I’m also having a really hard time listening to my heart.  Things are hard and unpleasant right now.  Is that a sign that what I’m doing is wrong?  I should not be living here, Boulder is not the right place, life inside is not the right thing?  The words aren’t coming, so should I give up writing?  Or are these things just barriers I need to push through?  And how can I know the difference—when does dissonance call for reevaluation and when does it call for perseverance?  I just have too many questions, as always, some of which feel essential, like they need to be addressed immediately, before anything else, or I can’t go on.  I tell you this, waking up and getting out of bed without being able to answer the question of “who am I and why am I here” takes an infinitely greater leap of faith than does hitchhiking across the country.

Why am I having such a hard time with this whole thing?  Why can’t I just love the process?  Why can’t I let go and embrace it all, accept whatever is happening to me?  Use this time and space for what I had intended?  Why can’t I write?  If I’m not traveling anymore, not living in this outwardly outrageous and fascinating way, then what am I even supposed to write about?  What role does writing now have in my life?  Too many questions.

*          *          *

One evening I rip out a few pages from my notebook and make a massive bubble chart of my needs (physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, creative, political, social).  Then I write down all the things I want to be doing with my time but haven’t been doing, and I connect those bubbles to the various needs they would fulfill.  It’s time for a change in my approach.  After two years of waking up, living spontaneously, and allowing the day to unfold, I am going to try creating a rigid and disciplined structure for my days.  I am going to try this as an experiment, because the old way isn’t working anymore.  I immediately feel averse to the idea, maybe because it’s the exact opposite of what I have been doing for so long, but maybe this is a part of the reason I came here, to experiment with different ways of living.  I’m concerned about losing the spontaneity and flow that I’d been cultivating before.  Yet I’m not doing anything with the freedom I have right now, it’s destroying and immobilizing me.

And still, I’m not doing what I came here to do.  My days are filled with so many other things.  Looking for work.  Setting up the house.  Hanging with Boulder friends.  Drinking coffee.  Struggling to write.  But I chat with Aneliya one evening and she tells me that maybe my problem is that I have too many expectations.  The only reason I’m suffering right now is that I’m comparing the reality of my experiences here to my old expectations, and there is a conflict between the two.  And she’s right.  Things aren’t exactly wrong right now, there is nothing that’s not ok, I’m feeling fine most days, I’m just not fulfilling my own expectations.  I thought I’d let go of the idea of expectations a long time ago.  But as always, I came here loaded with them, only I disguised them from myself by calling them “intentions.”  There’s been no difference so far.  I’m trying to learn to let go.

Everything is being flipped upside down right now.  I’m being challenged and pushed in completely new ways, pushed to new things and new conclusions, many of which are completely opposite to what I thought was true a few months ago.  One example would be work.  I just spent two years avoiding work, refusing work, sympathizing with those trapped in hated jobs, writing essays on why work is bad and wrong and destructive, and right now all I want to do is work.  I want a job, I really do.  Not even because I will need money.  It’s because I want to be part of a community, I want to have other people relying on me for something on a regular basis; it would give me some structure, help me organize, since currently I am finding myself totally incapable of providing my own structure with my lists of neglected activities.

Though actually, come to think of it, I guess it’s amazing in a way that I was able to be so devoted to my arts, travel and writing, that I made my own structure for two years on the road.  Maybe freedom is not what we think it is.  Would people really WANT a break from their work?  Even people who say they hate their jobs?  What would people do if they had two years with no external help building routines?  Would they love the “freedom,” or would they go insane and have no idea what to do with themselves?  Maybe this 40-hour work week isn’t as horrible and devious as I’ve always thought.  Maybe it’s what people really want.  Maybe people want to spend most of their daytime hours engaged in any random activity that occupies their time.  I don’t know, but I’m ready to try it.  Trying to suspend my judgment, let go of my preconceptions a little bit, and let this all be.

Yes, there is a guilt, definitely.  When I traveled and owned nothing but what I carried on my back, my relationship to privilege shifted in some way.  When I was younger I always felt queasy when I saw a beggar and didn’t give a dollar, and really I still felt bad even when I did give something.  Regardless of what I did about it, it just always seemed like there was something deeply wrong with the fact that some people are living large and others are sleeping in the dust.  Why I became an activist.  But while I was living on the road and sleeping outside, the inevitable guilt for living a life of privilege seemed, if not to fade away completely, at least to lose some of its sharp edges.  But now it’s all back.  I get to shower whenever I want, I have a warm place to sleep, I have enough money to go out for a meal and a beer, and every day I walk past people who have access to none of these luxuries.  It’s amazing how quickly the novelty of the change wore off, now it’s just routine and almost mundane, whereas so recently having a room in which to leave my stuff, sleep and write, seemed so outrageously amazing.  The guilt is something I will find a way to deal with, but it does leave me with a strong sense of responsibility to use this time for good.  To do something worthwhile in some way.  Which is part of the reason my lack of creative productivity is wearing on me right now.

