Do You Dream Of A Cold Alaska?, Better Wrap Up Warm Tonight, All I Know Is We're In A Blue Time, Where The Land Is Snow Drop White

--"Alaska", Camera Obscura

I. Into the Wild

I've begun reading Krakauer's Into the Wild after having seen the film and after much insistence from a friend of mine who swears by it. I don't know if it's the usual read a book/see the movie, excitement that has me really enjoying the idea of getting away from it all, but the more I read from the book, the more I'm falling in love with the idea of getting away from it all. I'm enjoying reading about what it would be like to have no responsibility, no planning, and to just pick up and go when and where you wanted.

Not that I could ever do it for too long. There are practicalities to consider, but I have been toying with maybe more weekend getaways, the kind that I used to do all the time with DeAnn. Say what you will about our time together, but it definitely wasn't the most sedentary period I ever spent in my life. In fact, I don't think I ever did as much traveling as I did when we were together. Maybe it was just to fill time, but I think it was something more. I think the reason why I had such get-up-and-go back then as opposed to now is that I had someone to share it with. When one tends to do the bulk of his traveling alone, it tends to get tedious and uneventful. It was fun to have a partner. Having a companion enriched the trip in ways that I didn't even count on. Places I'd been to before were seen with new eyes when I brought DeAnn along. I guess that's kind of the point, that you get to share in the experience anew when you have somebody who hasn't been there before.

I used to think that the best trips were the ones I did on my own. After all, aren't all the great adventure stories about people who have ventured into the great unknown by themselves and made a go at it? Isn't it more adventuresome to not carry backup with you? Time was that I espoused any company because I thought it would tarnish the pioneer spirit of my sojourns. West Virginia, Maryland, Philadelphia, New York, Boston--these were all trips I made a conscious effort to undertake without towing anybody else. I may have met up with friends once I arrived, but it was never for the full time I was away. And I was the better for it. I don't know how those trips would have turned out had I not had the freedom to go wherever I wanted to go. Being able to be flexible with schedules and timetables made for truly unique experiences.

But the more I read the book, the more it dawns on me that the only reason Christopher McCandless' journey seems so extraordinary is because the fact we were able to relive it through the book. Had he gone off alone, had he died alone, it would have been just another tragic tale of somebody dying in the great Alaskan Wilderness. It's precisely because of the fact we can share in his journey that it becomes a tale worth telling, just like a journey shared by two people is a journey worth taking and talking about. When it's just me, I'm the only person who can relive it and that's not quite the same experience.

II. Northern Exposure

Then, when I start to think about what it would be like to take another fantastic trip out on the open road, it always compels me to the next step of thinking what it would be like to move to a new place, someplace where I didn't know a soul. I always hearken back to Joel Fleischman from Northern Exposure and the whole fish-out-of-water adventure. It's no big secret that I would love to move to Boston someday. I have loved the city every time I've been there. I have loved the people, the sights, the food, the baseball team (of course), just everything. I think about how great it would be to be immersed in such a thoroughfare of knowledge, history, and culture. I think about what kind of person I would turn into from just being exposed to that kind of life day after day.

Sometimes I think I'm scared of moving away from California. I'm scared of being so far from the familiar. Part of me thinks that's why I like traveling so much, because I'm too chicken shit to take a chance on a new city and that I satiate my wanderlust by these occasional jaunts across the country. I always talk this big talk about not needing my family, not needing my friends here. I always talk this big talk about how, if I really wanted, I could leave right now and be okay somewhere else. I always romanticize myself as some stoic lone wolf who could mete out an existence wherever I went.

The real picture is far less noble. The real me has always relied on ritual and routine carefully crafted over the years. There would be so much I would have to change if I, indeed, did move to Boston. Instead of driving up from Santa Monica to Oxnard along PCH when I'm troubled, where would I go when I'm over there? Instead of driving up to the top of Mount Wilson when I go out on a fourth or fifth date, where could I take someone that would be as inspiring? Instead of having literally thousand of places that I can easily relate to an anecdote, I'll have to craft new stories about the new places in my new home city.

True story. I had AOL for two or three years longer than I had to all because I couldn't be bothered to switch all my personal info to a new e-mail address. I'm a man who doesn't like to be bothered with cleaning up after myself. It's not that I don't think I could cut it in a new city if I had to. It's that I'm very impatient when it comes to the small details and I'm very resistant to forging new connections. If something seems to be working one way, I'm loathe to try and improve on it.

That's what Boston would be like for me, a lonely existence at first replete with having to make new friends, learn a new city, and craft new stories to relate to people. It'd be worse than traveling by myself because at least with traveling you can come back from the new and strange. When you move, you're immersed in that new and strange.

I don't know if I'm ready for that yet.

III. Diners

I had a late night snack with Ilessa the other night after spending a day at the beach. We hit up The Kettle, this all-night diner near my cousin's house in Manhattan Beach. We talked about my plan to move to Boston. I could hear the excitement in my voice, the tenable joy in the life I could imagine for myself there. She smiled and nodded like she always does when I get excited about something she knows I'll never follow through with. I mean--what else can you do? She had to be encouraging on the off chance that this is one of the handful of endeavors I actually see through completion in my life. But on the inside she knows this may just be a pipe dream and she knows better to encourage me. She knows better than to get my hopes up because that only means I only feel worse when I quit out on the idea.

That's when I hit upon the memory that Boston has some awesome diners and that that's one thing that might be familiar in an unfamiliar land. There's something comforting about the universal quality of diners and their usual fare of comfort food. I like knowing that no matter which one I walk into they'll probably have a decent two eggs and ham, a decent fish n' chips, maybe some meat loaf. When it comes to being nervous about having to adjust my way of life, eating's never been on the list of things to worry about. There's always a decent diner somewhere nearby. I always get the sense when I bite into a patty melt two thousand miles away from California it always tastes pretty much the same as the one I can get into California.

But it that enough? Is one familiar routine enough for me to establish a foothold in an enemy domain? She shrugs her shoulders. I can't ever quite tell if she's for or against my idea of moving away. She's always lived in California and, as far as I can tell, she's never had designs for ever moving away. She likes it here. She likes everything about here. Sometimes I think she has a hard time wrapping her head around the idea somewhere else can be better. She's like a conservative in her sureness. It's like Southern California works for her, so it must work for everyone else.

I guess that's what I'm looking for, some place I can be sure of. That's why I travel. That's why I want to move. It's much in the same vein that I'm still looking for that one person I can be sure of. I do all this searching, get these bouts of wanderlust, because what I have right now has never felt quite perfect. That's why I go out on these trips, that's why I seem to meet all the wrong women, because no place I've ever lived and no woman I've ever loved has ever hit the nail on the head.

It's like the whole diner theory, I explain to her. I want one city that, no matter which place I go, it feels comfortable for me. I want one person that feels right no matter what time of the day it is, no matter where we end up. It should feel the same every time I walk into my new day.

She says she understands that explanation and we spend the rest of the night talking about other things, aware that we haven't discussed the getaway north for weeks now.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers