...click here

It's a gray morning in Pittsburgh--a perfect morning to sleep into and let achey bodies rest. We've ridden across Pennsylvania, my friends Nick and Carter and I, in the attempt to make it to the West Coast. Ridden--not driven; I'm talking bikes. Hence the achey bodies. 

Today we spend our time in the city before moving on towards Chicago. We may not make it across, in fact it's likely we won't, but the beauty in life and adventure is not always the destination, but the journey we take in her direction. The sunset is beautiful, but only unreachably so. 

There are stories upon stories and people and sights, but little time between pedals, and even less internet access. I encourage you to go to this blog for the time being (www.westwardwithoutwalls.blogspot.com), where we will be posting as much as we can to keep you informed of our travels. 

...yield properly

I had the chance to fly Portland to Portland, and in doing so to cross five weeks of roadtrip in one day. This ability to travel by plane has erased all need for Lewises and Clarks anymore. However, I suppose it provides opportunities for adventures Sacagawea could never have taken them through. Either way, by bookending the country in this way I thought there would be some fun or poetic excitement. There was no excitement. There was one long day with two connections, three explanations of safety procedures and many hours in waiting rooms. Fun…

But it was poetic. On one flight I sat next to a wonderful lady who was taking a poetry course and used to teach English and had daughters who should do theatre and we had a grand time looking at her and her classmates’ work together. 

The next flight I got to switch to the exit row because it wasn’t full, which means more rooms for long legs and wide shoulders. Yes! The flight attendant swung by and asked, as is procedure:

            “You are sitting in an exit row. Have you familiarized yourself with the safety procedures featured on this plane and are you willing and able to assist the flight crew in the event of an emergency?” Honestly, I didn’t even let him finish.

            “You haven’t met anyone more willing and able. I am fully prepared to tell women to ‘Take off your heels before you jump!’” He looked at me quizzically. “You know, so the slide doesn’t pop.” I pointed to the no smoking symbol with a heel in the middle instead of a cigarette and he laughed and said perhaps I should be a flight attendant. It is a definite bucket list item.

Leaving Portlandia was great because I was anxious to get home. All that time in a van moving ever forward makes one long for a bit of consistency. But it wasn’t all celebration. Portland is a great city and I wasn’t there for too long. The locals called it the city of bridges for assumable reasons but I felt like it was the city of pedestrians (there's a bridge for that, too). Never before have I felt like, as an automobile operator, I was driving on roads that belonged to those on bikes or feet. There was no chaos, people were not leaping into the road or jaywalking, but it felt as though the design, the DNA of the city wasn’t meant for me. I was always yielding the right of way to someone else. But that changed as soon as I parked and walked to Powell’s Book Store where I meandered my way through four floors of stocked stacks to the drama aisle and found myself some gems.

I also swung northwest of the city to a beautiful coastal hill-topping town called Astoria, where the Columbia river meets the Pacific Ocean. Here there is a real sense that the country has come to an end, as if the river carries with it all the exhoes of experiences and peoples of the mainland and meets the great unknown distance. There is no more land to walk on, no more Westward to go. I visited a couple of friends there and they took me to see a lighthouse over the 3-mile bridge to Washington, the trendy downtown and the house where the Goonies was set in. It is a gorgeous town that felt very much like home to me. 

There is much that feels like home here, actually. Green with pine, coastal, bricked buildings and lighthouses. The same kind of folk roam the streets, tattooed and fluorescent, young and aware of their youth. This is different than many of us who are young and let it pass by in the pursuit of a middle aged life we don’t know we’d trade for youth once we got. I am wooed by this relaxing self-awareness that shucks off the pressure tall buildings and corner offices press down upon us as we saunter under their manmade shade. The Portlands both express this, but perhaps Oregon does it better; we are too close to New York City and they are bunkmates to cool California. Either way, I yielded all my apprehensions about leaving, any unfinished business and all my frustrations with this air travel and accepted that I was headed home. Another time I would visit again, I'm sure. This time I will cross the country, and it will only take one day.  

