teleportation:

its a bitch. i feel like im doing it all the time now. teleportation, that is. time travel. you know like where did this day just go? or the week for that matter...its friday already? its fucking june? wait....2009? im 25? 25! you've got to be joking right. i mean, didn't i just get to the island. i mean wasn't i just living in caitlin and john's apartment? wasn't i just in college, or highschool for that matter? i mean, i'm pretty sure it was just yesterday that i was building forts in the forest behind my parent's house outside of baltimore. where does it all go?

my whole life, i've been flying lightning speed from morning to night, from saturday to saturday again, from april to may to june, from spring to summer to fall and winter and shit, spring again. another year and every year going faster and flying away from me and i just want to grab onto all of them and keep them forever. every morning. every night. every saturday. and every winter. and every summer day.

it hard though. i mean there's just so much. i know the only way to really do it, to really stop teleporting, is just to let go of it all and look around, drink it all up. but there's so much to drink. caitlin, john, carrie, ethan, tim, i just read all of your blogs for the first time in awhile. and its just so much. each of you, out there, fucking killing it, and i want to drink it all in with all of you at once. and i want to drink it all in here, on the island, too. fuck, sometimes its like im drowning. but in the most beautiful, bursting open full of love way. i guess it could be worse.

i've been trying to teleport less around here. the island, i think, has some sort of time-slowing device hidden deep with in the center of it's rocky core (something akin to the time bubble in LOST i think) which has been quite helpful in slowing my weeks and my days and my hours down just a bit. i've been closing my eyes more. smelling more things. tomato plants. strawberries. sunscreen and sweat and damp chicken feathers. i've been finding that the unplanned times are almost always better than the planned ones: stopping in the middles of an old homestead pasture and sprawling in the grass; posting up on the porch to drink tea and listen to the rain; last-minute skinny dipping in the pond before night fall; and when the question arises always saying yes to getting ice cream, and more ice cream, and more ice cream.

it's almost the solstice and the days here, close to the top of the world, are rediculously long. it has rained zero times in my near memory and the afternoons are hot and hard to make it through without a swim. the food is plentiful. we have more lettuce than we know what to do with. the fields are bursting with kale and chard and peas and broccoli and strawberries. strawberries! and i'm trying to drink it all up.

i wish you all were here.

come visit whenever you wish.

perhaps you could even teleport.

epiphany

spring time's no time
to be sitting on the blog train.
get up offa your thang
and dance till you feel betta.

spring has arrived.

merry equinox

ten minutes ago i was running around outside in a downpour and now the down pouring of the sun is blazing in through the windows. john (farmer john, that is) says if you dont like the weather in the san juans, just wait ten minutes. i think he is right.

in the past week i have woken to glorious blue skies only to be caught in a massive hail or snow storm by the time i've finished breakfast. and then rain till lunch. and then of course always back to sunshine by the afternoon. perhaps rain again. or sun. either way, it'll be something new all together in just another moment. it's good, i think. keeps me on my feet.

i've been on the island for just over two weeks now. its pretty wonderful. john and justine are both out of town right now, leaving me and jubee(the black lab i am watching) in charge of the farm. i'm trying pretty hard not to burn down the house, and also not to kill too many plants in the real farmers' absence. i think i am doing okay. me and jubee mostly have been hanging out in the green houses and fields and right now we are baking bread. jubee is a big help.

we've been sowing alot in the greenhouse, and just planted leeks and onion outside recently. there's alot of work to be done before the first farmers market in may, but i am excited. spring keeps tricking me into thinking that shes going to show up next week, but alas, i have to keep reminding myself that spring in the san juans is a fickle thing that taunts and teases through most of march, and april, and may. she settles in perhaps in june, just in time for summer.

anyhow, come visit soon. all of you. there will be plenty of food and fun to be had.

much love and happy equinox.

A Series of Moments

1. I walk into Sandy's liquor store in downtown San Luis Obispo to buy a bottle of whiskey for the boys who have so kindly put me up in the band's house, fed me the bands food, and poured me plastic cup after plastic cup of the band's wine, which was given to them for free after the last show they played. I know it's not much but whiskey is always the right thing to get for someone when you want to say thankyou. Whiskey and a hand-written note. But anyway, I walk into the store and ask the guy behind the counter if it is okay that I have an out of state id. And he says in some middle-eastern accent, "Well, what do you want?" and I say, "Whiskey." And he looks at me for a moment, thinking, and then shrugs his shoulders and says, "OK", just like that like, "OK, sure, fine, yeah, whatever."