This morning I came to a café to do some transcription work.  A couple of guys with packs and dogs were flying a sign by the exit of the parking lot, and after setting up in the coffee shop I walked over to them with a couple bottles of Gatorade and some cigarettes.  They thanked me and said that they’d been trying to manifest the Gatorade.  Now I am sitting inside about to work; I can still see them through the window.  Both of us are at work, them for a few hours of sitting and chilling and waiting and waving at people, me for a few hours of listening and typing and rewinding, and both of us will walk away later with enough money to continue supporting our own lifestyles.  Their work is maybe more honest than mine.  Their work openly involves receiving money from other people.  Mine also involves receiving money from other people, but through an elaborate system of justification, I will convince myself that the money is mine, that I deserve it, am entitled to it on my own because I have done “productive” work that is a “contribution to society.”  This is part of the reason why I might make $80 and they might make $10 and at the end of the day they will probably be more grateful for whatever is in their pockets than I will.

Over the past weeks, I have been reflecting on why I did come here, how I wanted to use this period of time.  My intention was to craft this lifestyle in a deliberate way, trying to acknowledge all the different things that matter to me and find a way to incorporate them all into this new life.  Writing was supposed to be the centerpiece of it all, and I was also especially interested in the things that I couldn’t or didn’t do on the road, new things that I wanted to bring into my life like exercise, meditation, yoga, climbing, volunteer work.  I reread old notebooks to revisit past intentions and I outlined the ways I wanted to spend my time.  But I haven’t been doing any of it.

I really don’t know how to operate in this setting.  I hang a map on the wall and trace my journey in red pen.  The lines crisscross the entire damn thing over and over again and it’s amazing.  And my daily routine for the last two years has been more or less some variation of waking up, cleaning up in a bathroom somewhere, driving or hitchhiking to the next town, setting up shop in a café or on a corner with a guitar, busking or writing, meeting people and conversing, letting the day take me where it would, finding a spot to sleep, eating whatever food happened to come, sleeping when the sun fell and waking when it rose.  Now, I’m at a loss.  Feeding myself, for example, is difficult.  I’m so used to just allowing meals to come when they would, and now that it’s in my hands, I don’t know what to eat or how to prepare it.  I can build a mean fire and cook over it even through the rain, I know how to set up a portable stove in the wind, I can use the dashboard of a car as a microwave, I know how to chill drinks in a river, but in a kitchen with a stove, oven, refrigerator and sink, I’m lost.

I don’t know how to arrange my days.  I see the travelers in town and I envy them in a way, I miss so many things about it, I miss waking up and letting the day unfold, but that’s not what I want right now, there is so much I want to do, create, give, receive, so much I want from life and I just don’t know where to begin or how, how to get from here where I am now to where I want to be, I just don’t know.

Leigh called and told me that her restaurant was throwing a bunch of stuff away, so I zoomed to the dumpsters out back and picked up tons and tons of boxes of plates and bowls and pots and pans and knives and cups.

The creative sanctuary is progressing.  I cover one wall with paint samples (thank you to Grace for that idea).  I nail sheets of cardboard to the other walls to make the entire room a bulletin board for pictures and printouts and poems.  I have incense and candles on my windowsill.  A couple of plants.  A little lamp with warm light, clothes hanging up in the closet, my musical instruments propped against walls.  And bookshelves, from the thrift stores…I spend an entire evening setting up my books, arranging them and rearranging them and pulling them out at random to flip through pages.  My books bring me a lot of joy.  Then I pull out the boxes full of notebooks.  I set them up on a shelf above my desk, leather bound journals and composition books and spiral notebooks and scribble-filled legal pads.  I’m momentarily shocked at the amount of shelf space they take up.  My entire journey is contained in these pages, and there are just stacks and stacks of notebooks.  This is what I wanted…to be able to sit at my desk and have them surrounding me.  To flip pages open randomly to the Yukon Gazebo, a return to the University of Miami campus after a long hitchhike, the streets of New York and the emotion of Occupy.  Or to search notebooks purposefully, to find the words I wrote in the cabin the night before embarking on the very first day of what I had no idea would become a two year journey, to dig out the worst and most hopeless writings, and the most blissful and enlightened moments.