...light up

 Some Santa Barbara

California is indeed a menagerie of climates and atmospheres and moods. I didn’t see the entire south-north stretch, but I got most of it from Los Angeles through Sacramento and up to the Mount Shasta area before leaving the state for Oregon. I believe the Northwest really begins in the roots of Shasta. Though Sac and The City and L.A. and Santa wherever each have a unique feel, they are certainly all California-y. 

Some Hollywood

But as soon as the flatness starts rumbling again and that white capped mountain shines brightly in the distance, things begin to change. The pines come out in force, and rivers dig gorges into earth again and rocks thrust into the sky in a frozen excitement loom over the winding man-made highway. This is the Northwest.

But before I was there I was somewhere between the Southwest and the West.

Some Vegas

It seems like so long ago, now, when I was standing in Las Vegas looking up at sights I’d only seen in movies and feeling a bit cardboard, like I was in one of those movies, as a prop or scenery perhaps, that those facades would all be torn down when the final take is completed, to be replaced, that the illusion of three-dimension was accomplished by skilled artists and master magicians. I couldn’t do anything but stand and look around—besides, there isn’t really anything to do if you aren’t checking in somewhere and gambling. Perhaps that isn’t completely true—it felt that way—for it wasn’t void of excitement. No, there was electricity in the air—not just what was lighting up the whole strange colony—and everyone was in love. Couples meandered, took selfies and laughed, sometimes stumbling, and that joy was infectious. This is the city of sin, right? Well I didn’t have much time to indulge in many of my vices, so a cigarette had to suffice. I lit up, looked around, left.

Some San Simeon

After the long descent through Apple Valley the great state of California greeted me and I managed my way into L.A. Good thing for GPS; without it navigating the inverted labyrinths of roadways would have been impossible. Southern California was not without its perks—namely congenial weather—and the traffic wasn’t even so bad as the rumors purport. But you do drive everywhere. I know I drive everywhere in my own hometown, but the driving is thicker in L.A., or something. You want to wipe it all off like sweat, but it sticks too well. It may be some illusion—if it is, it is besieging—but everything seems so far away and takes so much energy to find and at the end of the day you wonder if you spent more time behind the wheel or away from it.

Some Los Angeles

It was a kind of relief to leave the valley and traverse the beautiful coastline up through Santa Barbara and then to Monterey and Carmel and Solinas and then to San Francisco (aka “The City”). The coast surprised me, actually. Thinking it similar to the golden shores of Miami, which is maybe the case in the L.A. area, it was oftener steep drops into crashing waves, like Icarine mountains that finally realized it was too hot and decided to go for a swim, somersaulting into the Pacific. As I went it proved to be a continuous (really) collision. North of San Francisco the coastal road was so windy I slalomed my way north feeling like a test driver avoiding orange cones in one of those commercials.

Some Carmel

But the Bay Area should not be passed over without mention. It is much larger than I ever anticipated—I’m not sure why—but just as hilly. The City is brimming with an energy, artistic, historic, diverse. The Spanish heritage is revived in authentic taquerias, and new and used bookstores speckle the strips of shops on roads filled with so many people dressed conspicuously that they are swallowed in a sea of eclecticism, like all those beautiful lights blinking at the same time in Vegas where the gorgeous marble statues go unnoticed. There seemed to be quite the “immigrant” population—all friendly—Easterners who abandoned their home for a Western one settle in the most Eastern city of the West. Honestly, Frisco’s a regular New York or Boston, in feel. But the city’s veins run west, and that attracts we who want something different, but the same, sort of.

Some San Francisco

So, I suppose it is like any other city in these regards. And maybe I liked it because all this time out West makes me long for home. Maybe that’s what’s nice about Oregon: how East it feels—they have a Portland even!—and no matter how close to the sunset I get, my heart is in his rise. Isn’t that what I loved about Santa Fe? How like morning she was, clear and fresh and crisp? Isn’t that what I left in Vegas and L.A., the cities who wake and live in the electrified dark?

