The question is, are you working with your head or heart? At some point you’ve got to stop being who your parents want you to be and start being who you are.

…

Would you rap if there was no Biggie, no Jay-Z?

Would you play the guitar if there was no Eddie Van Halen?

Would you be in the music business if David Geffen hadn’t made all that money?

If not, give up. Please. You’re hurting yourself. And you’ll leave no lasting mark.

But if you need to play, don’t lament that you’re not a millionaire. The music should be enough. If you’ve got a roof over your head, if you can pay the bills, you’re on the map. Affecting a coterie deeply is more important than being a momentary comet, burning brightly and then flaming out.

I read something like that and I get a little shaky because it hits so close to home, like he knows a secret about me that I don’t want anyone to know. It’s easy to be snarky, cynical, to be in it for the money, to be ironic. It’s hard to believe in something.

People ask me all the time, where is this going? What’s your goal? What’s the end game? I tell them I want to be a writer.

But that’s the simple, reductionist answer. The truth is I need to write. And I can only hope that someday someone will give me money to do it. It’s not the greatest business plan but it’s the truth.

See, I’ve tried to quit writing. I’ve tried a lot. From twenty to twenty six I tried to quit writing every six months. I’d start a blog and I’d just write the shit out of it. Words would pour out of me. I’d post twice a day like I had to hit some magic number before they turned the Internet off.

Then something would happen. I’d realize that I didn’t have an audience. Or the wrong person would find it, a family member, a friend. I’d get nervous because my rough edges were showing, and I’d wonder what was going to happen when people knew things about me. Because my words weren’t professional. I wasn’t writing about a cool subject like marketing, or a hip subject like social networking. I wasn’t writing about writing or making money on the Internet. I wasn’t dispensing advice to those in my generation. I was just writing the kind of things I wanted to read and I wasn’t strong enough to stand on that. Something would spook me, I’d drop the writing, walk away from it, and find something new to be interested in.

But a few months later, I’d start again. There’d be a new service. Diaryland or Livejournal or Blogger. I’d bounce between, torn between wanting to have someone read my words and afraid to be judged by them.

We love to scream about the narcissist. We love to tell those around us that we don’t twitter and we don’t read status updates on facebook. We love to surround ourselves with people so we can tell them how much we don’t give a shit about what other people are doing.

But is it narcissistic to just want to connect? To put yourself out there and say “this is what I’m about, what are you about?” I don’t know. I’ve read so many snarky condemnations of the narcissist that I couldn’t recognize one if I was holding up their mirror for them.

At some point you’re going to have to decide if you’re afraid of what other people are going to say about you. And if you are, then you’re never going to step out and do something great. Because if you do, if you step out, you’re going to attract haters. And you’re most likely going to fail in the attempt, and still, you’re going to attract mountains of criticism. It’s not fair but it happens and most of it, the worst of it, is going to come from your own brain.

And so for years I fought that battle. The first thing I ever put on the internet was a zine called NaCL. Salt. I wanted to write a monthly newsletter. Silly stupid shit. I had it online for about twelve hours, submitted it to search engines. This was in the days when Yahoo mattered and before anyone had googled anything. This was back when if you built something, the internet was small enough that other people would find it. The first email I got was one telling me that my writing sucked and that I should quit. And to a 19 year old me, that mattered. I tore the whole site down – a site that had taken me weeks to hand code – the next day.

So I wrote in secret after that. Wrote short stories, essays. I’d just write to write, because it was fucking awesome and I liked doing it. Every once in a while, like a build up of pressure, I’d crack. We used to all hang out on this mailing list and some nights I’d pound out a short story and send it to the whole list. Just because I wanted to know that it was in front of someone. And I could lie to myself and say that at least someone was reading it.

There’s this scene in Almost Famous:

I used to do speed. You know, and sometimes a little cough syrup? I’d stay up all night, just writing and writing. I mean, like pages of dribble — You know, about The Faces, or Coltrane. You know, just to fucking write.

I love that scene. I love that scene because I’ve written and deleted more in the last ten years than I’ll probably write in the next ten.

I didn’t find writing. I didn’t say, I’m going to be a writer. Writing was just the thing I did when I burned out everything else in my life. Writing was the one thing I came back to time and time again in all those quiet moments when I wanted to understand the world around me. Everyone who talks about finding their passion has it backwards. You don’t find your passion, it’s not hiding under a rock, waiting to be picked up and taken home. Your passion is already there; it’s the thing you’re doing every day. It’s the thing you do when you need a break, when it you need to blow off steam. And if there’s nothing there yet, there will be, just give it time. It took me ten years to finally attach my name to my writing. You’ve got time. Don’t panic.

I couldn’t believe how much freedom I suddenly had. Every time I sat down in the driver’s seat I’d get giddy. The sense of possibility was so overwhelming it was a physical thing. No matter where I was going – school, work, a friend’s apartment – I’d wonder what would happen if I kept driving. I’d give myself stress headaches thinking about it. Where would I end up? Who would I meet? What would I see?

Some nights I’d just get in the car and drive. I’d get out on those Arizona highways and drive for three or four hours with the windows down and that cool creosote soaked desert air blowing in my face, a road atlas next to me on the passenger seat. There wasn’t anything out there to see, only whatever plants my headlights could pick up at fifty miles an hour. It wasn’t about going fast. Hell, the car was only a couple of years younger than I was. But it was mine and for the first time in a life dominated by high school or college, and adults telling me what to do next, I had something that was truly mine, something that no one else could control.

