• Day 9,210

    Okay. So, it’s morning. I still feel new life pulsing through my body (or maybe that’s the feeling of Late Night Taco Bell), and I can still feel the sudden rush of inspiration that overcame me last night.

    Phew. For a second I thought it was just another manic episode–hold on tight, because it still might be.

    Since we will be riding this out together, I suppose we should familiarize ourselves with the website which is as straight forward as I could make it (mostly because technology is really hard, even at 24 years young).

    Creating a “travel blog” proved difficult from the start because considering the amount of remade and over told stories and opinions that already exist on the internet, it progressively became easier to get discouraged to do something that most people wouldn’t give a second glance at. But this very fear of failure and embarrassment that stifled my confidence is the same fear that immediately made it easier to get started, because it’s true: who gives a fuck? Well, I do. And since that is, in theory, the only opinion that matters, then who is to tell me what my blog is or is not?

    With that being said, any pictures, videos, or stories related to my travels can be found under anything labeled “Adventure is out there!”, which doesn’t currently exist because the part where your New Life Begins is, unfortunately, not as sudden as you might hope. And even then, the labels may be subject to change depending on how I feel about it. Bare with me. We’re figuring this out together, right?

    The next big adventure is set for 4/28/2022, where you can live vicariously through me as my wife and I travel to Seattle, WA, cruise on through to the glaciers of Alaska, and end the tour with Denver, CO.

    Any posts labeled “Day ….” are daily thoughts, questions, worries, conspiracies, rambles, opinions–anything that I could manage to articulate that day. This part is important because so much of my time is spent in my own head that I talk myself into chaos, and detangling the mess can get complicated without the right tools.

    When I was younger I would write novels, short stories, books, essays, diary entries, anything to get the words out. Whether they were nice or smart or wise, whether they were just mundane thoughts about the cars passing by or the shape of the clouds; it didn’t matter what idea spawned into my mind, it went down on paper. Sometimes I would look at them, but most of the time I’d give them away. To teachers or girlfriends, letters to friends or friends I wanted to have. I gave away all of the words in my head until the love I had guarded so much finally decided to lock itself away. Love didn’t come out in romantic refrains anymore, she didn’t look like the gentle sadness I had trained myself for so long to finally accept. Love wasn’t hanging around bookshelves anymore, or hiding in the notes of my guitar. Love had turned my words into venom, it turned my author’s hands into fighter’s fists, Love got tired of giving away her words and not being able to read any for herself.

    So, in one final attempt to show Love that I won’t hurt her, or give her away, or betray her, I am taking my kind words and over-romanticized lifestyle straight to the person who needs them most: myself. And along the way, maybe we can both discover what it means to exist (or at least the fun parts).

  • Day 9,209

    In movies they make this look easier.

    The spider bite that changes the hero’s life, or the look of betrayal in the eyes of a once innocent soul that finally shapes them into the villain that builds the rest of the story. That sudden change in music or the montage of sudden flashbacks that highlight the moment their lives begin.

    Instead it’s Wednesday night at 9 o’clock. I got fired from my waitressing job for yelling at the owner just a couple of days ago, right when I had decided I wasn’t going to kill myself because the least I can show for enduring a heavy depression for the past month, or life, is that I liked my job. Twenty four years in the making and the best I could come up with is this blog. There was no Five For Fighting song playing, no grand gesture that signaled the beginning (or end) of a new journey. There wasn’t a sudden gap in my plot where we find that my hair has been cut short to show the essence of time passing (if anything, in a comedic turn of events that is constantly my life, my impossibly curly hair has decided that the years didn’t matter and it would be staying at the exact length it has been for however long it pleased, thank you very much), and there had not been a heinous murder that suddenly shaped all of my life’s sorrows into the seemingly obvious choice of avenging so-and-so’s death.

    Somehow I still feel the camera zoom out as I type away my last farewell to the Writer’s Block that so furiously worked to build a dam that could contain all of my words, all of my thoughts. The Dave Matthews band isn’t playing into the sunset, but rather the house is filled with the sounds of my wife trying her best on our electric guitar, and maybe the credits don’t need to be rolling right now because none of it is over, and beginning is only the first inch of a journey worth seeing all the way through.

    Maybe life isn’t spectacular like in the movies, maybe it isn’t always worth living.

    Until you start to live a life that is.