The New Yorkian skyline of The City (not to mention the arrogance—our city is best) is familiar so far from familiarity. I lighten up.

Some Northwest

How good to bookend the trip, from one Portland to the other; from one pineland to another; from East to West. It makes me think how we really are all one, all United Statesian. Being at Pacific’s scratching fingers I am no farther from Atlantic’s reach. I stand on her shores and look far into the distance, to the Cathays and Tartars I may never see, may not even exist. Isn’t it true? Far enough West brings me still farther East after all. 

...do it tomorrow

All I kept saying was rad. The people, totally rad. The weather, the view, totally rad. The activities, professions, museums, performances, all rad. But what an outdated word for New Mexico! It is no longer the 80s, Simon; no one’s saying rad. Except me in New Mexico, apparently. But I couldn’t help it.

The Midwest is back there...ahead is the South West

Before I left I had a feeling I would like the South West, and I did. It began the moment I crossed into the state…something in the air shifted, perhaps. We were no longer in Kansas—thank God—and Oklahoma was behind us too. We were officially in the South West. The landscape responded immediately, as if to greet us from a deep sleep. First there were the easy, deep breaths in rolling hills. Then the mesas—glorious mesas!—rose in first movements and fresh eyes. That kind of love only morning sees gently grew into mountains in  the seated position, eyes rubbed with clouds. And that sun, fully awake, smiled at me and said ‘hello’ in a ‘good morning’ kind of way.

Omega Bridge outstide Taos, NM

Our first stop was in Taos, an artsy spiritual town unsurprisingly nestled in the heavens. In every direction you can see for miles and miles and then up even higher to surrounding peaks. In one corner lies the land of the Pueblo Indians, the other has a shrine to poet D. H. Lawrence, and in between are the shops and restaurants of tourist-fed wares and well-fed tourists. Indian artifacts and artwork, cowboy garb and southwestern spices were in the windows of shop after shop. But it is becoming with a view. Maybe even quaint. 

Easter sunrise in Arizona

At the Taos Diner II we interacted with genuine gals more concerned with contact and communication than orthodoxy, and I enjoyed every bit of it, from the off-color jokes printed on their menus to the casual way they poured coffee, to the matter-of-factedly way they denied service when the power went out. We sat and drank coffee until it went cold or the electricity came back on and told stories of bears in the mountains. Outside the restaurant the cook toked on her cigarette and laughed with the neighboring businessman about the situation.

It is the land of mañana, apparently, so this is par for the course. I met a transplanted New Yorker who told me that first when he explained the difference between “the way it works” in the North East and South West. Cowboy poet S. Omar Barker (aka Ol’ SOB) said it this way:

Mañana is Spanish word I’d sometimes like to borrow.

It means “don’t skeen no wolfs today that you don’t shot tomorrow!

An’ eef you got some jobs to do, in case you do not wanna,

Go ‘head an’ take siesta now! Tomorrow ees mañana!

Le Canyón Grande

But I like it this way—not so fast paced and crazed, with less stress clinging to us like our wintery garments.  I like that it is markedly different in the South West. The character is distinct from other state clusters. Maybe that's why I'm on the West Coast and finally getting to this haphazard post. Santa Fe is growing on me. Or maybe that’s why everything was rad—because it wasn’t cool, like California, or wicked like the North East. It isn’t awesome or tight or right-on. It’s just, totally rad.

…get the hell out of dodge

It’s been day after day, it seems, in deceptive listlessness. Like plains rolling into farms rolling into fields—the experience one has crossing Kansas—these recent weeks have been monotonous, though anticipatory.