Over the next six months I put something like twelve thousand miles on that car. I drove to San Diego to sleep on the beach. I drove to Seattle to visit a friend for a week and was still there a month later. And when I left, instead of going home to Arizona, I drove to Philadelphia. It took me five days to cross the country sleeping in my car, brushing my teeth in sketchy rest area bathrooms and surviving on what I could buy out of vending machines. I was so tired by the third day I could only drive for two or three hours at a stretch before I had to pull over and sleep. I was so sleep deprived that I almost blew a tire outside of Chicago and didn’t notice that the steering had gone to shit or that my front end was shaking so bad my arms were getting rubbery. I only pulled over because I couldn’t figure out how to get my portable CD player, which was sitting on my passenger seat, to stop skipping.

I’ve driven across the country a number of times since that first trip but none of those subsequent trips have had the same sense of adventure as that first time. Partly because I’d done it before. The shine had worn off. I knew about the long days with nothing to see, the days of singing or of talking to yourself to pass the time. Of doing jumping jacks by the side of the road to wake up and get the knots out of your back.

That first trip I ran hot. I was low on cash and I didn’t want to get stuck somewhere in the middle of the country with no idea of what to do. But a bigger part was because I couldn’t believe that I was out there, doing it. I expected a big hand to reach down and pluck me right off the road. To turn me back and put me back where I was supposed to be. I’d walked away from college, from an apartment, from a girl I thought I loved, from a whole life. I drove hard, all day every day because I wanted to see just how far I could push on this new freedom before someone figured out I wasn’t playing by the rules.

And that feeling stayed with me for years. There was always one more mile to drive, one more drink to drink – nothing could ever be enough.

It wouldn’t be until eleven or twelve years later that I’d hit a wall. I was standing on a rocky beach in Alaska. It was midnight and the sun hadn’t set, still burning low and orange sitting just above the horizon. There were only a few of us still awake bullshitting about our lives back home and as we started to pack it in for the night, I turned and just stared off at the mountains silhouetted by the sun.

It was a beautiful night, the kind you don’t want to end. And as people were headed to bed I couldn’t help but think, “This is it. This is about as far as I can go in one direction. Much further north and all I’m doing is heading south again.”

It was a strange kind of bookend to all those years I’d spent wondering what was just around the next bend or over the next hill. For years that feeling of potential had always been there. But for the first time in my life I felt like I had found the end of the road.

There was almost a childlike wonder to it – like following a rainbow and, despite a cynical belief that it’s really nothing more than just water in the atmosphere, finding the pot of gold. I’d always thought that if I just drove long enough I’d find an adventure. For whatever reason, standing on that beach, I suddenly felt like I was finally in the middle of one.

Even now I’m not sure why. I’ve thought a lot about that night. Maybe it was the people. Maybe it’s that Alaska feels a little wild, a little untamed. Maybe it was lack of sleep or too much hiking. The rational part of my brain wants to pick it apart, give it an explanation and even though I know that will kill whatever magic the moment holds, it’s hard to stop myself.

For the first time since I sat down in my car and drove all night to San Diego, I felt something new. Not just fun or exciting but totally new. Out of context with everything I’d felt over the last thirty years. At a point in my life when I thought I knew all I didn’t know, I found myself wanting to laugh and cry at the same moment. Unsure of what I was feeling and too overcome to take out my camera and snap a picture.

I know in moments like that, there’s supposed to be some epiphany. Some revelation that then drives the next ten years of my life. But there wasn’t that night. I stood there for as long as I could and when the sun dipped behind the mountains, I simply wandered off to bed. Happy to have been there.

Even a year later I’m unable to come up with some context for that night in Alaska. That first trip across the country wasn’t a mystery. It was a decision, a line in the sand. How far was I going to push against what other people wanted for me? When I left Seattle I was blowing up a whole life. My parents were telling me to get my ass back in school. Everyone was telling me that I was making a mistake. And the whole time that everyone was telling me what I needed to be doing, I was driving myself crazy with the idea that I should just do something. And maybe I should do something that I didn’t necessarily believe was smart just to see if it could be done. For months I’d dreamed of pointing the damn car in one direction and driving until I couldn’t any longer, just to see what would happen. And standing there at the beginning of the summer, low on money I was faced with a decision. Was I going to get a job, enroll in school, push the all those thoughts and dreams out of my head and take what was, admittedly, the smarter path or was I just going to jump?

I know that there’s something in me that’s wired a little different. it’s a little wild and probably a little loose. It’s easy, looking back, to see what 18 year old me was going to do. There was no way I was going to enroll in school, get a job, put down roots. Given the choice between chasing the adventure and doing the smart thing, there’s no question that I’d chase the adventure.

And that’s why I’ve come back to that moment on the beach so many times. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t feel the need to keep moving. Suddenly some hunger that had been driving since I was seventeen just vanished. I can only imagine that what I felt that night is what it must feel like to find god.

I was 25 when I moved out to California and I had these terrible nights of insomnia. I’d lie in bed for hours, my mind just racing. I couldn’t ever get rid of that feeling like if I wasn’t moving I was dying. I’d crossed the country twice looking for something that I clearly hadn’t found and I didn’t know how much more slingshotting between coasts I could take. But whatever I needed, I hadn’t found it. And I’d lie there unable to sleep until I’d slip out of the apartment and down to the beach.

Some nights I’d sit there for hours watching the moon over the water. Even with an ocean in front of me, I’d still feel that urge to go. People would ask me “why California?” I’d tell them it was as far west as I could drive. I thought it was just a funny thing to say but sitting there in the dark and cold, buried in a sweatshirt, I’d feel a frustration that I couldn’t go further. Like the ocean was a personal insult, trying to tell me what I could and couldn’t do.

