It’s all scripted ya’ know, every word that flows from my lips, out of my brain. One would want most words to come from their gut, but that has not been the case for me. There is so much traveling through my mind right now, like a scene from a movie where someone is dying and flashes of their life slowly pass by. Being home is uncomfortable, unsettling, I talk to people and smile and laugh and repeat the script. “I loved Arkansas, the west side of the state” “George Washington died from what seems to be a lack of blood in his system due to bloodletting” “Our forefathers raped and pillaged the Native Americans, stole this land from them and in return we give them squat to atone for their sins.” All the while I’m asking myself ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ ‘Why are you here?’ ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
I feel like a piece of a fruit that has been left in the desert sun, decayed and dried up. Like I was living, living in all these different feelings and experiences and it all came to an abrupt stop. And now I’m back in my apartment, on my couch, putting my backpack back in the same spot. That’s when it all dawned on me ya’ know, 4 days after getting home, how the script became alive a little more, my backpack back on the same chair it has always sat on. My work boots next to my footlocker, my fruit bowl holding some bananas and apples. I settled right back into what I left 3 and a half months ago. I’m even heading back to the same job I left to take this trip, putting a penetrating oil on a mahogany door. Here I am, back in the life I left, the life that was killing me. Where I was dragging myself through days and surviving the nights by the light of nonsense tv, online shopping for shit I had no real need for and bouncing in and out of some flirting.
For the last 104 days I had given that up, all of it. Towards the end of the trip, I started to watch some Netflix but the signal in the van is weak and I didn’t like the feeling of being disconnected from the world that was around me. Checking out was welcomed due to boredom but gave a sad feeling all at the same time. Since back home I’ve seen some people, been able to be open with a couple of them, one’s that have understood my plight. My plight, I can’t go back into what was, explaining my physical and mental predicaments. To be conscious now is to let go of all that was before, I stuck close to what was for so long. Stuck close to a definition of me, what made me up. Not out of ego, not to say I was any different, but to explain my neurosis, to give reason to it all. There is not reason needed, who I am, what I’ve done, any struggles I might have gone through at one time – none of that is now, none of that matters now. Over the last 3 ½ months, this is what I worked on most.
I keep looking to the clock, I’ve to be on the job at 8. I haven’t had to be anywhere in a while, at least not at such a specific time. I care not for time constraints, it bottles me up some, like the traffic on the 110 freeway that sits right below Delaiah’s street. I love seeing her, so much I thought of moving back to LA. I love the vacant lot across the street from her house, to sit and watch the freeway and downtowns skyline is one of the most delightful pleasures I’ve had, as much as hiking in the Smoky Mountains. As much as riding my bike around Jekyll Island, as much as visiting New York...
Back to now, not 7 days ago, not a month ago. Back to now, where the clock ticks and tocks and I try and explain to you what it is like to be back home after so much time away and alone. What it’s like to not know how you feel and the replies you are giving are as empty as your thoughts. Maybe it’s all a transition phase and I will settle like the dust after a dessert windstorm. Maybe I’ll fall back into a groove and I will refer to what I did as the trip of a lifetime instead of a life changing trip.
I do apologize that I’ve not much to say about being home, that the last entry is not that of pure joy and elation for what I have done. I don’t see this as an individual block of something I’ve done, it seems to be lightly touching the rest of my life, like it’s all connected, and the ties cannot be severed into separated experiences. Maybe I don’t want it all to be over so I don’t segregate into a singular experience. This was that and now that is gone so this is happening. Yes, it is like that, each moment a new, but where one experience ends and another begins is up to our perception. I can tie all of my life together so I can ride on the wave of what was or I can chop it all up and move on to the next swiftly, letting go of what was. Either way there is a push or pull on my part, some sort of aggression. Trying to bring my mind to a place that sits with it all, sitting in a vast field, empty of trees and shrubs, short grass so I can as far as possible, see all that is around me. Looking at my life like an outsider, watching, exploring. This frame of mind gives me the power to be removed from attachment and free to keep living now.
