-sized game, and even then, only if you know how to aim and how to shoot. Although he apparently gained some skill (no doubt through trial and error) in killing small game such as grouse, ptarmigan and squirrels, this is not, as anyone who's attempted a subsistence lifestyle knows well, enough to sustain the body of someone ranging long distances to find food in the first place. A 10-lb bag of rice without a camp stove or even the intent of building a fire to cook it on is useless, not to mention woefully poor nutrition against cold and extreme bodily hardship.

Most important, I suppose, is the fact that McCandless, whether through design or through sheer bad timing, attempted to begin this journey in the early spring. Most plants are not yet blooming, let alone edible at this time, and so his little plant hand book would have been of little use but for its information on what NOT to eat. Attempting to bury or smoke an entire caribou (which, in fact, the large game animal he killed was) carcass is, of course, a surefire way to ruin the meat, invite in bacteria and let it all go to rot, never mind that it violates possibly the most essential rule of subsistence-and even, perhaps, sport-hunting: do not let any part of the animal that can be used go to waste.

McCandless trekked into the park in the passenger seats and with the advice of the greatest resource there is: other people. Had he penned down any of the tips given him by those with experience in Alaska's backcountry, or bothered to utilize the answers to his few practical questions, he may have survived.

In his article for "Men's Health", Matthew Power quotes someone he met while researching the filming of Into the Wild, a movie I couldn't even sit through the opening credits of: "Carlson, a barrel-chested Athabascan who worked as a tribal liaison on the shoot, shows me around the bus. He chuckles through a handlebar mustache and offers an unburnished appraisal of McCandless: Another fool bit the dust. "We grew up here. You learn how to make a campfire when you're a kid. This, I didn't think much of it at the time. That kid's mistakes started a long time before he got here."

At its core, this statement is so true it hits you in the face: The mistakes that led to McCandless's death were unavoidable; he had made up his mind and begun down this path long before he even reached Alaska, long before he shouldered the too-meager pack he brought with him and started hitchhiking. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who's lived here for any substantial amount of time who wouldn't have packed more, asked more questions, thought more about what was in store for them. A little utility to go with the asceticism. It's been debunked by a study incited by Krakauer himself that the seeds McCandless ate were poisonous, and so the hapless plant (possibly wild potato, possibly sweet pea) is no longer to blame, and when there is no one to blame but the tragic hero himself, blame goes sneakily under the rug, by the wayside, to save what's been crafted around someone who was, as Carlson said to Power, just 'a kid'.

What is there, then, to idolize about what most of us consider a complete lack of common sense? In many cases, there are folks who think McCandless was pure-D crazy! I'm inclined to agree. Is the true aim of what McCandless seemed to think of as spiritual liberation, as transcendence and escapism-escape from materialism, from the bonds of human limitation-to overthrow one's mind in order to loose the traps of one's body? McCandless wished to venture further than he ever had before into the wild, into places where he must have thought men had never been-only to find A BUS waiting there. A bus. One is not bound, then, by the walls around them, nor by the objects they hold in their hands, but by the confines of what's in the mind, what insurmountable difficulties are presented them as they lie awake at night. How trapped must Chris McCandless have been by himself to have chosen this kind of a fate.

"I'm not trying to romanticize him," insists Penn, who has little patience for McCandless's critics. "There are few people in Alaska who have done anything comparable to what Chris did. We're not talking about a week with another buddy and ATVs, hunting. This was 113 days, 79 of them by choice. And he did pretty damn well. Did he make mistakes? Sure. A lot of people do. But however many miles he needed to walk to become a man was up to him. So I think he did very well by any standard, including Alaskan."(-Matthew Power)

Holy jesus. Sean Penn, you idealist, blind asshole. Let's name a "few" Alaskans who have done far more than Chris McCandless ever did, and lived to tell about it, and contributed in major, major ways to not only the history and health and progress of this state, but also lived to tell about it:

Dick Proenneke: http://www.dickproenneke.com/
Noel Wein: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Wien
Rusty Heurlin: http://www.askart.com/askart/h/rusty_heurlin/rusty_heurlin.aspx
Sinrock Mary
Capt. Michael Healy
Clara Goddard

And the list goes on, and on, and on...Men and women who, for reasons economic or adventurous or yes, even spiritual, have come here not to conquer or be conquered by the land, but to become a part of it, taking only what they need, exploring and living to relay their wealth of love and knowledge to the rest of the world. Chris McCandless, yes, was selfish. His expedition robbed his family of their brother and son, but it also robbed the rest of the world of the opportunity to learn what he learned, to see what he saw, through his eyes. Chris McCandless might be a legend now, yes, but in a vastly different and much more polarizing way than he could have been.

