The departed and prodigal son returns.
Test one, test one... Is this thing on?
I'm writing right now from the Jupiter Hotel in Portland, the retro funk hotel where I really started the trip that ended up taking seven months to complete, and led me around the world.
Normally while in Portland I'd be heading out to Devil's Point, to see the sole coterie of exotic dancers whom I respect performing their madness and unleashing their aureole in the dark of a dingy room, but the rain and my reticence conspire to keep me in my hotel room (in blatant violation of one Traveler's Rule or another, I'm sure).
But for some reason, I don't fell like wrapping up my journey exactly the way it started after all. Something tells me that one of the things that's changed is that my desire to find beauty wrapped up in irony has been simplified; beauty itself is what I want, and need, and search for. A love of irony seems like a sort of cowardice, as least tonight.
I'm heading home tomorrow, although 'home' is an approximation at this point. So much is the same yet everything has changed; I now know for sure that a home that I leave behind will keep chugging onward perfectly fine without me, and that the world itself is a huge and wondrous place. I have so much less outside of myself, and a great deal more within me. I know both less about who I am and more than I did when I departed. I'm actually terrified about coming back to the place I left. Of all the things I'm worried about, the threat of inertia looms most forbiddingly on the horizon.
Inertia is the death of motion, and I'm not sure I know how to be mobile-in-place.
I'm writing right now from the Jupiter Hotel in Portland, the retro funk hotel where I really started the trip that ended up taking seven months to complete, and led me around the world.
Normally while in Portland I'd be heading out to Devil's Point, to see the sole coterie of exotic dancers whom I respect performing their madness and unleashing their aureole in the dark of a dingy room, but the rain and my reticence conspire to keep me in my hotel room (in blatant violation of one Traveler's Rule or another, I'm sure).
But for some reason, I don't fell like wrapping up my journey exactly the way it started after all. Something tells me that one of the things that's changed is that my desire to find beauty wrapped up in irony has been simplified; beauty itself is what I want, and need, and search for. A love of irony seems like a sort of cowardice, as least tonight.
I'm heading home tomorrow, although 'home' is an approximation at this point. So much is the same yet everything has changed; I now know for sure that a home that I leave behind will keep chugging onward perfectly fine without me, and that the world itself is a huge and wondrous place. I have so much less outside of myself, and a great deal more within me. I know both less about who I am and more than I did when I departed. I'm actually terrified about coming back to the place I left. Of all the things I'm worried about, the threat of inertia looms most forbiddingly on the horizon.
Inertia is the death of motion, and I'm not sure I know how to be mobile-in-place.