So, slowly the creative sanctuary is coming up around me.  One evening I glance through photographs of old rooms that I’ve occupied in past years.  The mark of my presence has always been strong, artistically and musically, and rooms have always centered around a good desk.  And now I build yet another room; how many will I inhabit throughout my life?  What gives a space its energy vibe and feeling, and how does memory tie itself to spaces?   Do memory and meaning bond more strongly to spaces or to places, and what is really the difference between the two?  I wonder if place is just merely a collection of spaces, of space-based experiences that come together to form a person’s idea and memory of a place.  And somehow this notion becomes tied to a certain period of time; our experience of a place is intimately tied to the daily activities we carry out over and over again that at the time can slip by and feel mundane but with the passage of time and distance often ferment into an acute experience of nostalgia when recalled.  But how then can I feel nostalgic for “the road,” and what is it that I’m really missing?

I am having a really hard time with consumerism.  Buying things is one of the things that makes me miss the road most sharply, I miss being a rucksack wanderer and leafing through Kerouac while hitchhiking from one small town to the next: “See the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume…”

Living and traveling without money was in many ways an intensely political act.  Living out my own principles and learning how to survive for two years without a job, turning my life into as total a rejection of consumer culture as possible, was a powerful experience.  And in moving to Boulder, I resolved to continue that rejection, even while making certain compromises (I would be paying for a place to live and thus working).  But then I started to realize what things I would need in order to be comfortable and clean in a house, so I compromised about not buying anything, and I started going to thrift stores and yard sales.  Then I compromised about household products like toilet paper and soap and I started spending money at Target.

And now I’m trying to figure out how to stock a kitchen.  I’m standing there in the grocery store with a basket dangling from my fingers that contains a bag of rice and two apples and a pear and I don’t know what to do.  There’s an endless array of items in front of me.  If I buy a box of cereal I’m paying for the release of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere to manufacture cardboard and plastic wrapping.  If I buy the wrong apples I’m funding the pointless burning of fossil fuels to ship these things halfway around the world from New Zealand.  If I buy meat I’m paying for the slaughter of animals, etc.  If I get unhealthy food, since I’m no longer just eating what I find, I am now fully responsible for my poor diet because I’m the one choosing what I eat.

It’s really important to me to be conscious about this!  But the last time I stocked a kitchen was in college, when I bought microwave dinners, hot dogs, and frozen pizzas.  I simply don’t know how to buy food the right way.  Never mind the fact that I don’t really know how to cook healthy, nutritious, conscious meals (unless I’m cooking over a campfire).  I don’t know how to find an apple that wasn’t shipped ten thousand miles to the store.  I don’t know if I’m supposed to buy bagged flour, generic flour, bulk flower, or go to a natural market for flour, or go to the bulk food store for flour, or if I even need to have flour in my kitchen.  It was so much easier to just outright reject the whole system.  But this process is important, because now that I have to make these compromises and decide what ways I am going to engage the system, I have to actually learn to make smart decisions, which is going to take me being much more knowledgeable and informed.

The butter was difficult (Salted?  Unsalted?  Sweet Cream?  Organic?  Whipped?  European style?  Lite style?  Spreadable butter?  Butter-like spread?  Oh my God), but the dish soap makes me freak out even harder.  I would love to know what I must have looked like to someone else.  Restlessly pacing back and forth in front of the shelves, grabbing at mostly identical bottles and staring feverishly at labels, setting them all down and arranging them in a line and staring at them as if I expect all but one of them to explode from the intensity of my gaze.  Somebody probably walks by and notices me, does a loop of the whole store, comes back to grab something they forgot, and is startled to see me in exactly the same place as I was last time, still pacing frantically.  Do I get Dawn, because of the comfort that comes from its unconscious association with my childhood?  Or do I succumb to the influence of propaganda and go with Palmolive, since I just saw a nice commercial?  Do I buy the generic store brand, or should I pick Seventh Generation because the words “natural” and “organic” are printed on the bottle?  Does it even make any difference at all?  I’m tempted to just automatically grab organic everything, but that’s really no better than just buying what advertisements or my unconscious tell me to buy—I am still totally uninformed and simply being influenced by labels and packaging.  I can’t buy my way out of the need to be aware of how I’m affecting the world.  What it comes down to is that I simply don’t know what the effects of my purchasing decisions are, and right now what bothers me most is not the fact that if I buy a non-organic, not fair trade bag of coffee, I might by paying for genocide, what bothers me most is the fact that I just don’t know either way.