While we're at it, those people who don't exist, who've never done what Christopher McCandless attempted to do? They're everywhere, actually. If Sean Penn had bothered to travel downriver on any major waterway in the state, he'd have found thriving homesteads, fish camps, and encampments for subsistence hunters, inhabited by people who have forged their living from the land and continue to do so, in perfect health and in perfect harmony with that which they subsist upon. If he had spent more time actually talking to local people, especially in Fairbanks, he'd have encountered farmers, truckers, fishermen, guides-dozens of them, still alive and well and reaping the benefits of their adventures in the great North, who all began here with little more than dreams and ideals and have carved from those and with their hands and minds lives extraordinary.

I have lived here, give or take, for 27 years of my life. Not as thoroughly as some, but more than many others, my siblings and I were taught practical skills and knowledge to live by: which berries are edible and which are not; how to navigate using the river; the best way to start a fire in the rain. This place is full to bursting with those of us who want to, and do, exactly as McCandless did: find a release of the self and the burden of the everyday here. Do we all run around giving out false names and dismissing the kindness of strangers in order to pursue some insane notion of self-sufficiency? No. I would have burned an entire goddamn stand of birch down to signal a plane, no matter the bleeding-heart moralism that led McCandless not to, yes, out of desperation, but also because it comes to this: I love this land, the entire place, down to the smallest least-smashable mosquito. But I would not die for it. I would die to save it, to protect it. I would die in defense of its people and their rights and to stop some injustice being done against them, or against its flora or fauna. Would I die to preserve McCandless's type of spiritualism? To further an agenda that pointed more toward selfishness and narcissism than toward Thoreau's brand of solitude and freedom? What, I ask, would be the use in that when, at its end, that brand became nothing but a series of cryptic journal entries, an urban legend outside urbania?

Outsiders are astounded by these things. That you may go outside to check the mail on a particularly snowy, cold day, and never come back. That if your vehicle breaks down, you might easily be two, even three, maybe four hours from the nearest small town. That bears and moose and wolves come straight into town, pick through your garbage, eat from your garden, prey on cats and little dogs at will. That there's a very real chance that your pipes might burst, your electricity go out, your phone service suddenly cut out in a blizzard. You prepare for it. Growing up, we got so used to the power going out all the time that my father invested in a generator and one Thanksgiving, we simply moved the partially-cooked meal from the oven to the top of the wood stove and waited it out. I cannot admire what was McCandless's insatiable need for removal, not from creature comfort or convenience, but from practicality, from the base and undeniable will to LIVE. For what is willful about refusing rescue from starvation?

Of McCandless, Matthew Power says, "McCandless clearly believed in self-mythologizing, in the power of storytelling and self-invention. Had he lived, perhaps he would have gained enough perspective to tell the story himself, rather than leaving it for others to tell. As it is, he has entered the realm of myth, and myths are shaped by those who can make use of them." Can we make use of this? It seems we can, whether to frighten grandiose dreams out of our children, or to attempt the pilgrimage ourselves: hundreds of people every year now flock to Denali to see the bus where McCandless died, to cry, to worship him like the be-all-end-all of some cult of wilderness escapism. To become the 'masters of their own destiny', experiencing life as a series of cathartic and utterly unbounded moments. To somehow prove that everyone else is a mere pawn of some materialist, capitalist, inadequate culture, that no one else is 'living'. McCandless's myth, such as it is, may not be much of a myth at all. The facts remain: he was young, intelligent, idealistic, and full of hubris. He died. He has nothing left to offer us but what will eventually become nothing more than a debate at a diner counter: Christopher McCandless-hero or clueless greenhorn?

But you're missing the point, you'll say. The point was not whether he lived or died, ate this or that, did it right or wrong. The point was in the doing. And I say the point is this:

Christopher McCandless could have taught us all so much more, could have added to the annals of wilderness traversed and loved and documented. Somewhere in all of this mess, the piles of mattress stuffing in a bus, the stupidity of having cut off contact with loved ones to travel (some think purposefully) to his death, I see Chris McCandless's mother, left with nothing but these old and useless photographs, these tiny bits penned in his journal, and I think what a stupid and tragic and sad, sad waste it has been that he is not alive still, painting these stories himself, his hands making the lines of maps and compass roses in the air for the world to see.