Story

We’re now in October, and as predicted, I feel like I’m getting chewed up and spit out of 2019. I go through every January with a sense of rejuvenation, intention to get through the year at my pace this time. But I’m starting to realize that that’s the problem…my pace is a sprint.

Even the notion of one day growing old and wise enough to truly appreciate the present moment is a daunting task, a plan for the future that seems like I need to pass through countless obstacles in order to get to. In my attempts over the past few years to act like an adult, manage my life, and stop being in a position of being blind-sighted by everything because I didn’t think ahead, I’ve now trained myself to only know how to plan. I sit on planes searching for flight prices for my next trip. I look up dinner spots while eating lunch. This month, I’m applying for grants while just weeks away from the big project I’ve been working on for years. No wonder I’m riddled with anxiety – if anxiety is about being on edge about the unknown, I’ve propped myself up in the most uncomfortable position of perpetually leaning forward. So how do I lay back?

I don’t know if I’m forever trolling myself by believing that all I really want out of a perfect day is a morning where I’m able to meditate, stretch, write, and sip my coffee slowly – these are all the first things that I throw out the window when I open my eyes and reach for my phone. I’m telling myself that this will all be over after this project, after this month. I don’t really feel great about posting this after so many months of silence but tbh this basically sums up how I’ve been feeling all summer. Hoping for some ease. Actually, trying to stop hoping, longing, awaiting, anticipating, and just trying to be herenow.

In Latin America, there is a long history of poets becoming diplomats. I learned this recently through Lovely, who learned about the life of Neruda during her trip to Santiago. It is a beautiful concept – an acknowledgement of the value of well-thought words and the powerful tie between art and culture.

The same day I learned about this, I also learned about the abstract-expressionist painters who were corralled by the CIA for the culture wars against Russia. What a better deal, one might imagine – that these painters were not tasked to be actual diplomats the way that the Latin American poets are. They were not required to wear suits with lapels and to be stationed in other countries. They could simply do what they were good at, with slight (or drastic) slant toward nationhood.

I was hired as a curator as a poet, as well. It does not read as romantically in my mind as the biography of Neruda – it was more of a “gigs are running dry and I need a job” tale. Often, I wonder if I abandoned one life for the others. Despite my verbose curatorial statements and flowery keynotes, where does poetry still sit in my life? Can I still call myself a poet?

Lately, I’ve found myself in a lot of historic homes, which are meant to capture the legacy of their residents. Right now, roaming the earth without an address, I wonder what becomes of all the temporary residences? Will the legends of today be tracked by their Airbnbs and gentrifying luxury condos? How much does it matter where you laid your head, the spaces where I do the documenting but which I hardly ever document?

I don’t know why I’ve been contextualizing my self-image in the scope of the great and the famous again – they have led to some of my greatest disappointments, my most flagrant underestimations and under-appreciations of myself. After all, when we follow the hype all the way through, all the CV-building and social media output, isn’t it all to leave breadcrumbs for a legacy of greatness? Or am I just taking everything too seriously, too literally?

I’ve been in DC this past week. The difference is, for the first time in six years I’m not a resident. Our lease ended in May. We packed our belonging up into two shipping containers and jetted off to Europe. On our last day out, I managed to catch our super. He wandered the empty apartment like an empty maze, smiling in that kind of way that only expresses disbelief. “Six years!” he proclaimed. “Aiight man, good luck.”

It felt weird landing in Dulles, opening up Lyft, and not clicking the “Home” button. We’ve been staying with our friends Oscar and Les, their basement recently became an empty nest while their son is gallivanting in Seattle. I feel like I’m unpacking every time I fish out a sock. Out suitcases are splayed out on the floor like a massacre of clothing and toiletries. I can’t find shit. Every once in awhile, I scout for something before realizing that’s it’s squished up against furniture pads and boxes, somewhere out there in the jurisdiction of the shipping company.

Oscar and Les’ place is amazing. There’s a deck to catch sun and look out at the backside of the very-DC houses (something I always envied). They graciously stocked up on eggs and bread and condiments. Even our old house plants that they adopted are situating themselves in their new digs. They told us to make ourselves at home, and by all purposes, we have.

But feeling at home isn’t so much in those moments of intention. It helps to have a stocked kitchen, a comfortable bed, your partner at your side, and a considerable amount of your own shit around. But it’s in those moments between – feeling around for light switches, the foreign temperature of the floor on your bare feet, negotiating with unfamiliar shower faucets and their fickle temperature settings. These are not complaints, but rather observations – observations of things that fall into the subconscious when you’re actually at home.