The idea was to continue getting everything I need for free.  That’s what I really wanted to do.  That was one more way to hold onto the values and identity of my road experience, and I was excited to apply that sort of resourcefulness to life indoors.  Boulder dumpsters are full of good stuff, and the free section of Craigslist is very active here.  I show up at a free yard sale one morning and watch people barge into the garage and pick through piles of stuff.  I make friends with the man who lives there, I tell him my story and I listen to his, and together we watch people come and go and grab without even saying hello.  He takes me inside to the kitchen and fills my arms with crystal wine glasses he needs to get rid of.

But I can’t put everything on hold until I happen to find what I need.  I can no longer just wait for things to come when they come.  Every day that I don’t have a bookshelf means I’m living amongst unopened boxes which is not good for the heart.  No table means I’m sitting on the floor and holding food on my lap.  So I decide I can deal with yard sales and thrift stores as well.  I wake up at 7:45 one Saturday morning to hit as many free sales and yard sales as possible.  Throughout the day, I make it to probably half a dozen sales and another half dozen thrift stores.  I’m in a daze the whole time, not used to shopping, I’m looking for furniture that I can’t even fit into my car anyway, so I don’t really know what I was even thinking, I walk into venues and wind up in the book section and end up spending too long browsing and then buying new stacks of books that I do not need and do not have shelves for, and at the end of the day the house still doesn’t feel comfortable to be inside of.

I am quickly realizing how much stuff is needed for a house.  And what about everything that I can’t get for free or even for cheap, like soap?  There’s no such thing as second hand soap.  There’s no such thing as free trash bags.  So the next day after yet another wave of yard sales and thrift store excursions, unsuccessful except for more piles of books I will probably never read, I am sad to find myself wandering the huge empty endless aisles of Target, where I end up spending $55 on things like dish soap, dish detergent, laundry detergent, dryer sheets, sponges, body wash, shampoo, razors, shaving cream, etc.  On my way back, I get stuck in horrible football game traffic, I move about 20 feet in 20 minutes, it is the poorest use of my time I can imagine, and I can feel myself getting jittery and impatient.  I’m impatient and I’m hungry.  It’s been 6 hours since I ate breakfast.  Was it really only two months ago that I used to pride myself on my ability to take hunger, and now I am getting cranky because I haven’t had my lunch yet?  The traffic is making me grit my teeth.  I remember getting stuck in traffic somewhere in Canada on the long drive from Alaska down to Seattle, stopping for construction that lasted like 45 minutes, and our natural reaction to that situation was to just get out and brew a pot of coffee on the trunk of the car.

I feel so far away from that now.  I am impatient.  It’s stressful.  I’m having a really hard time appreciating the process of this all, and I just want it done.  I can be lost on a mountain top bleeding from a gaping wound, or I can be stranded in the middle of nowhere on the side of a deserted road with no water, no money, and no phone service, and I’ll be completely calm and in high spirits.  But trying to find a nonstick pan sends me into spirals of hopelessness and despair.

I put in a load of laundry, lie down on the floor, and order pizza to my own house for the first time in something like 30 months.  Tonight I will let the candles burn out, take a bath, walk through the house naked, brew a cup of tea, pray, and then curl into fresh sheets and disappear from the world for a while.

The way I’ve been looking is now incongruous with the kind of life I am currently trying to lead.  So I decided to buy some new clothes.  I haven’t done that in at least three years.  Just thinking about walking into a clothing store actually made me really uncomfortable, and I realized that this is yet another unexpected way in which I’m being pushed to grow as I go through this transition.  The way I dress has actually been an unspoken insecurity for a long time.  I was in 7^th grade when I stopped wearing what my parents bought me and started dressing the way everyone else in middle school did.  I always felt like I was doing something wrong.  I wore only grays and dark blues because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.

I set out on the mission armed with a sketch inside the back cover of my notebook mapping out the thrift stores of Boulder.  My first stop was Rags Consignment.  I walked in and awkwardly pawed through a couple racks of hangers.  I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be looking for.  A girl walked up to me.  “Can I help you find anything?”  “Um…jeans?”  “Well, actually, this is a women’s only store.”  “Ah.  I see.  Well do you think I could rock women’s jeans?  Just kidding.  I am leaving now.”  Next, at a complex on the corner, I saw a sign for Wild Bird Depot or something like that.  There was an X on my map at that intersection, and I was pretty sure that was the name of one of the thrift stores.  I peeked inside and immediately realized that this was a bird seed store.  Ok.