That night in Alaska I should have been mad or resigned or angry. Any of those old comfortable emotions that I’d worn every other time in my life when I felt like there wasn’t an escape to be had or a move to be made. But I didn’t. I felt happy. Delighted. Amazed. For the first time in my life I felt like standing still. I felt like someone else.

I was given the option early on to either join the tour or sit it out. Impulsively and without really thinking about it, I volunteered on the spot. Then I spent the next week wondering why I’d do something so dumb. Six weeks on the road, eleven or twelve of us on a tour bus, new city every day, living out of hotel rooms. Stop for a moment and think this through, when was the last time you wanted to take a six-week road trip with your boss and coworkers?

It would be different if I was one of the stars, but if Tucker and Nils are the band, then I’m a roadie. A step below the tour manager. Believe me, I’m not going to see my name on any riders and there aren’t going to be any groupies sneaking back stage to hang out with me.

At first I rationalized the decision. I told myself that it was a good idea without really believing it. I told myself that I should be doing this. That it would be good to get myself out of my comfort zone and have an adventure. Then, because I didn’t really believe any of that, I asked myself “eh, what’s the worst that could happen?” Turns out, I’ve got a pretty good imagination when it comes to the disaster scenarios.

I give a lot of advice as a result of this blog. And most of that advice is that if you’re going to grow as a person, you have to put yourself in situations that allow you to get outside of yourself. To shake up those unconscious (or maybe conscious) perceptions we hold about ourselves that, under the wrong circumstances, can be incredibly limiting. For all the times I’ve told people to go out and live and interesting life, I’m actually terrible at doing it. I get stuck in my routines all the time. I pass on opportunities because they sound like too much trouble and pretty soon I’m stuck in this feedback loop where I’m just here in front of the computer all day afraid of the outside world, afraid to go to the kitchen and make a sandwich.

So this should be a good thing. Presented with an opportunity to do something big and scary (and more importantly, outside in the sunlight), I was all “where do I sign up?” I should get a merit badge or something.

It took me most of that week to realize why I did it. And if you already think I’m an asshole this is where you should probably stop reading. I did it because after September 25th everything changes. We’re no longer the scrappy little company that could. We’ll either be on the map or buried in the ground underneath it.

I don’t want to overstate my importance to Rudius. I can only hope that when everything is said and done, I contributed to its success in some small way. There were things that I could have done better and there are some places where I think I shined. But what this company has given me is tremendous. I spent a large part of my life doing things because I thought I had to do them. I worked in an office and hated it for far too long because that’s what everyone around me was doing. And while I eventually left that life behind, I did so by packing what I could into my car, throwing everything else out, and moving across the country with no clear idea of what was supposed to happen next. It was not a graceful exit.

You’d think that would have taught me a lesson. Most people would have taken that as a sign that they weren’t cut out for the business casual lifestyle. But once I was back in school and looking around for what the next step would be, I set my sights firmly on the one career that would put me right back in the middle of the very environment I’d just burned out on. Law.

And the whole time I was in school working towards a poly sci degree and eventually law school I was spending every spare moment writing these little stories. Sitting up at night with a couple of beers or maybe a few fingers of whiskey in a mug and just writing. The words were just pouring out of me. And it still didn’t occur to me that I might be walking down the wrong path.

It wasn’t until Rudius that I really started to consider that I might have a goddamn choice. I might be able to do something that didn’t make me feel numb inside. I’m not where I want to be yet but these last three years have at least shown me how to get there. And for that I’m infinitely grateful, and a little scared. If I fail now, there are no excuses. It’s not about not knowing what to do anymore. It’s now just about putting in the work.

And that’s why, initially, I wanted to be on the movie tour. If there’s one event that’s going to be the psychological line in the sand between the company we were and the company we become, it’s going to be these six weeks. Gone are the days when this thing was run out of a living room in South Central. Gone are the days when it was six or eight people not knowing exactly where or when the break would come, just hoping that if they could hold on long enough it would eventually come.

I feel like an asshole writing a thousands words about this. This is really one of those good problems to have. Like having too much money. We’re finally going to be on solid ground and all I can do is reminisce about the past.

But in trying to figure out why I wanted to do this tour, I’ve been thinking a lot about the three years and everything that came before that. I started in IT right at the end of the dot-com bubble. I spent a lot of time at my desk in those days reading about the bay area and what was happening out there. Kids … kids my age were making and losing fortunes. They were on the covers of magazines. The whole country was just losing its collective mind over the new economy and the new-new economy. I didn’t know what any of it meant, I didn’t have the experience or perspective to make any sense of it. Because of that I believed all of the hype. Really bought into it and sitting there, night after night following the latest news I was losing my mind along with everyone else.

This wasn’t like watching Lebron get drafted out of high school and knowing that no matter how many hours of basketball I played, I was never going to play in the NBA. These kids, these architects of the new economy, were building the future with skills I fucking had. I’m not sure how many times I wished I’d been born five years earlier and on a different coast. Of course, if I’d had any balls at all, I would have gone and chased that dream instead of sitting at my desk bitter about everything I was missing out on.

It wasn’t even the money that I was so enamored with, although I wouldn’t have said no to it. It was the sense that these kids were part of something. They were having an adventure. And the rest of the country could do nothing but sit and watch, and try to live vicariously through profiles in the New York Times and cover stories in Wired.

I didn’t give a shit that they were working eighty hours, 120 hours a week. I was running a third shift help desk, watching kung-fu movies and reading reference books on networking topologies to pass the time. What scared me was this suggestion that my early twenties would just end up being a series of uneventful nights and non-events. And so when I got the chance to sign on to the company that would become Rudius, I jumped at it. In a way, I’d been priming myself for it all along.