But over the next few months, we will have no address. We will be living out of our suitcases, even if we are able to stuff our shirts into various closets and drawers during the lengthier stays. There’s an excitement about being somewhere new, and I usually most enjoy it when stepping outside. Discovering cafes and bakeries, encountering local flora, noticing the slightly-different hue of blue in the sky. If I can approach the inside life with the same curiosity, this era of vagabonding could be an easier pill to swallow.

I’m not sure if having no expectations is the same as expecting nothing, but the latter might better describe how I approached last week’s trip to the Vatican. It’s not a place that’s ever been on my bucket list, but perhaps one of the perks of being a husband is acquiring inlaws and their pilgrimages. Lovely’s family members are devout Catholics, and so it only makes sense that, when the opportunity arose for their first family vacation abroad, the Holy City was a no-brainer.

You’re thinking too much about it tends to be the answer to my questionings of God. My own parents met in Bible study, and I spent my early summers in Jesus camps. Like so many others whose worlds revolved around Christ Almighty, the topic of religion was inevitably the first area of interrogation when my mind developed into a critical one. I spent college writhing in spiritual confusion, and my early twenties coming to peace with my agnosticism. But the past few years have been a confluence of spiritual complications – visits to Muslim-predominant societies like Turkey and Indonesia, encounters with infamous Buddhist temples in Asia, intimate experiences in the context of Navajo and Hawaiian belief systems – all while Christianity has become an encroaching synonym for fascism.

That last thought feels both blasphemous and unpatriotic, and those two might also be synonyms.

The halls of the building where the Sistine Chapel sits are stacked with statues of gods and Gods. Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Judeo-Christian. Staring up at a sculpture of Oden outside the Vatican giftshop, one wonders if he’s put there to be worshiped or to be mocked for having been tamed, acquired, catalogued into the collection of another Creator’s museum. Long before seeing an actual depiction of Jesus or Mary, I lost count of the Anubises and Zeuses. Opening acts to the headliner.

In the parts of Vatican City where tourists have access, there is no space for solitude or quiet. Everything is so immaculate that you can’t stare at any single thing without someone in front of you raising their camera at it, or you yourself raising your camera at it. 30,000 visitors on a Tuesday. You can hardly hear the sound of your own voice, not to mention God’s.

By the time I reached Michelangelo’s famous ceiling, my feet and phone battery were zapped. Packed shoulder to shoulder, I raised my eyes to the ceiling and flipped on a Moses Sumney track to drown out the guards shouting at the crowd to quiet down. I stood directly under the iconic image of Adam touching fingertips with God. Time froze for a single moment. God looked so much smaller in person.

I left in awe of the ability of people to be motivated so deeply by their own notion of their own God that they could erect such structures. Paint such murals. Alter such history. I thought about the societies that fell at the hands of people who believe in this God, whose own gods are universally assumed falsified by virtue of the fact that they did not win against the swords and guns that bear the cross. None of those other gods get to be proper nouns, or have a church that’s actually a city that’s actually a country. I thought about the fact that Michelangelo did all of this for almost free. I thought about the fact that God did all of this for almost free.

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?

We move out of D.C. this week. Being in this state of transition has me investigating what it means to “miss” something, in this era where so much is fleeting. I’ve had best friends move away from me, and I’ve done the same in return. I’ve moved out of countless homes, and out of just as many cities. I’ve grown accustomed to traveling to new places, making friends within a few days, and then saying goodbye not knowing if I’ll ever see them again. A seven-year stretch in D.C. is, of course, more profound than a seven-day trip somewhere. But what is it about something lasting long that makes me feel like it should last longer? Does the longevity of an experience convince us that it is more deserving of permanence?

I’ll of course miss my friends here, even though I’ll probably continue seeing them once every couple of months. I’ll miss my apartment, but even in the past few weeks of packing up, it no longer looks or feels like home anyway. Home is not made of one’s objects, but it is in the curation of them. With all my things tucked away in boxes, I also feel tucked away in a box.

I’ll miss my routines. My bike route, even the part where I sneer at the White House and grumble at the waddling tourists. I’ll miss going to Hana market to pick up onigiri, Firehook to pick up an olive loaf. But even that’s just empty carbs. The life I’d supposedly miss will still be with me, if not revisited often then encapsulated in memory of my D.C. years.