Eventually I ended up at a real thrift store with both women’s and men’s clothing.  I started pulling things off of hangers randomly.  I didn’t even know what size I was.  I tried some things on and once I found a pair of unripped jeans that fit me, I felt a little more at ease knowing that I would be buying something.  I stayed for probably an hour and ended up buying a few collared shirts, a sweater, a jacket, a black vest, a gray fedora.  Nothing was more than like $12 but I spent a total of $93 which is more than I have spent on apparel over the past three years of my life combined.  I got in my car with a shopping bag and drove away to an empty parking lot and put on some of the new clothes.  It was weird but I looked good.

I panic after the first hour, take a few deep breaths and remember that this is not really my life.  Whatever, I can push through it and spend the week here, I can force myself to do it, but I am utterly baffled and completely incapable of understanding how people can do something like this day in and day out for years upon years upon years.  Driving back to Boulder in the evening, I try to come up with a good reason to go back tomorrow.  Because I will make money?  That seems so hollow.  And of course, if I wasn’t looking for a place to live and pay rent, I wouldn’t even need this kind of money.  Shelter + bondage or star-roof + freedom?  We spend countless hours doing things that do not matter to us, in order to get something that we think matters to us, in order to get a precious few things that do matter to us, along with a whole lot of things that don’t matter to us.  Maybe I’m overdramatizing this but my God it was awful.  At the same time, as Dr. No reminds me, there might be something of value for me in seeing how other people live.

I’m going to need somewhere to deposit the check, but I can’t join a credit union until I’m actually a Colorado resident with a local address.  So I decide to temporarily open an account at US Bank.  I choose US Bank because they’re offering a $100 bonus for opening an account, and I plan to immediately close the account after joining a credit union, which I am candid about with the banker.  He frowns.  “Why wouldn’t you want an account with us?”  I explain why I’d rather not be directly involved with a major financial institution that will use my money to invest in multinational corporations that commit worldwide atrocities and why I’d prefer to work with a local credit union that will invest in socially conscious ways.  He argues that US Bank is one of the most charitable large banks in the country; I say it’s just a cost of doing business in order to make US Bank look good in public while putting money into terrible and profitable things behind closed doors.  We talk about the mortgage crisis and US Bank’s discriminatory lending practices, the ability of major banks to generate the conditions that make international financial crises possible, and I even tell him about being arrested in a protest against the housing foreclosure process in which US Bank has played a significant role.  He does a procedural credit check and squints at the screen.  “It looks like you have an outstanding $500 bill with St. Johns Medical Center?”  I nod.  “Yes, that’s an experiment I was doing to see what it would be like to go through the collections process.”  “You know,” he says after a while, “I really don’t even like working here,” and then he tells me how to set up automatic bill pay and mail three small checks to myself to get another $25 bonus on top of the $100 for opening the account.

