How I know that Capitalism has me tightly by the throat is that I return from a weeklong vacation harboring a sense of guilt for not having journaled/posted each day/at all. That’s not the behavior of someone whose life is supposed to be remembered. For the past few days I was on an excursion – a passive one in the form of a bourgie family cruise – but an excursion nonetheless. I learned/recalled about myself that, there is no pure form of relaxation. Even in the “do nothing” environment of a floating resort, my mind is constantly racing (and also looking back to ensure I’ve most poetically retraced each step). Coasting through the Mediterranean, I literally had all the time in the world. That’s how Lovely and I could afford the hours to meander the streets of Naples just find the perfect pizza. It wasn’t an expensive meal – 6 euro per person meant that it was less than the tip for Domino’s delivery. But the residual cost is the droning voice in the back of my head that I didn’t document the moment well, post it on the internet, journal about it, catalog the day or any others. How will the world know this mattered? My mind flashes through the biographies and biopics of all the greats, the curatorial statements sprinkled throughout retrospective exhibitions of those who deserve to be remembered. In Barcelona we shuffled through the Picasso Museum, and it seemed as if every shit the artist shat was synthesized into a dozen sketches, each to be studied ad infinitum by generations of art scholars. I docked in six ports and all I have to show for it are a bunch of crooked iPhone shots that don’t even deserve the gram. To think/know that I’m the one who cares the most about these crumbs of documentation is jested only more by recognizing how little I myself care about them. What is it about the lust for attention that makes me concerned not for a great life but for biographers who will obsessively write my gospel or at least my wikipedia entry? Is that what it is to be recognized? Is that impact? Is that legacy? To experience something passively, but for that something to then echo in history, ever bigger as time carries on? While being herded through the Vatican, it occurred to me that Jesus probably never wrote a single word about himself – was it because he knew that every breath he took would be theorized about by others for eons to come? Or because he was just a dude who was none the wiser to his infamy in wait? Maybe if I was a baseball player or a tightrope walker, it would be the least of my concerns for my life’s most impressive moments to be self-documented. But I came into my sense of significance as a writer. Not a writer about trees or the spirits that dwell in them, but of myself. The first time I ever felt truly proud came after I stood in front of a mic with my journal and described myself in cadence. As a writer, I’m not only supposed to live that great writerly life, but I am also burdened with the self-expectation to pen it better than anyone else – as if it actually matters whether anyone else will even remember who I was in three generations’ time. If there’s anything I’m taking away from my week on the Great Lethargic Boat, it’s that significance is most probably overrated. It might be better to quietly phase out of existence, void of a lingering reputation, or else let your ghost forever worry that someone’s going to dig up or concoct a scandal in an age when there no longer lives any eye-witnesses to testify on your behalf. To be Homer or Odysseus? At a certain point, how many people can even tell the difference?