We’re not living in the times of covered wagons and the Pony Express, where “so long” actually meant such, when embarking a few hundred miles away meant you were leaving a life behind for good. I have the great luxury of knowing I’ll be back, that not being here daily doesn’t mean that I won’t be here forever. I carry the experiences of this city in my bones, and it’ll be with me everywhere I go.

The first city I fell in love with is Chicago. It was 2003, and I hadn’t traveled all that much yet. All I knew about the Bay Area cities I grew up around was that I was bored of them – I was a teenager ready to escape. Being in Chicago helped me feel a sense of locality in a place where I wasn’t one. I learned that I could get to know roads and routes, become a familiar face, and even learn to embody certain tropes of the cultural landscape. But mostly, it was about the people. Once most of my Chicagoan friends left, I didn’t really have a reason to go back. Last year, I made a day-trip and hardly left the Loop. I ate at steakhouses and sandwich spots surrounded by tourists, I stared at my phone screen during the cab rides back and forth from the airport. Sometimes you can feel so familiar that you no longer even notice it.

Over the past couple of years, some cities have nestled into my heart – the places where I’ve actually called home; Oakland, New York, D.C. And then Honolulu, New Orleans, the vastness of New Mexico. None of those are places I’m moving to. My next venture to L.A. feels strangely predictable. I know it well enough to see beyond its vanity. I might even be able to catch the slow pace that I’m looking for, but who knows. I might get swept up. I won’t be settling in until the end of the year (or later) and in the meantime and preparing for several months of vagabonding. While I’m out at sea, or air, or concrete, I’ll be exposing myself to new cities but I’ll miss all my beloved places the same. How much room do I have in my heart for so many locales? When does a constellation decide to connect its last dot with the first?

I ended my most recent project in New Orleans last week, and as I boarded the aircraft I wondered when I would return. “The door’s always open for you,” various friends said in various ways. What does it mean to be always passing through? How do I find a sense of home in my transience?

Lately, when people ask me how I’m doing, my response is either trying to catch up or trying to slow down – either way, it means the same thing. I recognize a misalignment between the pace of the universe and that within my self. The earth has been spinning steadily for billions of years. Even more billions of life forms have ascended and descended back into the soil, most thriving perfectly without a sense of time or scale – yet somehow I’ve spent the majority of my existence convinced that I’m supposed to cram more, faster, bigger into my life than the rest. You’re meant for so much more, I told myself throughout my 20’s, as if life itself wasn’t already enough, beyond, overwhelming.

But how limited my notion of more has been – achieving certain incomes, performing in certain venues, being validated by certain institutions, associating with certain individuals, proving it on certain platforms. How liberating it is, then, to turn 36 today with the recognition that it’s all just molecules, pixels, or even less.

A few weeks ago my white blood cell count came in low. I spent a few days scared and saddened shitless. “It turns out it’s just stress,” the doctor told me on my follow-up appointment. “Try not to stress about it.” Just stress struck as an odd and paradoxical phrase. It made me think of all the things in my life that would benefit if I shrugged them off the same, placed the word just in front of them instead of acting like they were the cores of all gravitational pull. My body is literally, on a cellular level, struggling to catch up with my life, my ambition for that limited and minuscule more.

If life is a roller coaster, then being 36 is like being at the very top – having gone uphill for that tense first half of the ride with all the cranks wound up. You grip the handle until your knuckles are white and brace yourself for the descent, hoping the camera doesn’t catch you freaking the fuck out. But fortunately, life isn’t a roller coaster. The world doesn’t spin faster or slower for anyone. The universe is very anti-climactic. I aspire to live accordingly.

Being raised in the world of art and activism means that I grew up learning to frame everything I do in the scope of social service. My art has been cultivated with the belief that the stories I aim to tell are bigger than myself – whether that has meant representing identities or beliefs on the margins, or harboring a message that can serve to benefit the collective consciousness. My community organizing has also been about pushing fields and visions further, emphasized even more so working at an institution whose sector literally labels me a “public servant.” One would think that following a life in this direction offers constant checks and balances to keep one selfless, to avoid becoming narcissistic – but I’ve learned that this isn’t necessarily the case.

