A Brief Update of the Mundane and Unremarkable

Greetings, random person who might have stumbled across this.

As my towering fame continues to rise like Babel (because nothing bad ever happened there), I thought I’d pop in to just make a few quick notes so that you know I’m still alive. Flourishing? Not quite. But alive and kicking, as the elderly and soccer-obsessed might say. My ninth month in Portland is about to end and I’m stuck wondering if there's such a thing as an adventure that actually continues. I’ve long confided in people that I’m a wanderer at heart and that I just happened to get started embracing that reality a bit late in the game, and as I sit in my apartment thinking about the mundanities that make up my life, I find that I’m already feeling an itch to go somewhere else, to do something new, to change up the habits that have already nested in my day to day life like an exceptionally tenacious wren.

That’s not to say I don’t like it here, I do. And it’s not to say the people aren’t great, because 70% of my interactions are quite lovely. But I know myself better with every passing day and while I’m a world-weary realist, there’s an undeniable romantic in me that wants to live in a world that I’m quite positive doesn’t exist. When I came to Portland, one of the things that drew me here was the promise of “Portland Weird”. I wanted to find odd people and odder situations, and dip in and out of them like a waterbug searching for food. But the thing they don’t tell you is that…odd people just seem and act and look like ordinary people. They’re just…there. And the magical weird city is little more that a collection of concrete and litter, buildings both big and small, and a collection of stores that might be different from the ones you grew up around but…they’re still just stores. Little places populated by people who might not be entirely ordinary but are still simply…people.

This isn’t a bad thing. It’s simply the way things work. It’s reality. Things look strange and odd and magical when we’re a thousand miles away but, when you get right down to it, they simply look that way because it’s somewhere new. It’s something we haven’t experienced before. It’s a fanciful and fantastical act of “othering” for the sake of our imagination and contemplating people and places we don’t really understand. I think the only problem with any of what I’m saying right now is that, if you’ve read my work or know me and have talked to me for any stretch of time, you’ll know that I’m not actually that fond of people. That’s not to say I’m not a people person, I’ve been told that I have at least some basic conversational charm, but rather that I don’t think very highly of the human race at all.

I think we’re… fine. But there’s so much in the world that I hold in such high regard and find to be so imminently and transcendently magical that being 'fine’ is a bit of a wet rag. I’ve found some nice people out here, folks that I even think might be really good friends if we keep wandering around together, but everything else possesses so much of the sameness that bothers me about humanity, life, and existence. It’s just…ordinary. If you talk to enough people, they all sound the same. If you wander around a city, you come to realize that there really isn’t that much that separates it from any others. Not really. And I realize this is a gross oversimplification of life, but since I’m just talking to myself and trying to convey what I mean, I’m alright with that. I’m not talking about what existence is, so much as trying to pin down how I perceive it.

The simplest way I can put it is that it’s just ordinary. And after a while, if your life is waking up at 6am, exercising, going to work at an unfulfilling job, walking home, and then trying to cram in some writing before you fall asleep and do it all over again…the opportunity for it to ever be anything else is fleeting. The magic of a new place and population is quickly ground down by the mundanity of routine. It’s just there. And after a while you realize that your entire life has begun to look a bit too much like a run-out-the-clock operation, like a boxer in the ring who is merely trying to dance around an opponent’s punches so that he can make it to the final bell.

This is, to put it plainly, not ideal.

If I were to be honest with myself about why I came to be this way, I think it mostly chalks up to the fact that I read a collection of books at the perfect moment and they left behind a different me than the one they found. Their impressions lasted. And somehow they left behind a person who was both wistful and whimsical, but also a bit detached, lost, and fatalistic. It’s a strange mixture and not one that I’d recommend for any mixed drink, but it is me. So I can’t help but appreciate that it’s there. Still, it has left me in a bit of a spot. A less-than-desirable predicament, Wodehouse would say.

I think I know now that I’m never going to stop moving. I think, at the very least, I’ll always be someone who has to pick up and leave when he knows exactly what’s going to happen next. I don’t mean that in all ways, of course, but I do as they pertain solely to me. The good thing about being me is that I know for certain that I can blend and fit in just about anywhere, at least for a little while. I can feel for a short stretch of time like I belong wherever I happen to be. But when that changes? When people start to look like ordinary people, when concrete towers start to look like every other monument to finite things…I think it’s just time to go.

On to another city, another town, another…nowhere at all.

I think that wistful part of me will always hope that at some point I’ll stop and realize that I’ve found it. “It” being whatever I’m actually looking for. And for now, my chosen place will do me just fine, as I get to listen to crows every single day and the one thing no one ever tells you when you pick a favorite bird is that it’s so damn lovely to pick one that’s common and ordinary and everywhere all at once. Imagine living in a world where you can’t go a single day without seeing your favorite thing? I like that part about Portland. I like that one certainty because crows aren’t like people. I never have to worry about getting tired of them. I never have to worry about them letting me down.

They’re just there. They’re everywhere all at once. And that will keep me here a little while longer.

How long? I’m not sure. I need to think hard about my next step in life. I need to remember how inspired I was to write when I first arrived here. And then, I suppose I need to find somewhere new, someplace where I can live in that magical moment that tricks me into believing I’m in a place so different from the one I left behind, at least for a little while. I know it will fade away eventually, I think that’s just how my brain works, but I like the idea that some day it won’t.

Maybe, if I go far enough, if I test myself and ask great things of who I think I might be, maybe I’ll wander into a world that never stops feeling different. And I will one day find myself at home in a place that never stops changing, a place that I’ll finally never want to leave.