Deep-Fried Conversation

While on the road, I designated a half-full notebook I'd been carrying around all year as the "good idea book." I figured that Josh and I on massive amounts of caffeine for a month would generate some things I should write down, as he's always been such a force in my life. I'm really glad I had a notebook around.

Among the pages of streamlined thoughts and ideas, I'd also written down words and phrases that came out of our mouths in the most caffeinated and sleep-deprived moments of the road trip. These are things that I wouldn't have bothered to write down a year and a half ago, because it looks like gibberish to the naked eye. But because I was present, they each are a souvenir of a conversation I might not have recalled otherwise.

Some of the conversations we had on the road changed my thought patterns in ways I didn't recognize at the time. Each sentence in quotes, every pair of descriptors will turn into its own essay eventually. One of the things I realized somewhere between Oregon and Montana (maybe it was Idaho?) is that I actually do not care if those things get published.

Publishing isn't my goal. In a way, it never really has been. It's a thing I thought was the only vehicle for my real goal, which is getting people to read it. I want people to be affected by the words I write. I do have to make a living, and it'd seem easier if the words earned me money, but I've been on that end of it, too, and it's not as easy as I thought it would be. The paycheck wasn't excessive by any means, and of course, I got way more gratification from public feedback on my work, both good and bad.

Everybody kind of wants to change the world with their craft, and in that way, I'm no different. I want to change the world, and it's a goal that has always stressed me out, because it's somehow built into my mindgrapes. I can't do a damn thing before I verify that I am, in fact, making an impression on the world. It's egotistical and it's taken me a long, long time to come to terms with that. In that way, I'm no different from anyone, and that's an ego struggle I have never been brave enough to discuss with anyone. You have to be different to change the world, right?

In one exchange of thoughts, I said something that's far smarter than I am, and it wouldn't have happened if I'd been in a room by myself. We were talking about the reasons people go to college, and the general attitude people have towards knowledge and learning. I blurted out that I never assumed I'd get a "job" related to my creative writing degree, and that I thought of learning as something I'm not really doing solely to better myself -- that I now view my degree as something that benefits the human race as a whole. That's under the assumption that the more I know, the more we know.

Now, it sounded so super fucking smart and wise and shit, that I'd love to snatch it up and say that's always how I've thought.

It's not. I'm not that insightful. It's not how I thought about it when I skipped class half the time, and my years of "learning" were done rather selfishly. It's true that I was never under the impression that I'd get a "job," but my general ethos was by no means "wise." In that way, I am no different.

But I am different. After that came out of my dopey mouth, I sat there and thought about it, talked about it, thought about it some more. I've never really defined my goals in PowerPoint fashion because my brain is a pretentious asshole that rejects all forms of planning, but maybe it's time I step a little closer to that realm of thought. What do I actually want to fucking do with this skill I've dedicated 10 years to? Well, Mr. Mackey, I want to change the world.

In what way? Good question.

I want to change the way people think about creativity. I don't just want to tell people that they should get in touch with their "inner artist" -- I want people to know that it exists inside of them. I want everyone to have something that cannot be taken away from them -- a thing that isn't a thing. It might sound like I'm talking about God here. That's because I'm kind of talking about God here. God, defined as that inextricable part of a person that cannot be removed. It can be changed, shaped, smashed, and reformed, but all the pieces are still in there. They might hurt sometimes, but there is no way to remove what's in that space. It can only be added to; there is no exit. It is a well of infinite capacity, with infinite spatial possibilities and incarnations, and it will never, ever not be there. An artist is merely someone adept at describing theirs to the world. I want to expose my God on paper with a degree of accuracy that makes others curious what theirs might be like.

I want to rid art of money, not because it's worthless, but because it's priceless -- and producing a lithograph of the art inside of you is a gift that should be given, and if it is given, it can't be stolen, taken, bought, or sold.

I want to create frameworks with people who inspire me, people who like to be inspired. People who aren't first interested in money or due credit, because when they're excited, there is no room for concern about such things. I want to see everyone's lithographs and be stricken by their intricacies; by the delicate filaments that make up their particular fabric.

I want to see eyes light up when I hit the nail on the head -- when I can ignite someone's dormant star-stuff by rearranging some letters on a page, when I find the combination of words that create the weight of an emotion that everyone has felt. All I want is to create reminders that we can all feel the depth of each other; that we are tied together; that we all kind of want the same things; that we all hurt for similar reasons. I want everyone to lay their deepest cards on the table, lay out our unmatched bits so we might see where our own missing pieces are -- the North to your South, the nitrogen to my roots, the phosphorus to our matchbooks -- and by that, become something more than the sum of our parts.

I want to understand myself and to be understood by others. I want to know the mechanisms with which my experiences have formed my God, my sense of self, and my sense of purpose; what those things I remember are made of, and why my extra pieces ended up shaped like another's emptiness. I want to understand the bottomless universe inside of every human being just as much as I want to explore my own.

I guess I'll go first, then.

Syntax

I saw the filaments of a light bulb magnified through tiny holes drilled into a hollow gourd. They represented the binary language, the way we stack our words, what our syntax does for the way we build our worldviews. At first, I wanted to learn it -- trace each filament back to its point of origin, decode the cultural cipher of language; I wanted to understand how each one works, down to its most microscopic elements, the space inside a pause, the pounds of pressure per square inch of space between words.

And I tried. I stared and I studied, but I got lost in spirals of thought that are surely each a different rabbit-hole unto itself. There was a moment where I found myself satisfied to lay there, staring at the ceiling where the panned-out map of the human condition was projected before me -- unable to reel in the slack in my jaw in the face of such a perpetual picture. This kind of thought -- the collection of these states-of-mind I've written about before -- I've never been able to quantify it as well as I have just now.

Maybe I found the service road for my brain's rush-hour traffic, or the fuse box for my tripped circuit. Maybe I tripped into the maintenance driveway by mistake, the entrance to the underground tunnels. The duct system in my skyscraper.

Weird shit happens when you read a language theory book before taking a hippie trip.

How the West Was Burned

With this mysterious bottle of wine I found in my kitchen upon my return, I shall attempt to marble my way around explaining what happened to my June of 2012.

It woke up like a demon in a birth canal on the fifth, hungry and ready to point the laser eyes of summer at every snow-capped mountain, frigid campsite, and Fahrenheit degree that crossed its path. A few days shy of four weeks later, I'm reading reports of all the wildfires blazing the states we crossed. It's an odd thing, looking at the greasy atlas, retracing our penned routes -- I could almost use the same lines to draw in which forests we stayed in are burning to the ground at this very moment.

Now, in June, I've managed to learn quite a bit about forest fires...and I've managed to see a few places that are still recovering from fires 50 years ago. It takes a long fuckin' time for a forest to regrow.

I'm bewildered that I got to see all these places -- some literally days before they would endure an event from which they may never recover -- in the nick of time. I waited so long to travel; every shred of my being wanted motion for as long as I can remember. And when I do, I manage to do it just in time.

Also, I seem to have quit smoking cigarettes. Hooray.