When everything you do is by default “for others” it can become a slippery slope down a superhero narrative. You start being convinced that doing for yourself is automatically doing for others. Indulgences become necessities for upholding your mentality, physicality, morale for doing the “good work.” But this is how preachers end up with Benzes. It’s how Silicon Valley CEOs justify massive bonuses. It’s how activists end up undermining or holding themselves above the individuals within the communities we’re supposed to uplift. Such faults, we tell ourselves, are overwritten by all the good we do – in fact, we can even tell ourselves that these are the tools, boundaries, vehicles of self-care that are needed in order to be as selfless as we would like to believe we are.

We all need to treat ourselves. But sometimes I wonder if creating a binary in which our service is “work” and our contradictions are “play.” It not only puts us in dangerous territory where harm unto ourselves and others are justified, but we also lose sight of the ways in which the work we do can be, in fact, the treat. We start seeing the art we make, the connections we build, the stories we tell, as the giving. We fail to recognize how the audience inspires us, the community feeds us, the actions themselves keep us holistically tone.

I’ve been thinking about this over the past couple of days while here in New Mexico working on Ways of Knowing. It has been more and more difficult to frame this project in the conventional terms of service as stated above. We are not some group coming from outside merely to benefit the Navajo community. Each time I leave a session with someone here, I leave so satiated, evolved, touched, that I wonder if I’m actually the biggest beneficiary of the project. I then wonder if that’s wrong. I then question the entire dynamic of weighing who benefits more.

Is it selfish of me to be able to more tangibly recognize the ways in which this project has deepened my own relationship with the earth and my vision of the world? Perhaps only if I see projects like this as a one-way dynamic of servitude. But if I recognize the nature of exchange and sharing that exists in communities like the ones we’ve been encountering – and find inspiration in the ecosystem around us, things might look different. Neither the bee nor the flower see themselves as the “public servant” in the process of pollination. There is hardly even a recognition of the “greater good” or the “natural balance” that is being maintained by either, they just simply are doing them. I feel that this is the biggest challenge that I’m facing now – to unravel the categorizations that parcel collective growth. To not think so highly of what I do, and allow the things that fill me up to simply fill me up.

One of the points in Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens that has stuck with me is the notion of the “luxury trap.” A quick googling of it offers some article titles that sum it up quite succinctly – When niceties become necessities, reads one. A deeper dig reveals the nihilistic sentiment often provoked – “as we all know, those who do not rape the environment today will not be able to afford to buy canned air tomorrow,” reads a Reddit post. The topic as described in the book looks at things from a more humanistic, mile-high view. As technology and wealth increases, delicacies become staples. Occasions become regimens. Fantasies become expectations. From this view, the debate is about whether greater access to industrialized food is worth the pollution caused by the meat industry. If advancements in transportation are worth the pollution. Each of these threads can spiral in their own ways.

Then, because the internet is the internet, there is a host of writing about how the luxury trap applies to one’s self. The top hit for the phrase goes, How it works at how to avoid it. This is maybe more along the lines of how I’ve been chewing on this topic, all while being mindful of my very human tendency to try to beat the house at its own game. The ideal, of course, is to enjoy all the perks that luxury affords, without falling into its trappings. To be able to indulge while being above it all. To take a hit without getting addicted.

This kind of view can be problematic, because, like everything else, it’s all relative. I can easily compare myself with others and feel myself for not feeling the need for expensive jewelry, new cars, a big house, even premium cable. I can recognize that flying first class is something I can live without (ask me again after I somehow get bumped up on an international flight one day tho), and that indulgences like VIP seats or bottle service are not the kinds of things I’d like to spend my money on.

But luxury doesn’t always come with a high price tag. The luxuries that I often worry about getting too comfortable in are those that are like the proverbial lobster in the proverbial pot. The micro-upgrades in life that are the difference between getting somewhere on foot, versus bus, versus subway, versus Uber. It’s the appetizers I didn’t use to have room for, the extra 15 minutes to myself I didn’t use to need each morning for peace of mind. And then there’s just some things that come with getting older – like not couch-surfing anymore. But even in those cases, I wonder if “my back can’t handle that” or “I’m not in my twenties anymore” are valid justifications that do easily make the difference of hundreds of dollars after a few nights. Getting my own room instead of crashing in someone’s pad, or my own ride instead of hopping in a carpool, or generally expecting loads of privacy and agency in an existence that has long been built on communal activities are where my luxury traps lie. There are things I used to never expect that now I demand – the trap is described as that which is easy to accept as an upgrade, but difficult to downgrade back to. Perhaps it’s a question of shared value, collective definitions of convenience, standards of beauty. It’s awakening from the American Dream, and being okay with how life looks in the light.