…I think I’d called it “The Daily Humiliations of NAME REDACTED“ 

I wouldn’t call it this because I’m constantly humiliated — I experience only an average to above average level of humiliation. I’d call it this because I don’t know of a word that accurately describes the moment of realization in which your utterly galactic ignorance is laid bare.

I seem to know nothing, and am reminded of it almost daily. It can happen when I learn a new thing that unlocks a whole world of new things that I didn’t know existed, and my feeble drops of knowledge are diluted in an ocean of wisdom.  But it happens most often when a thing I thought I knew turns out to be a thing I’d actually always misheard, misunderstood or misjudged. 

I used to think I knew people. I don’t know people at all! There’s a directly proportional graph available somewhere in the invisible data center of the cosmos that charts my professed level of self-knowledge racing my professed level of interpersonal insight to the top, peaking sometime around high school, and reaching incredible new lows every day since. 

Isn’t this the opposite of the way things are supposed to go? Wasn’t I supposed to do all my lostin’ and confusin’ back then, and be on the path to wisdom and enlightenment by now? 

I’m definitely getting dumber every day. Of that there can be no denial. Reconnecting with people I once knew and now know again has shined one of those big, Egyptian tomb mirrors on the problem and brought in the light so that everyone can see it and laugh at how dumb I’m getting.

Unless.

Unless I’m actually getting smarter. I’ve come to hold that the basis of faith is the belief that you know nothing and a greater power that yourself knows the rest. Could I have stumbled on the essence of wisdom - that the path to true knowledge is admitting you know nothing?

So I’m smarter now right? I’m getting smarter every day. If I stay healthy and put whole milk on my fiber-rich cereal I’ll live long enough and I’ll get to know everything. I hope you poor, ignorant fools can see where this is going.

I’ll just settle for believing that it counts as personal growth and productivity that I’ve started to channel these silly thoughts into sentences and paragraphs instead of just free-range words in a text message.

This is the most Holden Caulfield-esque I’ve ever felt. A peculiar mix of angst, self-loathing and anti-social outrage. Where are the poets of my generation? Who will write what I am feeling, and what my brothers and sisters are feeling? Who will explain why we don’t know how to do the hard thing, why we can’t connect with each other, why we are afraid to be vulnerable and simple and honest and good, why we live on snark and cynicism and are withered and broken inside and out? Who will teach us how to be- how to think and love and act, how to face down our incessant self-analysis and be bold enough to take a chance, or even bolder still to take no chances and be content with living simply and earnestly?

Who will stand in front and lead us from here to there?

I can see into their minds. 

They were bold and brave and brash and more. They were (mostly) men — some with families, some with nothing. They followed God and themselves and no one. They were criminals and lawmen, and often both. They were savage and civilized, corrupt and pure, sober liars and honest drunks.

They were hungry and thirsty and always dreaming of more.

Dreaming.

They looked at endless plains and saw towns. They pulled a civilization together on top of peaceful wilderness.

They looked at the hills and saw wealth and opportunity. They tore it from the ground and said it belonged to them.

They looked at mountains stretching to the roof of the world and saw a primordial dare: cross me if you can. They did it because they had to, and they called it progress.

They were explorers and settlers, prospectors and robber-barons. 

They would become monsters, and commit terrible evils against natives, foreigners and each other.

They would cover it up and explain it away as a divine directive, a natural process, or just honest, plain greed.

But look at this land:

Can you blame them?

I want to go home so badly. I want to throw everything back in my car and just start driving. I purposefully haven’t unpacked yet so that this will be easier. I grabbed a shirt to hang up in my closet, but had to throw it back before my shaking hand dropped it or squeezed it into nothingness.

I have no bed. No furniture. No friends. No family. No safe places. No well-traveled roads. No familiar annoyances to unleash my angst upon. I hate everything here, and every despicable, false, stuck-up, proud, selfish beast-wearing-human-skin who lives here too.

I wish they would all go away. I wish I could sweep away everything they’ve ever done. Every building would be leveled, every road broken — all that rubble ground into a fine powder then blown away by a mighty wind. From nothing I would create the trees, grass and animals that used to live here. I would let them grow and flourish untouched by the filth of human hands. In time, they would reclaim this land and God and nature would undo the abomination man has wrought in this place.