So I pick up a bottle of Jim Beam (I wanted Evan Williams but they didn't have it and the Jim Beam was on special) and set it on the counter. The guy rings me up, gives me my total, I pay him, and then he remembers about the ID. "ID?" he asks. So I take it out of my wallet and hand it to him and he takes it in his hands and holds it and stares at it for like five seconds, which is awhile. So I reach over and point at where it has my birthdate and I say, "Oh, it's right there." And he looks from my finger up to my face and he says, "I know where it is, I've seen hundreds of these." And I feel dumb. And he looks back down at the ID and I am thinking to myself, "Well then why are you staring at it for so long. Give me my whiskey." And he is still staring at it and he takes a breath, and looks back up from the ID to my face and I'm thinking, "Does he not think it's me? I mean it's definitely me." And he looks at me and finally says, "Do you know what your last name means?" And I sigh, relieved, and laugh, kind of embarrased as I always have been to answer that question and I say, "Yeah. It means yellow. In German." and in my head I'm thinking, "BO-ring." And he smiles, and says, "No. It means heart. In Arabic. In old Arabic slang , Gelb means heart."

"Really?" I ask, kind of excited that my last name is not as boring as I had always thought and happy at the prospect that it could mean something so cool as heart. "Yea. Really," he laughs and puts his fist against his chest and says, "Yea. If you love someone, y'know, if they are like your brother, then they are your gelb. They are your gelby. They are your heart."

And I'm just super elated and I'm just like, "Wow, man, that's so cool." and he laughs some more and says, "Yea, you're gelby, you're heart." And he pats his fist against his chest once more and smiles and gives me a high five and tells me to have a great night with my whiskey and I thank him again, and grab my ID and my whiskey off the counter, stuff them in my satchel and turn, on a cloud, smiling to walk out of the store. And without noticing, I am singing along to the background music playing in the store as I walk out and it's not till I get to my bike that I realize that the song that is playing as I walk out of the store is "Magic Man", by the band "Heart". And I hopped on my bike and rode back to the boy's house, singing.


2. I've just met up with Corey in downtown San Francisco to go out for lunch which is funny because I'm wearing dirty clothes and am carrying this huge backpack and my hippie satchel and have various accoutraments hanging off of me and Corey is wearing a suit. and is carrying an attache case. And we get cheap chinese food, which is great, and he leaves his leftovers but I pack up mine while I am thinking of that scene in Dharma Bums where Jack is coming back over the border from Mexico and is laughing his ass off as the border patrol guys search his huge backpack looking for marijuana or cocaine or opium but all they find is his left over french fries wrapped in newspaper, and a half of a loaf of old wheat bread and some raisins and nuts and they are farely disgusted and they send him on through. Anyway, I stuff my leftover fried rice into my satchel and am thinking about this as me and Corey walk back towards his work office. We are on the corner and I notice there is a man taking a photograph of another man, who is posing. And the first man, who is taking the picture, is crouched down, looking through the viewfinder up at the other man, like he is trying to get something super tall in the frame and I follow his angle up with my eyes and look up to see that we are standing at the base of that building, you know, that one quintessential San Francisco building that like defines the San Francisco skyline, that one that is like a huge white elongated pyramid, the TransAmerica building I think it is called. And I am just like laughing in my head that I am standing at the base of this famous building and I didn't. even. know it. And I say to Corey, "Oh. that's THAT building?!" and he starts laughing at me like, "Yea. Duh." And I still just can't believe it and I'm just laughing out loud now cuz it's Pretty. Funny. And every time I look back up in the sky and that building, that building! that i've seen so many times, but really just in postcards or like some weird stock footage of the skyline in some movie, and I am standing right under it! and it's SO FUNNY. And at this point I just can't stop laughing and I look up at it again, and just laugh even harder and Corey is kind of laughing but is more just like, "What's wrong with you?" And I can't stop and this security guard is staring at me, but he's laughing a little now too. At me. And at the fact that I am uproariously laughing--so loud--in the middle of the street and it is echoing off the buildings and people are staring and Corey's motioning to this security guard guy, pretending to smoke a joint and pointing at me at the same time like, "She's craaazy." And I am so high on this building, this freaking building that I don't even notice this, but then Corey tells me about the security guard and the motioning and the looks and we're walking now, and I'm just laughing even more uncontrollably and I look back at the guard and he's laughing at me all like, "Damn. I wanna be on whatever that chick's on." Which makes me laugh even harder, cuz I'm not even on anything. It's just that building. That Building! And Corey and You, security guard man. You and me. You, stranger, and me. Laughing together. On this street. Under this building.