I’ve been home now 7 days and some job offers have come in, sort of. My sister has found me some work in Texas, pet sitting and painting for her friends come Christmas. She also found me some work in North Carolina, painting the interior of a summer home. All this was thought up by 3 tipsy women at a dive bar in North Carolina, so who knows what will come of it. But it’s like here it is, the opportunities I have been waiting for or working towards or intention setting into the universe. I can go to Texas, make some money. I can live in North Carolina for a few weeks, make some money. I can come back to SLO, paint a couple places. I can travel and work, like all the other van lifers. All I need now to be the epitome of a van lifer is a herding dog and a girlfriend, then I’ll totally become Instagram famous.
I’ll tell ya, the pictures that you see, the ones with the little blurbs from Ken and Karen about traveling in their $80,000 Sprinter van with their dog Julio, they are almost made up. I traveled cross this country of ours, to and fro, 17,000 miles in 104 days and most all the van lifers, all the picture grabbers and image setters, they are all in Arizona and Utah, maybe Cali and Oregon. Rarely did I see any young or middle-aged people traveling outside those states. They are on the west coast selling an idea, a moment that they know you are dreaming about as you sit in your cubicle or while you ring up another poor soul spending their hard-earned money on a cheap piece of plastic made in china. They are trying to fund their lifestyle, their dream, by playing to your desires. And it’s working! You can’t buy a used van for less than a new one it seems. All these people traipsing all over the desert in vans and cars and trucks, trying to get that epic shot of a sunset over sandstone arches. Trying to capture that feeling they felt in person so you can double tap that picture Ken and Karen just doctored up on their computer. Financially gaining from this lifestyle seems to take the romance out of it. Kerouac would be so disappointed seeing cash app pleas on social media accounts from these travelers, or so I hope he would be.
Although one could say I am no different, look to my Instagram, all my pretty pictures. Maybe I posted 100 out of the almost 1500 taken. And that there, those numbers there tell the story. Epic moments are only so often, van life is a grind, better yet jobless, solo, van life is a grind. I look back through all the pictures and I get these amazing feelings inside me, I saw so much beauty and wonder. I could never encompass all I saw; I could never tell all the stories of the sights and sounds and lessons learned. But on a whole, through pictures posted, truth should be added in some. Like how many pictures did I take of my legs and feet and the interior of the van, sitting on my comforter, laid up in my bed? How many afternoons and evenings were filled with book reading and wandering campgrounds and forests, sitting in silence for hours on end. Sleeping in noisy Walmart parking lots so I could eat ice cream those nights. Filling the front of my van with figurines so I had objects top talk to. The rainy nights that kept me up and the rainy days with nothing at all to do but sit more.
Now here’s the rub, my positive outlook won’t let me bash anything, I can only do cynicism for so long. I’m trying to search out honesty for you and definition for myself. I always feel like I am on the edge of figuring out something great, like the words of enlightenment are on the tip of my tongue but I can’t quite grasp them to say them. Or maybe this is it, this is the enlightenment, this is the definition, this is the truth. All of it. Every moment. Every moment Ken and Karen put up, every circle I walked in the forest, every lonesome mile driven, every epic view saw. When I am living, I am not thinking, and when I am not thinking I am in pure bliss. I could split wood all day long and be the happiest man alive but give me an hour alone being still and it all starts to fall apart.
I’ve no idea where I am headed from here, maybe Texas, maybe north, maybe to paint a few houses here for the winter. Maybe those applications I filled out for the National Parks Department will materialize into something. I just know life is short and I’m not meant to live it on a couch or in some manner that saddens my heart. 2 years ago I hoped/planned for a year off to do this #vanlife thing, then the pandemic hit and it made it fiscally possible to accomplish it. I still might keep with the original dream/plan, there’s nothing to say I have to replant myself in the same flower bed just cause I’m smelling its roses. There’s nothing to say that the year planned can’t take 3 years to accomplish, there’s nothing to say that possibilities and limited. There are no boundary lines drawn around my life by anyone but me, I am the only one that curtails it.
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