I probably don’t need to tell you that working here hasn’t been like the dot-com bubble at all. If you’d told me what the last three years would entail that first night, I’d have laughed in your face. This has been its own through-the-looking-glass adventure. I’m sure I’ll write about it one day, when I’ve had some time to gain a little perspective on it all. It makes me laugh now to think about what I was chasing three years ago. And despite the ups and downs, I’m pretty happy with where I’ve landed.

I’ve stopped trying to predict the future. I don’t have a clue what happens September 26th. I can see myself working for Rudius for the next five years and I can see myself getting on a plane to finally do the around the world trip I’ve been thinking about for the last ten years. Ever since I first touched down in Hawaii with a little money in my pocket, a backpack full of camping gear and no clear idea what came next. At this point I’m just happy to have had the experience and hopefully, one day, it’s going to make a good story.

This ritual of trying to process our own grief by making media out of it.

~ Jay Smooth

My grandmother died over the July 4th weekend.

Before you get all ZOMG, she was 92. She had health problems, she suffered from dementia. Her quality of life wasn’t all that great at the end so while it was a shock to hear, it wasn’t unexpected.

But it was a hard phone call to get on July 4th. I had planned on spending the holiday at home, maybe with a case of beer and some barbeque but at the last minute I got the chance to fly to San Francisco and see some close friends I hadn’t seen in too long. And since I’m just stupid for any chance to get out of LA, I took the first flight I could book myself on.

Had I been at home, I imagine that I would have taken the phone call, hung up and spent a quiet day trying to figure out exactly what I was feeling. Maybe I would have focused on the beer more than the barbeque but all in all I would just watched some TV, maybe caught some fireworks over the city and gone to bed.

As it happened I was standing in the dining room of a friend’s apartment, probably in my boxers and a dirty t-shirt, probably smelling like something that had just crawled itself out of the bottom of a whiskey bottle. I had one of those hangovers that makes it hard to look directly at people. The kind that leaves you feeling anxious for no reason, like you owe the world an apology but you can’t figure out what you’ve done wrong. I kept tripping over my words, barely able to complete a sentence, and just holding a conversation was leaving me out of breath. When my cell phone rang and I saw it was my dad, I assumed he was calling to wish me a happy fourth. I had to stop and ask myself if I could make it through the conversation without bursting into a nervous verbal diarrhea.

Twenty-four hours earlier, we’d wandered into a tourist bar on the edge of Union Square to grab a drink and see where the day would take us. With no definite plans, I should have known that we were headed nowhere good. Instead I let myself get caught up in the flow of things. A few drinks here, a six pack at someone’s house down by the stadium, then a quick ride over to a club where we drank until close and then piled into cabs to head to an after hours spot. It was one of those nights where I’d lost all sense of time. One moment I was sipping a whiskey coke with the whole night in front of me and the next, as if by magic, I was sitting on the back deck of this bar, watching the sun slowly come up over the city and thinking “fuck me, it can’t be dawn. I’m not in any kind of shape to face a new day.”

If you’ve never stayed out drinking until sunrise, it’s an awful feeling. There’s nothing in this world that can make you feel like more of a degenerate than watching the sun come up and being hit with the realization that you’ve got nothing but a long, painful day ahead while your liver and kidneys try and undo whatever damage you inflicted the night before.

It was just a few sweat soaked hours after catching a cab back to my friend’s place that my phone rang. I found myself yelling “Hey Dad! Happy Fourth!” into the phone in an attempt to keep ahead of the conversation. I hoped to hell that he wouldn’t ask why I was shouting like a lunatic. As it turned out, he wasn’t calling to wish me a happy fourth.

No matter how expected, no matter what kind of forewarning, that phone call is always a shock.

It was six years ago, this month I think, my grandmother on my mom’s side died.

That was the year that a friend and I packed up my Honda civic and with no clear plan or idea of what we were getting ourselves into, moved from east coast to west. The trip across the country had been successful in that we’d made it to Idaho where he was staying with, ironically, the same friend whose living room I’d be standing in six years later when I got the call from my dad. And while he was in Idaho, I was staying with my aunt in again, somewhat ironically, San Francisco and looking for an apartment so that I could get the three of us out of Idaho and to Santa Cruz.

I was just pulling up after another unsuccessful day of apartment hunting when my mom called to tell me that her mother had had a stroke. I must have been just getting out of my car when I answered the phone because all I remember is standing barefoot on my aunt’s front lawn as my mom told me. I’m not sure why, but for years I’d feel like a real asshole for not taking that call inside where the neighbors couldn’t watch me pacing back and forth, kicking at the grass underfoot.

Because my mom’s side of the family is Jewish, the funeral had to be held within forty-eight hours. And so what followed was the sort of logistical action that usually accompanies proclamations of war. Flights had to be booked, bags had to be packed, houses had to be sat, pets had to be looked after. For my part, I had to dig my suit out of the trunk of my car from where I had carefully wrapped it into a ball and wedged it half under my spare tire.

This need for hasty action left little time for thinking. All I had to do was stuff some sort-of-clean clothes into a backpack, lock my car and get on a plane. By the time I slowed down enough to take a sort of internal inventory I was three thousand miles away from my aunt’s front lawn and sitting in my grandparent’s house in Northeast Philadelphia surrounded by a family whom, having arraigned this complex movement of people around the country, were left with no good outlet for all the emotion and nervous, anxious energy that had been fueling them for 48 hours.