3. I'm walking down Chesnut Street on my way to Columbus to go check out this bookstore, I think. I'm not really sure what I am doing. Or what I am doing with myself. Or how much longer I am staying in this city. Anyway, I'm walking down the street and I'm kind of aimless I guess, but more than that, I am hungry. And I remember the leftover Chinese food in my satchel and so I pull out the box and open it up as I'm walking down this hill and I'm trying to eat it with my hands. But it's tricky, because it's fried rice. And I decide I need to find a fork or something because this is not working, but I also decide that I can't just go in somewhere and sit down and eat my leftover chinese food in their establishment. But what I can do is find some cafe or something and see if maybe they can give me a plastic fork or something that I can take with me and then I can eat my fried rice while I walk down the street.

So I decide all of this, and then look up in front of me and there is the Columbus Cafe. I think to myself, "Yea, this place totally looks like the kind of place that would give me a plastic fork." So I walk in and look around and there is this kid, this red-headed young dude standing at the counter and I know him. I mean, I guess I don't really know him, but he was on my train yesterday from San Luis Obispo, and then he was on my bus from Oakland. He was sitting next to me. And I was like, whoah, and I went up to him and said, "Hey man. I know you. You were on my train yesterday." And he squints his eyes a little, and nods his head up and down a little bit and then says, "Yea. Oh yea. Totally. Whoah, crazy." And I'm all, "Yeah dude." And he says something about the Chances and about This City of Five Million People and then says, "See ya later, " and goes to take his seat with his homie at the closest table. And now, all of a sudden, I am SUPER conscious of the fact that I just came in here, like some bum, to ask for a fork and leave. "Shit," I am thinking in my head and the guy behind the counter is staring at me like, "Well, What'll ya have?" and I get nervous and I feel like the red-headed train kid and his friend are watching me and I decide I can't just ask for a fork and leave so I tell the guy I'll have a cup of tea. "What kind?" he asks. "Shit," I am thinking, "I have no Idea." So homeboy behind the counter laughs at me a little bit and points out the tea list, to which I respond, "I'll have green....i mean, er....jasmine. No. Actually, yea, green." And he asks, "For here?" And theres this part of me that's like, shit, well if i am buying this fucking tea I might as well sit down and enjoy it and perhaps this kid from the train will come strike up a conversation with me, cuz well he seems kind of cool and I have no fucking clue what I'm doing anyway. "Yea," I say, "For Here." And by the time I pay, and get honey and find a free paper to read and a seat, I look up and red-headed boy is gone. Like he just got up and left at some point. I mean, I dont know what the hell I expected.

And now I am sitting here with this fucking tea that I didn't even want in the first place. But I guess at some point I get over that, because the tea is good, and it is nice to sit here and for some reason, I feel like writing. So I do. I sit and drink my tea and write down these stories. from my travels. And Corey calls at some point and stops by. We find out this place has dollar fifty microbrews so we get a couple of those, and drink them. Also, this girl that I craigslisted calls me and offers me a ride to Portland in the morning and it turns out we have about 1,000 things in common, and also Pete calls me. And tells me he's "cleared his schedule for the evening" so we can get burritos and beer. And somehow within the time I am sitting at this cafe, drinking tea and beer and writing, about a million things fall perfectly into place. And I'm pretty sure, looking back on it now, that this little cafe on the corner of Colombus and Lombard must be the cosmic center of my universe. The place where I walked in the door, hungry, not knowing how I was going to get back to Portland, feeling like I had given up on trying to see Pete, feeling like I had no idea what I was doing myself except for trying to find a plastic fork. And I walked out of that place with tea and a beer in my belly, a ride to Portland with what turned out to be the raddest chick, a great conversation with Corey and plans to see Pete.