My travels back from Nicaragua went as anyone’s would. I was able to spend my final hours on the stoops of the Ometepan locals, a joy I often miss on the fenced porches of the States. It takes a certain kind of life to end the day sitting outside, peaceably, watching children pass, conversing with neighbors, content with stillness. In Palestine they understood this secret pleasure. So too did those in Nepal and Jordan. I was reminded of my sweet life in the West Bank as I tried to speak Spanish, both jokingly and seriously, which are hardly different to the local. I sat through dusk into darkness; the volcano silently faded into the navy night and a host of starlight broke through the sun’s waning cover. Paradoxically, the conversation was light, but the contact much deeper, like Michelangelo’s God touching Adam. These moments of connection are so delicate, intricate, even beautiful, and they occur wherever we are able to really meet with someone as ‘other-worldly’ as a Nicaraguan, or United Statesian or wherever-ian.

However, I had to say adios beneath hopes of return and a smoky volcano. I rode the ferry across the choppiest waters I’ve ever experienced and I marveled at the fact that we docked. For a moment there I honestly had no idea how or when we’d stop and what we were going to smack into and from where I will jump to save myself. Good thing I don’t have an iPhone to get wet—I thought (yes, these are my concerns). Luckily the plane ride was smoother.

The PoeMobile gearing up for departure

Home was freezing, my back peeled completely from a burn and I discovered I had developed shingles across my side. So when folk asked me how was Nicaragua, I found myself replying with a kind of love-hate paradox. But I didn’t have time to dwell on it, really; it was packing time! My father were to be off to the West on another leg of the Dead Poet Tour—this one exploring from Santa Fe to L.A. to Seattle. And there was much to do.

As I write this, on our way to our first stop in Taos, New Mexico, we are in the windy, cold, precipitous tedium of Western Kansas. The phrase “get the hell out of dodge” was first said in reference to Dodge City which we just passed through. It makes sense. Three titillating days of sunshine in Kansas City and Wichita spoiled us. Now all I am hoping for are the sunned clay homes, mesas and cacti of my imagined Southwest as we chase the horizon.

Westward Poe!

Ever westward. Towards occidens, the setting sun. It is a historically poetic direction in which to explore. Eden was in the East, and so lay our beginnings. From our exile until Lewis and Clark, until now, even, we have been headed West. It seems it is as Kerouac says, the east of my past with the west of my future. It is in the west our days end, unreachable but chase-able. And so in the hand of Discovery is the hand of Dusk, and they are inseparable.

So let’s get the hell out of dodge and head westerly. There’s nothing here for us anyway.

...sleep lightly

I implied it in the last two blogs--to put away the technology and that it is hard to sleep here in Nicaragua. In writing those words I didn't suspect how they would turn around to both spite and protect me.

I met up with the group I would be traveling and working with in Managua and we began our trip toward Isla de Ometepe--the Island of Ometepe. As we moved we met people who asked where we were from. I caught myself a handful of times:

"I'm American--I mean, I'm from the United States." After all, I haven't left Greater America, and I share a continental, maybe hemispherical identity with the Nicaraguense who are also "American." In fact, it was in modern day Brazil that the name "America" was first planted, so perhaps I am only getting closer to real deal. Not surprisingly, it is an easier question to answer in Spanish, where my only option is Soy de Estados Unidos. They have understood this concept far longer than we have.

Despite ourselves, we arrived on Ometepe after half a day,  smiling and excited, and were carted over to the orphanage, CICRIN, where we were to spend the next week doing construction works. Indeed, exciting it was, even by the first night.

I have always been a light sleeper--or perhaps an ever-aware sleeper--and something near me stirred my senses the first night at the orphanage. A moment later I heard the delicate sound of two lips separating and curiosity led me out of subconsciousness. I softly turned my head and opened my eyes to a crouched figure, pawing through my friend's luggage, looking up intermittently in caution. I suppose you never think you are being robbed until it happens--it is too far-fetched to happen to me, I thought without thinking--and so I sat up calmly. I looked over, hoping my friend had just risen early in the darkness for a morning stroll and didn't want to wake the others. Instead I caught sight of the burglar darting out of the room on noiseless feet and in the instant I was able to make it to the door, he was gone with only a crunch of dead leaves left behind. He made away with my friend's money and my beloved iPhone. An iPhone I care little for except for the photos he stole with it.