Six years later, my dad would give me the news calmly. My grandmother had died, there would be a memorial service at the end July or the beginning of August. We’d talk again later in the week when he knew more of the specifics. His calm smashed through my hangover and left me stupidly repeating “I’m really sorry” over and over again, not knowing what to say, what I wanted to say or if I had to say anything at all. He assured me that he was doing ok and hung up.

In that moment I wished I was home on my couch, door locked, no one around. I didn’t know what to feel and I really just needed ten minutes to figure out what was going on in my own head. I could see my friends in the dining room, talking as they waited for the first pot of coffee to finish brewing. I didn’t want to have to tell them. I didn’t want to be the asshole who ruined what was shaping up to be a great weekend with this news. I didn’t want to deal with the sudden flood of memories that I had to push as far out of my head as possible. I wished I had let the phone call go to voicemail.

As I walked back into the dining room, trying to paste something approximating a smile onto my face, I wondered if I even had to tell them. It was my pain right? My life and my family and maybe they didn’t need to know. Maybe all I needed were a few beers and a few laughs and I could essentially just push pause on the portion of my brain that knew – hold it suspended until the weekend was over and I was back in Los Angeles.

But I must have brought it up because the next thing I remember, I was being handed a tall boy from the fridge and asked “were you two close?” I shrugged off the question, not really knowing where to start.

The whole processing thing was easier when my mom’s mom died. That felt like a proper death. Like an emergency. There were a lot of people asking each other how they were doing. A lot of very serious phone calls made where nothing of consequence was said. I knew what was expected of me: drop everything and get on the plane. In its own way that was comforting. I didn’t have to think about my feelings because my job, along with my step dad, was simply to be there for my mom.

This time, there was no sense of emergency. Just the news of what happened and instructions to wait for the next phone call. With no one telling me what to do, I found myself confused. Did I fly back to Los Angeles early? And what would that accomplish? Did I gut it out in San Francisco?

So I did what I thought I was supposed to do. I slipped two fingers of rum into my coffee to help with the hangover, finished my eggs and toast and got ready to head out to the barbecue like we’d planned.

In a way of I was proud of myself. I kept thinking on the drive over to the barbeque, “this is what you’re supposed to do. You deal with it and you get on with your day.” Like it was a simple inconvenience but nothing that should actually interfere with my day.

And that feeling lasted about ten minutes. I wasn’t through my first serving of potato salad before I had a giddy, almost unstoppable need to laugh. I couldn’t stop thinking, “this is really how you’re going to spend your afternoon? You really think you can just turn yourself off like this? You’ve lost your goddamn mind.” Luckily, I don’t think anyone noticed when I slipped out and walked back to the apartment.

On that walk back I was angry. Angry that I’d get something like this dropped on me without anyone telling me what I should fucking do about it. Angry that I couldn’t seem to nail down what I was feeling. Angry that one moment I was praising myself for “handling shit” – that’s how I’d thought about it in the car, as “handling shit” – and the next moment I was sneaking out of barbecues because I thought I was about to crack.

I wanted the memorial service to be that day, not a month away. I wanted someone else to tell me “ok, be sad now and when this service is over you can go back to your life.” I wanted someone else to feel what I was feeling, so I wouldn’t feel so goddamn alone.

That week in Philadelphia six years earlier was so charged with tension and anger and sadness and hurt that by the time I boarded the plane to return to California, I was exhausted by the intensity of what my mom and her siblings were going through. Boarding that plane was an escape, like I’d been standing too close to a fire for too long and even though the soles of my shoes had melted, I could finally move away and find some relief. And it provided its own sense of closure. By the time the plane had hit cruising altitude I had put the whole week behind me.

This time, I found myself buying a six-pack of beer and a microwave pizza at five in the afternoon on July 4th. Even the guy working the counter must have seen something in my face because he took one look at me and asked “Hey man, you doing alright?” with a concern that went beyond simple politeness.

Now that I’ve been back in Los Angeles for a few weeks, I’m not sure how necessary the memorial service is. I’ve had enough time to find my own sense of closure. I’ve had enough time to deal with the shock and with the flood of memories and with everything else that comes with losing a family member.

I’m still going to the memorial service. For one, I bought the tickets back when I was looking for someone to tell me how to feel and what to do and I figure that getting on the plane is probably easier than trying to explain this to a Southwest representative and get a refund.

But I’m also going because it’ll be nice to see my dad’s side of the family. And without needing them to tell me what I’m feeling, maybe this trip can be about more than just losing a grandparent.

I wish I could say that I haven’t been writing here because my life is boring and there’s nothing worth saying. But when has boring ever stopped a blogger from writing about themselves?

I haven’t been writing because I learned some things about myself in Panama that I’m not real happy about. In past adventures I was always the shit talking, tough as nails, world-weary guy who could travel forever. Fixed addresses, owning more than could fit in a pack, speaking the local language — that was all for other people. I was going to circumnavigate the globe and never stop. I was going to crawl into every strange and exotic hole only to emerge when I had a story worth telling.

Traveling is a lot of things but it isn’t easy. No one ever talks about it being lonely or boring or scary. No one talks about having days with nothing to do or how after a week of sleeping in a hostel dormitory you kill yourself if it meant five minutes of peace away from the awkward blowjob the guy on the top bunk is getting from his girlfriend while you’re trying to sleep on the bottom bunk.

If we do talk about this stuff, it usually ends up sounding hopelessly romantic. Or at least, it does to me because there’s some lose wire in my head that tells me that it’s better to be miserable than bored. I’d rather the experience be scary than dull. I’d rather have the story than the money. If I had to list my insecurities they wouldn’t be about my clothes or my appearance or the car I drive. I’m afraid of being one of those dull, boring people you meet around the water cooler who has nothing to talk about except what was on TV last night. I’m afraid of missing out on an experience, of being left behind.