The next morning, I walked back down to the cafe to get a cup of coffee before Kathleen (my craigslist ride) picked me up to head north. And as I walked toward the front door, a voice said my name and I looked up to see my Australian bike-touring friend, James, looking right back at me, smiling wide and in shock to see me. To see me of all places here, on this random street corner, in this random city which neither of us resided, during this random hour of this random morning on this random day. And I smiled back at him, and laughed. "Of course," I thought to myself. "Well yes of course this is happening." And we got two cups of coffee and sat outside, under the awning and talked and watched as the sun turned to rain, and then hail, and the back to sun again.

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The crazy thing about traveling without a schedule, for me at least, is that I seem to spend half the time completely lost and distraught. Not sure what to do next, stressed by all the options, feeling lonely or slightly depressed, directionless. Or even worse, feeling like an imposition on my hosts and their lives that they have set up and maybe feeling like my misguided-ness and open-ended plans sometimes stresses them a bit, like, "How long is this chick gonna crash on the couch for?" or whatever.

But the other half the time. The other half of the time is beautiful.

It always seems that it is right when I think nothing will work out for me, when I am ready to give up, Fuck this traveling shit, and crawl, defeated, back to my comfort zone, It is always then that some beautifully wonderful serendipitous moment will occur. And in an instant, it is all worth it and everything works and it is wonderful and perfect. And everything fits together and shines like the sun blazing out in the San Francisco sky after the rain on a wet February morning, while I sit and drink coffee, blissed out, totally and completely in awe of my life.

west coast/best coast.

could the pacific northwest BE more beautiful???



in other news: i've arrived in portland--stop number two on the unofficial welcome-back-to-the-best-coast-tour 2009. awoke this morning next to caitlin lomen. laid in bed, watched the sun come up, chilled, chatted, read, walked, drank coffee.




life. is. grand.

what would you do?

my dad just told me he has two tickets to the O-man's inauguration in D.C. on the 20th. If I choose to stay on the east coast until then, it means I could go. but it also means 2 more weeks of straight parent's house chillin and...i'm going on two months of it already. Or I could just say F it, skip the clusterfuck crowds in DC, fly back to the pac nw already, and watch it on the couch with the homies. thoughts?

big citay

highlights from a week of frolicking in brooklyn/nyc:













headin' to maine with the fam today, then back to the west coast! its been too long.

In other news:

it's snowing in boston and i've been practicing my juggling:




i'm working on it. also, i dont know how to make this upright.

that is all.

Boston's Chill

there's a place here, in boston, called Finagle a Bagel. it's a bagel place. for short, people call it F a B. you know, like 'F' a 'B'. it actually says, "F a B" on the window. so boston's cool. yes, tim, i'm still alive. sort of. five days a week, i wake up at 4:45am to go to my temporary job where i wield a box-cutter and spend many minutes trying to keep the styrofoam packing peanuts from sticking to my hair. I basically open and unpack cardboard boxes, and then crush them in a giant machine. that part is fun. the really fun part, though, is that i download NPR podcasts everyday, and spend most of my time at work listening to This American Life and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. i spend the entirety of my 30 minute lunch break reading US Weekly. i get off work at 2, drive my grandmother's oldsmobile home, take a nap, maybe ride my bike to the library, and be sure to be home in time to catch a 7:30 showing of Jeopardy. before preparing some din with the fam, which we eat in front of whatever is on tv for the evening (gossip girl, grey's, barack on 60 minutes). so basically, i listen to alot of npr, watch alot of tv, and kick it with the fam. if i didn't know how temporary this sitch was, i'm not sure how i'd feel about it. but considering the circumstances, i think six weeks of letting my brain mush a little bit is kind of chill.

in other news:

i'm done working on the 23rd, and my good friend jessie brown will be joining me for festivities in boston before we head to nyc for new years eve. i'm stoked to run around the city for a while, before heading home to the pac n dub in mid january. there's a west coast tour in the works: tim, i best see your ass in seattle. caitlin, john, as always, i'll be in portland for an indefinite amount of time. maybe california? who knows.

love you all. see (some of you) soon. go see slumdog millionaire if you haven't yet. and keep keepin it real.

ciao.

i think the moon is in aries, or some shit like that

because things are coming into place. I've been up on Orcas for two weeks now and i find myself constantly saying, "oh yea....that's why i f-ing love this place so much." i've been living at Brett's house, a place known as the coop (see: below) and spending my days frolicking about. the weather has been outrageous with crispy blue skies and sun-shiny afternoons. i've been spending my days eating potatoes of every making (garlic mashed, fried with kale...we dug up something like 8 gajillion pounds of potatoes at a friend's farm last week), drinking coffee (i'm back on the bandwagon), riding my bicycle 'round the island, planting a few trees for a wetland restoration project, and learning a shit-ton/working at a small farm on the island called Maple Rock. John, the owner, offered me a position there in the spring, so I'll be heading back here hopefully in February and moving onto the farm. Even in the few days I have spent working over there, I have already learned so much. I am excited to get to spend a full growing season there and stoked to get to work with the kick-ass crew over there.