It goes without saying that I spent the entire rest of my stay in Nicaragua not only without a way to contact home but also without a camera; I could only memorize the beautiful sights, not immortalize them. And this is much to my chagrin because I love to take pictures of my travels and use them to color this blog or my desktop background or just to armchair travel in the future. Either way it forced me to have even fewer barriers between me and my experience than before. A camera is a wall, and the call of Instagram and Facebook, a distraction. This situation gave me a more unadulterated perspective. And what came into focus was an older world than I would have thought.

I noticed that there is something antiquated about this place, perhaps in their faces which still have the markings of ancient peoples (some of which are even Asiatic, reminding me of the great migrations during the Ice Age). But the sun seems older here too. They wear it on their skin and in their wrinkles. The toughness of their high cheeks, the trenches that crack in expression, the flat foreheads, they are all tanned by a hereditary sun. This is not like me, who gets it on vacation; it is a recent and fleeting color. At the beach where I waited for the ferry to leave, I saw young boys in their underwear chasing one another into the bar for a quick, sopping look at the Real Madrid-Barcelona score. They are various tones of brown, and in their skimpy attire I notice that the color is everywhere. There is no tan.

The sun bakes the land like a tortilla in this dry season where everything is dead or dying--something I wouldn't have been able to notice if I wasn't told since I come from the barren northern winters. I feel like we are harvested maize, popping under heat or puffing like souffles in the rolling hills. I look around in my stuffed minibus ride (what the locals call inta mortales, or something like that, meaning "on your way to die") and see an aging orange haze that takes me out of the bus and into the realm of the Olmec, Zapotecan and Mayan civilizations which thrived for hundreds of years, each adding to the menagerie of technological and agricultural innovations. They produced uniquely accurate calendars, great religious structures and the world-changing maize. Quite a bit has been discovered about these peoples, and quite a bit more is left undiscovered.

But perhaps all this is what I want to see--the vestiges of a glorious ancestry--because it helps me with my Euro-Caucasian guilt for spilling their blood so thoroughly and systematically, and for destroying those rosetta's stones of cultural information. With it I'll sleep better, but even the young men with gelled hair and tight shirts clicking their tongues at the passing women seem more American than I. Their eyes are Mesoamerican and their blood reaches possibly farther back in time than mine does, even if I trace mine back to Mesopotamia. Everything here is baked--a timely process--like that tortilla, dry and crumbling but rich in flavor and reaching far back into traditional and cultural history. I am a gringo, a microwaveable import.

Well, maybe not. I decide a stolen iPhone isn't such a great big deal and I relax into the views passing outside the windows. Sitting in that bus, my knee in the crotch of the man facing me and his nearly in mine, I take the trip from Managua to Jinotepe to Rivas to San Jorje to Isla de Ometepe as a local, as an American. 

...swing like monkeys

I awake to warbles and cuckoos I've never heard before. There's this continuous coo, a passing crick-crick-criiiiiiick, staccatoed chirps--I start because someones creeping into my room only to realize somewhere out my window there is a bird that sounds like a slow squeaky hinge. I go outside and catch just the glimpse of a species I've never seen before, not even in pictures or television specials. I look up and see mangoes to my right, still green, and coconuts hanging higher; this place is ripe with biological diversity. The sun has been up and by seven in the morning is already bright and hot if you stand in it, or sit and read, as I did. A fairly consistent breeze greets us in the morning, though (and will rock us to sleep later at night).  