And even though I’m pretty fucking far from that person, insecurities are rarely rational. Which makes them worse because no matter how many times I tell myself this isn’t true, or show myself how far I’ve come from the office life, part of me still thinks I’ll end up in some Monday morning ego session where people in badly fitting business casual khakis talk about things they don’t fully understand and we’re all nice to each other because of the almighty label of ‘professionalism’ and not because we actually like or respect each other.

But at some point in Panama, the stories stopped sounding romantic and I found myself craving routine over adventure. I found myself thinking about how nice it would be to indulge in all those things I had sort of held my nose up at before. Suddenly, I wasn’t fucking hardcore. I wasn’t handling it or maintaining. I was just another kid who wanted to run home the minute things got too hard.

It really sucks when the reality of a situation smashes through all the carefully maintained assumptions we hold about the person we think we are.

And so I haven’t been writing here because who wants to engage in excessive naval gazing and endless introspection when they’ve looked under the hood to find something that they didn’t like?

But I’m learning to deal with it. And I’m starting to get more comfortable with the idea of publishing here again instead of obsessively writing things down in my little black moleskine. I’m realizing that the path to being that person, the one I want to be, lies in getting out there and confronting all the shit I don’t like. Not hiding from it, alone in my apartment behind the dull glaze that a bottle of bourbon and cable TV can provide.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this post and this podcast (transcript). Obsessing over it. Going back and re-reading and re-listening to it. And it made me realize that I’m Doing It Wrong(c).

I’m obsessed with fiction. Reading it, writing it. I make people up and I let them live in my head. I put them in weird situations and I’m delighted when they react in ways that I didn’t expect.

I grew up reading. My parents are not big TV people. There were some years where we were too poor to afford cable and some years where we didn’t have it because of a lack of interest. Their interest, not mine. I was much more interested in TV than they were. And my mom, if she caught me wasting away in front of the TV would yell, “Go read a book.” Go. Read. A. Book. I heard that refrain daily. It was the sound track to my childhood.

And the result was that I fell in love with books. I read all the time. I was the only one of my friends growing up who read fiction. They had video games and MTV. I had an endless stream novels. I’d spend hours and hours and hours in my room, lost in worlds that others had created for me.

I haven’t been doing so well since Jeff and I left Panama. I’ve spent a lot of time, more time than I like to admit, wondering what the fuck I’m doing with myself. Part of my life is easy. I love what I do. And I’m not saying that for boss points. I find what’s probably an unhealthy amount of validation and happiness in working with my authors. Helping someone find their obsession times voice and giving them the tools to express that is incredibly rewarding. Rewarding enough that I happily let it overrun other parts of my life without complaint.

But another part of my life is hard. And I make it harder than it has to be. It’s the bencorman.com part. It’s the part where I think that I have something to say and I want to put it out there to see if it connects with the world. Since Panama I’ve been struggling to find something to say and let’s face it, my life is fucking boring. I wake up at noon. Some days I work until two in the morning and some days I work for two hours and then call it quits. Believe me when I say it’s not worth writing about.

bencorman.com was supposed to be a way for me to get my fiction out to the world. Because that’s what I’m obsessed with. But I let the medium overrun what I had to say. I thought ‘blog’ instead of ‘writing’ and when I looked around at those who were ‘blogging’ I simply tried to copy their success. Which is stupid because I’m not obsessed with the same things that they’re obsessed with. I was trying to push a writing peg into a blogging hole.

I know I’m not alone in this. I see the submissions we get from people who want to work with. Every. Single. One. And I’ve got to tell you, a lot of you out there are Doing It Wrong(c). You’re writing what you think we want to read or you’re writing about a topic that you don’t understand because you think that’s what you’re supposed to do.

I understand the urge. I did it. When I first discovered TuckerMax.com and Philalawyer.net (long before Philalawyer was with Rudius) I thought that I had to be writing crazy stories about my life. And I did that for about six months. And it sucked. The writing sucked and the stories sucked and writing the stories sucked. It’s not that I don’t have my own slightly irresponsible nights, I do but I’m not a comedy writer. Consequently, while I can occasionally write something funny, it’s not what I obsess over.

What people seem to miss is not that Tucker is obsessed with his own life, it’s that he’s obsessed with comedy. He’s obsessed with being an entertainer, with being the center of attention. To the point where it can get annoying and I’ve wanted to tell him to just shut up about it already. But that’s exactly the type of obsession that you have to have in order to create something amazing. You have to live and breath it, whatever your “it” happens to be. If you’re not annoying the people around you with it, you might not love it enough.

I think we as people have a deep need to create. That’s what so exciting about the internet. It gives everyone a printing press and an art gallery and a music label and a TV station. It allows the creator to connect directly with the consumer. It gives us a chance to be obsessed with something other than celebrity gossip or what car we’re driving. It gives us a chance to be obsessed with what we’re accomplishing. But all that promise and excitement is perverted and ruined if we’re just running around copying each other’s art, and doing it poorly because we assume that we’re supposed to follow in the footsteps of those who came before us.

I know that’s what a lot of you are doing. Your submissions tell me even if you don’t know if yourself. Because I’m not seeing a lot of original work. I’m seeing copies of copies of copies. And none are as good as the original.

It’s all right though. In a lot of way we’re all in this together. We’re all figuring it out together. I know the internet feels old and mature and boring and that blogging is passé and that twitter is even a little ‘OMG NPR is totally on twitter’ and so we’re all onto the next thing but the act of creation is timeless. And so no matter what new technology is almost here, it shouldn’t affect what you’re doing. Technology only ever changes the distribution.