This island is such a paradise, I can't believe I am fortunate enough to get to spend so much time here and to make this place my home.

Catch ya'll on the flipside.

i fell off

okay okay okay. so i havent written on here in like...17 days. damn. i guess we'll go chronologically. it took me 9 days in portland to figure my shit out: probably about 3 of them i spent just chillin, not thinking at all; probably about 24-36 hours of thinking about how i didn't want to continue south; another 3 days of convincing myself that it was okay to not continue south and that i was infact, not a failure; 1 day to decide how much longer to stay in portland, and 1 day to pack up my shit and hop on a train.

but back to portland. what a glorious 9 days:








and now here i am in seattle. i think i will be heading up to orcas this weekend, hopefully to spend some time working at this sweet farm.

thanks john and caitlin, for putting me up for 9 days of fun and love and thinking and drinking and kicking ass at trivia. thanks brother, again, for always accepting me back.

portland!

here i am, sitting in john and caitlin's nook in their beautiful house in southeast portland. caitlin and john are slumbering in their respective rooms and i am sitting here looking through my journal from the last few days, looking over pictures, and wondering...how did i get here?

the last time i wrote on here i think i was maybe on my 2nd day of the trip. from lake sylvia, i pedaled westward toward the coast, reaching the ocean at westport. seeing the open ocean again was an incredible feeling. i sat on the widest, grayest beach i had ever seen, and watched the birds fly south for winter. and no one was around for miles. it's interesting touring through these beach towns in the off-season. they feel grey, damp, lonely.

the following day i rode south, 55 miles along the coast toward bay center. this day was pivotal to say the least. for one, i encountered and fixed the first flat of the trip:






which was rewarding to say the least, but more importantly, somehow on this day i finally started to feel completely comfortable, happy and content with being by myself.i was pedaling along in probably my thirtieth mile of the day, thinking about why i like being around other people and why i like being alone. i like being alone because when you're alone, you can do whatever you want. you can be as fast or as slow or sit for as long as you want, and there is no one there waiting for you, or pushing you or pulling you in any direction than the one in which you want to exist. and i like being around people because i like talking and interacting and hearing stories and sharing my stories, and being affirmed in the the things that i say and above all, i love laughing with other people. and this is when i realized how rarely i laughed when i was alone. and why not? why cant we laugh--loud and uproariously laugh--when we are alone? and so i did. i just fucking let go and i found funny things all around me and also in my mind and i laughed with myself, and i talked aloud to myself as well, which is great, you should try it. and i sang songs, and i spoke aloud to people who i love who were far away from me and i'm not sure if they heard me or not but maybe they did. and somehow, in the twenty five miles to bay center i learned to really truly enjoy being alone and it wasn't all serious or lonely or sad, in fact at times it was downright hilarious and so exploding with energy i wanted to scream, and so i did. and it was the best damn time i ever had with myself.

there are more stories to tell, but john and caitlin are awake now and john's making toast downstairs and it smells freaking bomb.

ciao.

free peaches, yum!

so i'm sitting here in the public library in montesamo, a town of 3,000 located about 30 miles inland from the coast. i just rolled into town for the day and as soon as my 36 more minutes of librarian-allotted internet time are up, i'm heading the 1 mile up the hill to set up camp at lake sylvia state park.

today is day 2 of being on the road and so far, it's pretty f-ing rad. highlights of the past 48 hours include: cruising past the olympic mountains on my way out the hood canal, watching the sun rise this morning a fiery red, and meeting dick and dwayne, who insisted on loading me down with as much fresh produce as they could fit in my already-stuffed-to-the-brim bags. when i pulled up to their road-side produce stand, i assumed they were farmers. this was, until they told me that i should come back tomorrow to look through the assortment of rare coins, fine jewelry and antiques they have available. "so you don't just sell produce?" i inquired, confused. "three days a week we do, we get it from our friends farm in yakima, the other days we sell all sorts of stuff. you name it, we got it." and these unlikely business partners go on to tell me that they spend a whole lot of their time acquiring other people's unpaid storage units (and apparently, this happens ALL the time) and selling off all the junk (or treasure) that they find inside. "we're thinkin about packin everything up in the truck and takin it down to arizona for the winter, settin' up at swap meets 'n such", dwayne tells me.