Back at Leigh, Trevor, and Aneliya’s place that night, I talk to Lou, one of the couchsurfers who is also staying there.  The conversation shifts to politics and society and revolution and I tell him about a few of my experiences with Occupy, and then he launches into a vent about how fucked everything is, he talks about the economy and the education system and the media and propaganda and how of course it’s all solidified by the system of wage slavery, and how can you read a subversive book when you’re working 60 hours a week?  “But then why do you work?”  I ask him.  He gets a kind of funny look on his face and falls silent.  “Seriously, if you have all these thoughts of revolution and freedom and change, and you think a job is the thing between you and making it happen, then why do you work?”  He explains how he doesn’t really have a choice and how he needs to start saving up money and how he has payments to make on things he has bought and how he doesn’t want to starve.  And I’m just sitting there thinking, not criticizing him for not wanting to make drastic lifestyle changes, but just fascinated by the fact that we can point out all the ways things are messed up but as soon as it requires some kind of radical rethinking and experimentation in our own lives, the excuses begin and the responsibility shifts from our shoulders to those of society.  We can only see the situation clearly until it gets personal, it’s hard to keep asking these questions when something in our own lives is at stake, but that’s exactly what I’m here to do, isn’t it?  To see things clearly and put everything on the line?  To find a way to preserve my core values and beliefs even while living within the traditional bounds of the system?  Maybe this is it, maybe this is the real work, this is where the true challenge lies.  In some ways, it’s a lot easier to just fuck the system and try to stay out of it, not work, not have money, not buy the newest cars and electronics, not consume production, not pay war taxes to the government, not sacrifice personal happiness for a paycheck, just stay as far away from the whole thing as possible.  But that’s so much easier than actually learning about exactly what ways my financial connection to the global economy facilitates mass atrocities around the world and whether there are ways a person can still drink coffee and buy books and drive cars and have a clean conscience after having honestly and thoroughly evaluated the repercussions of this widely accepted mainstream lifestyle.  Yes, to live within it all and still know how to resist, armed with knowledge and experience, that’s much trickier, to learn how to navigate the labyrinth of responsible, conscious living, materialism and consumption and labor and taxes and transportation and food and rent and work.  To take on some deep and inevitable new hypocrisies in exchange for a desk at which to write, a kitchen in which to cook dinner and keep wine, and the opportunity to have conversations that might radicalize bankers, to deepen dialogues with people because I’m sticking around for days and weeks instead of hours.  And making such an exchange, is that even something I actually want to do?  From a purist philosophical perspective, maybe not.  And if I am doing it, I don’t want to delude myself into forgetting that our society, founded upon one of the worst genocides in human history, is destroying the planet and wreaking mass havoc around the world.  These things are important to remember.  But to really be on my game and know how to resist from within, that’s so much harder and it will take me being much more dangerous and well informed.  It’ll take a lot more from me.  And the whole point is that there’s really only so much I can do from the outside.  As a penniless traveler, I can strive to attain some sense of personal purity of lifestyle, and maybe I can even inspire those I encounter through my way of living, but once again, when I try to challenge other people to rethink the way they’re living, when I talk about things like freedom, my words probably don’t hit home for most people because what I’m doing seems so far removed from their own direct experience.  What if my external life was less extreme and more traditional, and I were to use that as a platform from which to express radical ideas?  There’s that old Flaubert quote, “be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”  Maybe that’s what this whole thing is really about.

The search for a place to live has been tough.  I spend hours staring at Craigslist waiting for something to appear.  I neglect emails and phone calls and writing blogs.  There’s so much to speak to, but nothing to say.  I just need a place to live.  Whenever I stay in a city for too long, I start to feel homeless.  This time I also feel homesick.  The last time I actually lived somewhere, had a place that felt like my own, was in September of 2010.  That’s over two years ago.  So I sleep on Leigh, Aneliya, and Trevor’s couch and keep searching.  I feel like I’m being way too picky.  I want to be walking distance from downtown, not pay very much money, live with people who inspire me, and not be more than ten or so blocks from this house I’m staying in now.  That’s sort of a tall order and I know it.  And as for work, I feel even pickier.  I design a resume for the first time in two years.  Nothing on it is a paying job.  It has graphics and bar charts.  The thing is, after two years of spending 24 hours a day doing exactly what I will, I am unwilling to take any job doing anything that I wouldn’t still do even if I wasn’t getting paid.  I tell this to some people over beers at Boulder Café one evening.  They roll their eyes, like everybody I’ve said this to.  “Well,” Trevor says after a moment.  “It sounds like maybe you’re not ready to end your journey and settle down.”

Exactly.  I am not ending my journey, and I am not settling down.  The journey continues, only, I will be staying in one city for a little longer than usual (indefinitely).  This is what I decided to do, and now I’m seeing this through.  Even if some days it’s hard to remember why.  I just almost fit in enough here not to be noticed.  Boulder means the dreads don’t stand out.  The ragged stack of left wrist bracelets hides under sleeves.  My feet are still black—I think it’s permanent, because it doesn’t matter how much I scrub.  But they’re in socks now.  And I’ve been here too long already and still haven’t found a place to live, still haven’t found a job, still can’t understand how people could voluntarily spend their entire lives this way, spending so much time doing things they’d rather not do, compromising so many things that maybe shouldn’t be compromised.  Remind me again why I’m doing this?  How can a person live inside after being encased in forest and root and naked sandstone?  Trade stars for roof, trade the wind through leaves for these walls, cold is sacred, our way of touching the vast emptiness of everything beyond ourselves, mortality and immortality, trade the cold for a stale warmth blowing through moldy metal vents, the fire for the stove, the ash on my face and the dust on my palms for lavender scented soap, chemicals, sunrise for tinted blinds and alarm clocks, I already feel the impulse to run.