As I’ve been to figure all this out for myself, I reached out to a few people I admire and look up to. One of them sent me this

What you’re feeling is a pretty normal thing that any artist who sacrifices in order to work feels from time to time. Sacrifice is fucking hard. Being broke is fucking hard. Frustration is a wicked bitch who’ll whisper in your ear every chance she gets.

So take a break. Stop writing for a minute, and don’t worry about it. Read. Read a lot, all your favorite shit, remember why you fell in love with writing in the first place. Relax and allow a little time to give you something you really want to say.

I took his advice and the first thing I picked up was my copy of Lonesome Dove. And that’s when it hit me. I’m a fucking idiot. When I went to back to what I love, I didn’t go to some fucking blog post or website. I went for my favorite book. Novel. Fictional account of people who don’t exist and who delight me when they react in ways that I’m surprised at.

I think we can all do better. I think if we all stop and we’re a little more honest with ourselves we’ll see that sometimes we just write bullshit for the sake of writing bullshit. That sometimes our motivations suck and we want the ad revenue or X number of readers or respect when really, we should be doing it out of love. We stir up conflict where there really isn’t any. We stand on our soapbox because we want the attention that yelling brings even if we’re not yelling about something we care deeply about. I think if we try, we can get back to doing this for the right reasons.

I met Nate the week before classes started freshman year. We were both recent transplants to Tucson and since we didn’t really know what we were supposed to be doing with our time until classes started we spent our days talking to girls, hanging out with a couple of punk rock kids who were juniors and wandering around campus, bored out of our minds. That first week we’d end up spending a lot of time in the laundry mat, only because it was one of the few places open all night, and debating the relative hotness of the girl who worked third shift at 7-11.

Classes started and while I was busy failing my way through a calculus class that I had no business being in, Nate decided that he wasn’t really about school and bounced for Seattle.

The first time he was back to visit, I didn’t really get where his head was at. And he wasn’t the type to try and explain it. He was one of those annoying people who was more interested in getting out and living life than talking about. So while the rest of us were content to do the college freshman thing, hanging around the dorms and bullshitting, he was itching to do something. He knew things, like what freight trains you could ride safely and which ones you could die on because of the length of the tunnels they went through. This was not the kind of wisdom that a middle class upbringing imparted and we loved him for it. Not that any of us would go on to become hobos and ride the rails but just being able to recite that information made us edgy and cool to the kids we parroted it to.

He did say one thing to me that stuck with me during that trip. I was asking him how it was in Seattle. He was living out of his car while trying to pull enough money together to get an apartment. What he said was “Seattle is whatever, but for the first time in my life I have something to say. Instead of just going through the ‘what’s your major / where are you from’ bullshit, I finally have something worth talking about.”

Then he was back in Seattle and I was busy failing out of college so things sort of just bumped along for a while. He found a place to live. I found myself at a community college.

One night I got in my car and drove from Tucson to San Diego. I don’t remember how I ended up in the car that night but I found myself driving north on the highway when I saw a sign for I8 West to San Diego and took the exit. I told myself that it was an adventure, that I’d watch the sun rise over the ocean. It wasn’t until the sun actually came up, behind me, that I realized I was on the wrong coast.

And the adventure part sucked. I slept on the beach that night and when I woke up I was sandy and damp and tired. I wasn’t looking forward to the drive back and whatever clarity I’d hoped to find had eluded me.

There was no one in my life I could even talk to about it. The semester had just ended and I was splitting my time between working the counter at Jack in the Box and hanging out with some kids who talked incessantly about starting a band, even though none of us ever bothered to pick up an instrument.

It was an awesome time to be alive. I was hopelessly twisted over a girl with whom things never worked out, a bunch of friends I didn’t really like and a job in fast food. I’d just managed to fail my way into community college and even my adventures left me cold, damp and wishing I’d stayed in bed.

A wiser person would have taken a step back, reevaluated their life, chosen a direction and starting working towards something positive. I stronger person would have taken responsibility for where their life was and known they could have fixed it. I packed up a weeks worth of clothing, called Nate and drove to Seattle. In the face of great adversity, I took the path of least resistance and ran.

That summer I caught traveler’s disease bad and I finally understood where Nate’s head was at. It wasn’t about the miles traveled, I spent most of my time walking around Seattle just getting a feel for the city and the freedom of doing something on my own for the first time in my life. I had no job, I wasn’t in school, I had cool roommates and enough money to afford a 40oz now and again. I fell in love with a girl who worked in a coffee shop and had white ink tattoos and kept a hedgehog in her apartment. It was the first time in my life that my future was uncertain, without a clean, time-lined road map laid out in front of me on letterhead that read “What You Should Be Doing.”

I’m not sure what I was looking for in Seattle or even if I was running away from my problems or towards an adventure. I do know that Seattle was good for me. It was the first time in my life I did something on my own and while my parents were horrified that I was throwing my future away, it seemed to me that the future held nothing but promise. It was an awesome time to be alive.

Just recently a friend asked if I thought all the traveling I’m doing this year was me running from my problems. I don’t know that I have an answer to that. In the eleven years since I left Seattle I don’t know that I’ve figured out if travel is a hobby, an escape or if it’s me running toward an adventure. It’s probably a bit of all three. My own private pathology and I’m sure that one day I’ll make a therapist very rich figuring out why I do the things I do. I know I’m happiest when I’m traveling and when I’m writing. And so disease or not, I’ll take the travel when and where I can get it.

I wish I knew what happened to Nate. After a few months in Seattle the urge to go caught up with me and I left. At 19 I wasn’t the letter writing type and after a year or so we weren’t in contact any longer. If you know a kid named Nate who lived in Renton Washington right off of Martin Luther King about 11 years ago, tell him to email me. I probably owe him a beer or two.