by they way, dwayne is also a cancer survivor and spends much of his spare time helping his parents run a women's shelter, at which his main job is acting as a sort of escort/body guard when taking the women to their new, undisclosed homes. dick, who has got to be at least 25 years dwayne's senior, tells me about hanging out in haight/ashbury in the 60's, being addicted to heroin for a couple years in the 80's, and how much his wife loves to backpack.



and this is when i realize that this is exactly why i am on this trip. the riding, it's great, but the people. the people are what make traveling around so fucking incredible. i realized that that is what's so remarkable about a bicycle as a mode of travel. If I were to embark on a backpacking, or kayaking trip, i wouldn rarely see or interact with other people except for perhaps on occasion, in the evenings, or in passing. but on a bicycle, you have to use the same routes that people use on their way to work and school and on the way home from the grocery store. and here you are on this adventure, but you get to interact with people who are just trying to lead their lives. and even while under pedal you are interacting with others: chatting with flaggers, returning a wave to a passing motorcyclist, or stopping to buy a peach on the side of the road and ending up hearing the life stories of two men. sometimes i can't believe how much people just want to talk. it's amazing, and being able to have the time to listen is a gift. a gift that i feel pretty f-ing fortunate to have.


anyway, i'm heading to westport tomorrow. it's a short day (who am i kidding, all my days i short)and then down towards bay center, and on to astoria.

catch ya'll on the flipside.

the right socks?

recently, it's been seeming like anything i need to get done to go on this supposed trip i'm planning, is nearly impossible to get done. I keep waking up in the morning, determined to fix my tent/find cheap panniers/find a twenty dollar bill on the ground, and keep going to bed having done none of these things. Why? This is a good question.

so today, i woke this morning at the early hour of 9 o'clock, determined to go to REI and just put some f-ing panniers on credit already. before leaving, i checked craigslist (like i do every morning) to see if some kind soul was selling their bike bags for cheap, and to see if any good labor gigs had been posted since last night. Of course, i found neither. So i headed for the door, but of course, every time i got down the front steps i realized i had forgotten my wallet/cellphone/waterbottle/where i was going and had to retrace. then, on the way to REI, i got fucked over by those damn one way streets, and drove in at least 7 circles before finally arriving at my destination.

what i'm getting at, though, is that all of these moments are leading up to something, because as i leaned over to check the price tag on what looked like the cheapest bags in the pannier aisle, i heard a voice. this voice was todd.

todd is about 6 foot 5, carries his i-phone in a gym sock, and has biked from seattle to los angeles "about 8 times". (about?) anyway, todd is fucking great, and proceeds to chat bike trips with me, getting me so freakin stoked like i cant believe. he tells me about all the bike trips he's done across the country and up through canada and how many times strangers invited him over for dinner and how he always carried a set of nice clothes so that he could crash weddings and eat good food. he tells me about how i'm leaving at the perfect time and he tells me about a syndrome he calls "organizing my closet" syndrome. which i definitely have. organizing-my-closet syndrome is basically the fear that you get before you go on a trip, the kind of fear that keeps you from going because you keep making excuses like, "oh, i can't go because i don't have the right socks", or "i have to organize my closet before i can leave." he's telling me this and all of a sudden, i am confessing all of my fears about this trip to a stranger. the thing is, all of the fears are irrational and the real fear, i realize, is failure. but of course, as we all know, the real way you fail is by not going. AND, todd reminds me that--like we all know from doing things that scare us--it's never as scary as it seems, and more often than not, all it takes is that first step or that first mile or that first word, and all of a sudden, we wonder what we were so scared of.

so todd confesses to me that although he's "no materialist", he does have quite the collection of panniers piling up at his house and that he'd like to sell me a pair for cheap, "at least," he said, "they'll be going to a good home."

so, while i'm still in no hurry, i'm not going to let the right socks get in my way. i'll leave when i'm ready, but maybe i'll be ready sooner than i thought. or maybe i won't be, but i think i'll go anyway. why not.