Perhaps we knew it would be a good day when we turned the car on with a chug-chug-eeeeerk and the blessed air conditioning worked. The cool air almost immediately caressed our sticky foreheads and necks. Air conditioning is a novelty during the hottest part of the year in Nicaragua, especially when your car is ancient, has an unfamiliar name, and is a chronic in-patient.  Before we left I thought about changing into a t-shirt for the sleeves so that I didn't stick out so clearly as a gringo, but kept on the cut-off to keep out the heat. I'm 25% taller than everyone here, and 95% whiter, anyway....not much chance for blending in.

But my friend's rig dig swell, and took us all the way to Granada (and back) with only one minor keys-locked-in-vehicle situation. We passed through dirt cow trails onto paved highways that yawn between rotaries, like arteries connecting the urban organs. Amidst chatter I watched as camels' backs rose lazily from the earth and were being herded as their peaks jockeyed with one another as my perspective changed. Elsewhere the green extended into near-jungle complexity, and beyond that the dust-veiled mountains were jagged like sharks' teeth.

Granada is a colorful town that sits on a big lake in Nicaragua and has all of those pesky characteristics found in touristy towns all over the world: carts selling promises of handmade wares, coffee shops  and bars, nice hotels, shops full of trinkets you can buy anywhere even though they claim their prices are lowest or quality highest, and so on. This town is strange though--at least, the central square is anyway--because you feel like you stepped awkwardly back in time. The architecture is clearly colonial, an uncomfortable reminder of the historic collision between native and European, a reminder which is augmented by all the Nicaraguan service and foreign patronage. I feel antiquated as I stroll through the park entertained by a big drum-and-puppet show and watching horse-drawn carriages cart people around. I find that it is easy to feel guilty, being a descendant of the conquistadors and colonialists and explorers who so unintentionally brought over genocidal microbes and (fairly intentionally) racial superiority and religious arrogance.

Grenada is a beautiful place, though, where buildings are separated more by vibrant color changes rather than spaces or fences or yards, and the people are kind, however persistent. We greet each other with a simple Bueno--Nicaraguans drop the "s," informally, it seems. We took a boat ride around Las Isletas and were struck not only by the incredible beauty, but also by the great divide between locals, who erected shacks on the islands they inhabited, and the others (mostly foreigners--we saw the Stars and Stripes hanging outside one), who have constructed mansions and pools and bars and docks on their paradise escapes. 

When we dock I ask my friend to take me to his favorite restaurant, expecting one of those dingy spots managed by someone's grandmother, one of those shacks you'd pass by otherwise, unaware of the magical meal provided, but no--instead he took me to TipTop, Nicaragua's KFC, where his eyes went wide with childlike excitement. It was good, but had no grandmother's recipe.

Nearby the city we went for a zip-line adventure where I just about maxed out the system's weight and size limits. Guided by friendly--quite friendly (they put my harness on for me and I thought about asking them if they'd like my number first!)--Nicaraguans, we traversed through a Robinson Crusoe kind of course. From treehouse to treehouse, and in all kinds of positions, we swung through the air, quite like monkeys. Well, quite unlike monkeys, being strapped in a harness and attached to a cable. But still, potato-potahto.

 My favorite line was the highest and longest one, where I was attached in the back and flew like Superman high above everything else, and I thought, This must be what flying feels like...And then I thought, This is probably not what flying feels like,  seeing as my harness was cutting into me and I couldn't breathe and this Nicaraguan was holding my legs like I was giving birth upside down...like I said, potato-potahto.

The good day ended well though, bruises aside. I may not be too monkey-ish myself, but I did get to play with a real, live monkey. Dexter is a white-faced monkey who was initially intimidated by his more advanced cousin, but quickly preferred my predictable touch to the childrens' erratic behavior. He clung to my arm with all five appendages, ate the bread I fed him and curiously pulled the feathers of our parrot friend who stood on my shoulder. What an incredible species! And after washing my arm quite well, I found myself in bed, being lulled by a fan which blocked out the chatter going on outside. As interesting as it is to listen to and interact with, it's near impossible to fall asleep amidst.

