The clouds scratch at the edges of Philadelphia. The other side – the side that was simply the day’s weather, up till late afternoon – is clear and blue. It’s rare to see a line this stark in the sky: safety here; danger here. If you spent a lot of time staring up at the clouds, it would be easy to decide that Light is good and Dark is bad. Morality has weedy roots in the same sky I look at now. I stare at the gods of my earliest ancestors. I would feel better about this transcendence if I didn’t have a flight in two hours.
“You will make it,” my Uber driver assures me. “It will not snow for many hours.” He says things like “for many hours” because he’s from Liberia. The accent is delightful.
He is going to move to Minnesota. He’s not sure where. “Philly, it is too expensive now,” he tells me. He’s right, and that’s also insane: America is a country that has the Mississippi Delta and San Francisco. Philly’s the higher end of reasonable, which doesn’t trip the radar of actual wealth.
But anyway, Minnesota: “Why?” I ask. I try not to enunciate the “??!!!???” at the end of the question. Minnesota is, by all accounts, very beautiful for the times in the year you can get outside. If you have a chance to move anywhere in the country, and your only goal is to find cheaper rent, why not avoid snow tonnage?
He says: “It seems nice.”
“Have you been?”
“I am in Minnesota before,” he answers. “It was good.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t have a town picked out? Minny-St. Paul?”
“I don’t want to raise the children in a city. It is very crowded. And my girlfriend, she cannot find work here. So we will look outside of the cities.”
“So you’re moving to Minnesota, and you don’t know where?”
“It is hard,” he acknowledges. “But I have jobs they offer me in Minnesota.”
I wonder if Moses sold the Israelites like this: “Listen, it’s gonna be great. We just don’t know exactly where ‘it’ is yet. Who’s ready for the fucking desert?” And then he did a few flaming shots, and winked and said “Remind you of something else that burned?” and his smoking Egyptian wife did a stage eye-roll and said, “That’s not the only burning bush in our home,” which brought down the tent, and the Israelites were like, “This motherfucker has shit figured.” And so there was an Exodus, to somewhere, because God had jobs he offered them outside the greater Cairo area.
I figure this is about as good a way as any to start my first trip outside the States since I returned, homeless, from China.
I haven’t really left Kensington/Fishtown/Northern Liberties for months. That’s a strange, frightening realization. But I haven’t. I do this: I move around a lot for a while, then lock into a central location and don’t leave for months or years. Between 2015 and 2016 I traveled to nine countries and spent two months couch-surfing across the United States, and in that year I spent the vast majority of my time inside a five-block-radius in a crumbling, molding neighborhood forty minutes outside of downtown Shanghai.
So now I’m back at it: I moved to Philadelphia full of energy and spirit, grateful to the heavens for the opportunity to live outside of China; grateful for the chance to be a part of the West and my home country. I was going to start a company and start a blog and re-form my old band. I was going to do every stupid thing I’d been embarrassed to try.
What happened was that I got hired as a referee in a psychosexual struggle between the murkiest lawyer available in Pennsylvania and his much younger, distressed, and disturbed female associates. I spent an enormous amount of time trying to keep a company afloat whose success didn’t much matter to me, for the motivation of a tiny, tiny amount of money. The company in question would not bear legal scrutiny, as a company; my conviction of this has led me to avoid seeing or being shown the company’s books on the off-chance I am subpoenaed in connection with basically any facet of the lawyer’s existence. (If there is a legal precedent for jailing a person for “just kind of asking for it,” this lawyer will be jailed.) I live in a three-(arguably two-)bedroom, one-bathroom rowhome with three other people; one of whom dislikes me specifically and noticeably. This would be wonderful material for writing, except I haven’t been doing much of that. I haven’t managed to start my own company, and the band is still floundering through early stages of development from which few bands ever emerge as viable concerns. Meanwhile, Donald Trump was elected President – this reality didn’t necessitate the exceptionally heavy drinking, but it was motivation. I can definitely blame it for the fitful sleep. And so I haven’t left a 10-block radius in Northern Philadelphia for months, even though New York City is two hours and $10 away and the rest of Philadelphia bears exploration.
I am starting to think I do these things to myself, on purpose.
So this trip will be a good way to clear my mind, I suppose. It’s a remarkably indulgent effort: I require a transatlantic flight and a stay in Rome to achieve the thing most people get from a walk around the block. In this way, I’m not so much different than my Uber driver: I want to adjust my life, so I try something radical, expensive, and poorly-considered. My sister lives in Scotland and is vacationing to Rome with her family, and one of the benefits of working for shady-ass company is that you can also engage in shady-ass behavior, like peacing to Europe for nine days on minimal notice. Part of my brain wonders if I can afford this, and I try to drown that part of my brain in mid-flight booze: fuck, I’ve missed international flights.
One of the problems with physically constricting your world is that you emotionally constrict, too. I haven’t been seeing anyone, but I also haven’t been trying to see anyone. I don’t mean that shit 27-year-old white college-graduated women say: I don’t mean “dating myself” or trying to find time for me (there is too much time in my life for me; I am not using it super well). I mean I truly, “sex-is-less-interesting-than-Netflix,” “bourbon-always-returns-my-texts,” “everyone-lies-and-we-all-die-alone” haven’t been trying. People talk about not giving a fuck like it’s an attractive quality. In 5.5 months in Philly, I’ve asked exactly one woman for her number, and she said yes, then explained – just to be clear – that she was a lesbian. Which I think I must have known, somewhere in the back of my brain, or in my current state I wouldn’t have asked. I’ve been casually mean to women at bars, not bothered to set up an online profile for anything, turned down offers to go to social events where all the people might not be dudes, and not bothered to follow up with attractive women I meet through friends of friends.
And here, “friends” is a loose term, which helps with giving no fucks and barely leaving the greater Olde Kensington area (the e is silent). In my past lives, I had people doing more or less what I was, and working hard at it, and having interesting perspective to offer. I have lacked for happiness before; I have rarely lacked for quips, gallows humor, or “Wanna grab a beer?” texts. I think I’ve found one person here who is fine with being my actual friend, which is mostly good but a little bad: you can’t lean too heavily on one person for anything, and he plays guitar with me in a basement once a week, which just reminds me that I really need to fucking write some news songs; goddammit.
And so I watch La La Land and Manchester By the Sea on the plane, and after starving myself emotionally for months, it’s a nearly unbearable experience. Movies are supposed to be bad on a plane, but on this plane – flying rapidly further away from the anomie of my post-Chinese experience – I am not really thinking about anything but those movies. To take in art of any kind, good or bad, you have to be a tranquil, inside, for just a moment: be still, and know that there may be no God, but not knowing is part of life itself, and there’s beauty to be had in this uncertainty.
For most of my life I wanted to get out of my hometown. I didn’t really explain this to anyone, but I wanted badly to escape and never return. I’m starting to realize that I eventually want to escape everywhere: I stay too long in a place and it drives me mad. I’m in a cramped seat on a turbulent flight, unable to sleep, watching movies on a shit, hand-width display. And I’m happy: I’m going somewhere, and I have found the peace necessary to seriously watch a movie, even if just for a few hours.
I don’t have the career to say this professionally, and yet: It’s good to be back on the road.