giving thanks

okay so im sitting here, at my brother's house in west seattle, chilling. it's september already, fuck! but it's sunny outside, thankgod.

from trying to leave orcas, to a blur of a weekend in bellingham, to now being posted up here in sea-town, the past week has been full of rediculousness to say the least. i'm pretty sure i went like at least 14 days in a row without sleeping in the same spot twice and was averaging something like four hours of sleep a night. which of course led to me falling asleep in such innappropriate places such as:

-in the middle of werwie's backyard.
-in the middle of game x.
-in the middle of the sidewalk at bumbershoot. (a police woman came by and told me, "time to wake up, sweetheart.")

but now, finally, after somehow moving all of my freaking belongings off of orcas island, passing them through many cars and hands, i have settled (for the week, at least) and my bro's casa. being here, i have realized how grateful i am for so much shit. for instance:

-access to a shower, laundry, and in general, running water.
-sleeping in a bed. by myself.
-having a toilet that not only flushes, but is located just a short distance from where i sleep.
-having internet access AND phone service in the same location. hot dog!
-friends and family who lead stable enough lives that they allow me to lead a chaotic, illegititmate whirlwind of existence.

more than anything, i've been thinking about how thankful i am for all of those people in my life who, without which, i dont know if i would ever have a stable place to rest.

so the thankyous for the past week go like this:

-thanks brett, and al, and the coop, for being my second home on orcas, and for feeding me feasts, for hiking and swimming and sitting and for letting me post-up for unknown amounts of time.
-devon and reed for cramming all of my shit into your car and driving it and me to bellingham.
-tim, for hosting tequila saturday.
-matt for cramming my shit into the neon and bringing it to seattle.
-dewey and pete for sponsoring me.
-anna and jack for gracefully packing ten people into a 2 bedroom apartment.
-my brother, for always taking me in, even when i show up without notice.

and last but not least:

-thanks in advance to caitlin and john. who knows how long i will stay.

catch ya'all on the flipside.

jump on the bandwagon

i guess there's no better reason to do something than the fact that everyone else is doing it. so here it is, here i go. i guess this is my blog. i'm sitting on a couch in a cabin at a camp on orcas island right now. it's ten o'clock in the morning and it's raining outside. i've been unemployed now for about a week and a half and there's no sign of work in my future. ahhh...the future. isn't it funny how everyone always wants to know what you are doing next. i feel like it's been the same since highschool. it's like nobody ever wants to talk about where you're at right now, because all people can think about is What's Next. i'm trying to enjoy my last year of highschool and all people want to know is "so, where are you going to college?". i'm trying to enjoy my last year of college and everyone's all, "so, have you got a job lined up?" i'm trying to be present here in my last week on orcas and i've found myself repeating the same two sentences over and over again in response to that question: what now? well, i've got a secret: i have no fucking clue what's next.

it's scary, but it's freeing at the same time.

i mean, how are we supposed to enjoy any bit of our life if all we ever look toward is the next horizon. because soon enough the next horizon is going to be the end of our lives and we're going to get there, and there won't be any more horizons, and we'll wonder what we were chasing after the whole time.

so for now, it's one day at a time.

sure, i've got ideas about where i want those days to take me. but i'm not stuck on any of 'em and i'm certainly keen on this very moment. right here. right now.

but, for those who are wondering. the conversations have been going like this:

"so, what are you going to do now?"

"um...i think i'm going to go for a bicycle ride."

"oh yeah? where?"

"i think down the coast, head south for the winter."

"oh wow. by yourself?"

"yea. by myself."

"gosh, have you ever done that before?"

"no."


so that's it. but i'm not stuck to it. who knows what will happen. maybe i'll fall off the ferry on the way back to the mainland. maybe i'll get to portland and freeload off john and caitlin for the rest of my life. maybe i'll fall in love and move to tahiti. for now, though, i just want to be free on two wheels. i want to have the ability to move around as i feel, to see places, to be with people who i love, to enjoy my own company, to be able to take advantage of every moment, to not worry about what's next. i'm not sure how far i'll make it, or if i'll make it at all, but i'm ready.

so, i guess this is the beginning of trying to possibly log some of whatever adventure i am about to embark on. not sure what will come of it. but it feels pretty good, i feel good about it. i guess that's all that matters.