It would be serene. No loud and angry cars, no sirens, no chainsaws or jackhammers, no stupid voices — no human sounds at all. No one would be here. Especially not me.

I’m going to be a new person soon.

I’m going somewhere very different than where I’ve always been. I’m going to meet only people I’ve never met before. To them I will be strange and untested. They will not know what makes me laugh, or cry, or angry, or thoughtful. They will explore and probe these boundaries, consciously or unconsciously. Or maybe they won’t care at all. 

I will be able to redefine myself. Form a new mold and squeeze the gelatin of my life into it until it hardens and I am set. New and complete. Unchanging.

An exciting and daunting prospect. Except I don’t know what I want to be. I don’t know what I am, and even the details on what I’ve been are themselves quite fuzzy.

Will the world be that different? What if the people don’t like me there? What if I don’t like any of them? What if I run out of money and can’t pay my bills and there’s no one there to help me? What if I go all that way just to find out that I’m alone?

Or worse, what if I get there and find that I am content?

I’ve found a room in an apartment.

Secured, locked down, in possession of. Inconsequential things such as paperwork, money and keys have yet to pass hands, but a cognitive agreement has been made betwixt them and I.

In perhaps two weeks, I will physically live there.

But where will the rest of me reside?

I flew to Los Angeles and it looked like this:

I flew back and it looked like this:

Sunbeams on a mountain. Beautiful.

Between these pictures, I suffered several existential crises, hunted for an apartment, punished my bowels with In’N’Out Burger (mostly Out, this time), and sat on a roof to stare at a city that stretches into forever — if forever can be defined as “increasing smog density that limits visibility to three miles”. I’ve seen the Google maps though, and it does indeed stretch on forever. I don’t know if I have an apartment there yet, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about one of the four most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. It happened last September, on my first (and only, to date) business trip. We went to Phoenix. There’s something to be said for the spectacle of Phoenix at night, by air - it’s like a huge circuit board laid out beneath you, full of human life and spirit - until it tapers off, and all you’re left with is desert. But you keep climbing.

You break through the clouds, watching the ceiling of your realm pass like so much air by your tiny plane window. And then you’re up. You’re up above the clouds, and it’s like being in a world unfinished. They stretch a million miles in every direction - thick bulbous mounds, repeated again and again, not a landscape but a fabric. A sheet laid out below you, ridged and crumpled, but lacking any defining features, so that one area might as well be another. A sea of clouds.

And on this sea shines a Moon. A full Moon in every sense of the word - full of light, full of energy, full of mystery. It’s bright white and it’s deep blue. It’s close enough to touch, but far enough to be unreachable. It casts mystical and odd shadows on the clouds. And it makes them glow. The light is coming from above you and below you. It is everywhere. All that could exist in this world is the light, the clouds and you.

We were given two lights in the beginning: a greater light to rule the day, and a lesser light to rule the night. But at that moment, the lesser eclipsed the greater, and all the world was quiet and peaceful.

I’m going to start writing now. Really writing. ‘Doing it for a living’ kind of writing. Even though I won’t be doing it for a living. Full disclosure: I will be collecting unemployment for a living. But I will pretend to be writing for a living!

Or no, I won’t be pretending, because it’s time to get real. If I have something to say, some greater message to impart to the world - if that is a thing that is true - then I need to treat it seriously. Creativity, I’ve discovered, is a muscle. And flexing a few times a week isn’t making me stronger. It’s time to hit the gym. (see how weak I am? I use totally disingenuous weightlifting metaphors)

Here, I will write things. Things I think, things that happen to me, my opinion on things that happen to other people - typical blog fodder. It doesn’t matter if anyone ever reads it. What matters is that I begin to think of writing like I think of eating (wonderful). What matters is that I begin to grow hungry without it (on the nose). What matters is that I seek after it, revel in it, let my body grow dirty with it’s tasty morsels (I eat in bed). Binge eating is no way to live (says reality tv!), and neither is binge writing.

Get real.