...switch all electronic devices to the off position

I am surrounded by people mostly transfixed by the pallid glow of LED light hovering before their eyes. Ten years ago this would have been the scene in some freakish distopian movie set in the distant future; now it's a reality.  There are a couple families with young children who are devoid of the technological distraction. Good. The news above squabbles the results of a recent study which reveals that parents who put their phones away at the table have better behaved children. This is news?! 

Isolation can be a crowded environment.

It certainly changes the way we travel. We don't greet the person next to us on the plane, who might happen to be an interesting, theatrical person on his way to work at an orphanage in Nicaragua, an orphanage which sits underneath an active volcano, and who has read the very book you are reading and lives in the same city. No, that could be too uncomfortable. But the Atlanta-based belles in blue order us away from our touchable screens, so I stuck out my hand--I'm Simon, he's Mike--and a couple sentences later we were a mile-high and swallowed in the pages of the books we brought. At least they weren't iPads, like everyone else. At least we said 'hi,' unlike everyone else. 

We are so eager to get where we are going we forget that there is something bound up in the process of getting there, something we would be remiss to miss.

But I am guilty myself. I sit here click-clacking away, occasionally looking up for a passing descriptive word or an  inspiration rushing to her connection. And I check my watch hoping that more than three-and-a-half minutes have passed and I'm closer to ending this layover in Atlanta. However, this is the doldrums of travel and they've existed since Amerigo Vespucci sat in the Atlantic wondering where the wind ran off to. Well, even before then, but we didn't much know of their existence. The lull is a part of this process--it forces you to sit back, actually look around and think. You may even meet a nice guy named Mike who works as an event salesperson who does business with an army base in Georgia and lives where you do. But you have to work up the courage and say 'hi.' May we continually be unafraid to greet one another. We're only human, after all. Each one of us.

...arrive, already

I have this need to write, right? It is that itch on your back you can’t reach until you do and then—ooooh, that’s the spot. Or perhaps that elusive itch on your foot somewhere you can quite find exactly…right under the Tibia’s medial malleolus, perhaps, or the Fibula’s lateral malleolus (either way, it’s the ankle). But it is there, and I can feel it, and so I pen this and that, but nothing to publish, or even keep. I have a journal for sneaky midnight dances for which I slip out of the covers and click on a light. Often it’s just a waltz, but occasionally my fingers tango. This journal is filled with private thoughts, my silent sounding board, my record keeper. It is the place to answer the nagging question:  About what shall you write? But journals can get ingrown. I did this, then that happened. I feel like…it is cyclical.

But it persists. This need to write, this molten lake within one’s mountain of creativity is a volatile force. It can be grumpy! One can wipe clean entire cities, leave mothers clinging to their crying babes because of it.

So I write, but I am unsatisfied. These words are not interesting, nor are these events noteworthy. This description is not poetic, not even dryly real. It is crumpled into the garbage, deleted from existence. The very world is in turmoil around me, but I am frozen.

Is this writer’s block?

But I wrote.

But I still want to write.

And so it seems my need is not really to write; my need is for something to write about. Like Clifford “Cliff” Bradshaw of Cabaret, who city-hops through Europe in hopes for his novel’s inspiration, countless travelers have run away to write. They chase the story; run from the stale. Krakauer climbs into thin air and descends with a horrifically beautiful tale. Steinback travels with Charlie in a romantic way, that horn-rimmed romance held up with suspenders and traced with typewriters—the kind of romance that rides the Trans-Siberian Express or sails to South East Asia and finds enlightenment somehow.

I have this need. It is wanderlust and itchy fingers and writer’s block, all an infant growing within, and he’s got his feathered cap and longjohns on already. And I shall call him Adventure, because he will save me from my stillness.

Adventure. From Latin advenio, meaning arrive. From where we pass through adventus, or arrival, but Advent has gone by. So now we cling to adventurus—future active participle—something about to arrive. In the vocative I name that which I speak to—adventure­, come forth!