I leave for Panama this week and I’ll be gone through the New Year. I hope to have internet access, so look for an update or two in this space. And of course, lots and lots of pictures when I’m back in the US.

That first period biology class was my introduction to the world of graffiti. For forty-five minutes a day I watched Andrew tag everything he could reach. He’d work something through in his book, then pull a paint marker out of his bag and go to town on the black-topped tables we sat at. I’d watch him pour himself into a tag that would take up half the table, only to get called in for detention later that day to clean the desk. I watched him tag the table legs, the floor tiles, the textbooks. I’m pretty sure that, had I fallen asleep in class, he’d have dropped a quick stylized “drew” on the back of my neck, just for the fuck of it.

I liked Andrew because he knew who he was. Graffiti for him was a lifestyle, an identity. While the rest of us were sweating memorizing the male and female reproductive systems, Andrew had a singularity of focus that most of us wouldn’t find for years, if ever. It would take me ten years to find something I loved like Andrew loved writing graffiti.

For a kid like me, a recent transfer from a private Jewish middle school to a public high school, identity was a big deal. Caught between those two worlds and not fitting into either, I did the only thing I thought I could do. I spent hours trying to write graf. I bought a black notebook and a bunch of markers and tried to come up with some ill shit that would give me entry into that world. But no matter how long I spent, or how nice Andrew was about my vestigial art skills, it was clear that I was never going to run with the kids Andrew ran with. And they weren’t nice about it. I was a joke, a toy, a failure, a loser.

As much as their disdain hurt, for forty five minutes a day I got to watch Andrew work his magic across whatever surface he could lay his paint markers on. I don’t know why Andrew liked me, maybe I was funny, maybe simply because I sat next to him and he knew I wasn’t about to sell him out. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter to me. I learned more from watching him then I ever could have from those biology lectures.

As the year went on, things only got crazier. Some mornings he’d show up at school with bloodshot eyes and paint on his hands. He’d tell me about some billboard or bridge or building he’d hit the night before. Then, with a sort of self-satisfied smile on his lips, he’d fall asleep on the desk. Some mornings he’d show up with bruises on his face talking about getting jumped by rival crews.

This wasn’t just captivating to me. Half the class would be turned in their desks listening to him talk. On the days that he was early to biology, he’d get peppered with questions about what had gone down the night before. Or if he was going to cut that day. Or, or, or. We’d ask him anything, just to keep him talking.

Of course, as the year went on, shit only escalated. Whatever vandalism happened in the school, it was Andrew and the friends that got called for it. Whether it was someone spray painting a burner across the lockers in the two hundred hall (obviously them) to someone popping a canister of pepper spray in the eight hundred hall (obviously not them) they were the ones who got called into the deans office first. And the more they got called into the office the more we loved them for it. Andrew was someone. In a school of three thousand plus students, people knew who he was. Say “Andrew” and no one had to ask who you were talking about.

I wish I knew what happened to that kid. I wish I could say that he was headed to art school but honestly, I don’t even know if he was interested in art school. Freshman year of high school doesn’t inspire a lot of “so, what are you thinking of doing when you graduate?” It wouldn’t be until four years later, my freshman year of college, when I’d stand around like an asshole in training hitting people with the “so, what’s your major, what do you want to do when you graduate?” combo.

And by my tenth grade year, my mom had moved us to a new neighborhood and that meant a new high school. Once we moved, I didn’t really think a lot about Andrew. I had entirely new social circles to navigate, new friends to make, new trouble to get into. Removed from his influence my interest in writing graffiti faded to be replaced with music, girls, computers and the occasional joint or 40oz when I could get my hands on it.

But even though I didn’t think a whole lot about Andrew the lesson had already wormed it’s way into my brain. Find one thing you love, be brilliant at it and nothing else will really matter.

And I still have a soft spot in my heart for graffiti.

This has been, by far, the most traveling I’ve ever done in one calendar year unless you count the year I moved from east coast to west. A move that took five months and found me sleeping on the couch of a very understanding Mormon family. I think most would label me NSFW, so it’s really to their credit that I had a place to stay when I needed it.

And the traveling isn’t over. There’s still fifteen days in Panama at the end of this month. It says something I think that I’ve become more comfortable sleeping in tents, hotels, hostels, couches and guest rooms than I am sleeping in my own bed. I just prefer to not examine too closely what that something is. And if we’re all being honest here, internets, ever since I went to Hawaii to sleep on beaches and eat ramen at 21 I’ve been more comfortable on the road than at home.

This is also the year that Jeff and I took over the publishing aspects of Rudius. Creative Director. It’s a pretty cool title.

When I was 19, I quit school knowing that I could do the job I wanted in IT without the degree. I had this overwhelming, unshakable belief in myself and I said fuck it and worked my ass off until I realized that, while I liked IT as a fun hobby, as a career I couldn’t handle it.

I thought I’d experience the same thing when we took the helm here. But something’s changed. I’ve lost that hyper-energetic confluence of arrogance and anger that made me want to take on the world face first, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. In the balance that’s probably a good thing, even in my rose colored recollection I was pretty intolerable as a person so the truth has to be that much worse. I’d be lying though if I said I didn’t miss those days where I couldn’t have put the words self and doubt next to each other in a sentence.

Maybe it means I’m growing up. Maybe it means that I’m slowing down or maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all. I do know that I’m still more comfortable on the road than I am at home. I know that I’m doing something I love and I know that it’s been a hell of year. Now all I need is the perspective to be able to write about it.