How Did I Arrive in Hawaii?
A Brief Autobiography: Part 1

While Jeff and I were hitchhiking, he made it a point to school me in the ways. This involved showing me how to obtain free food, free hotels, free herb, and of course free rides. One afternoon in Willits, after I had already spent ten dollars at the health food store on Kombucha and pumpkin bars, Jeff decided we should go on a food excursion to the food bank, to plan for our future. The juicy rumor in town was that the food bank gave out hotel rooms as well as food.

A middle-aged lady with thick makeup ran the food bank. She had a sweet but tense face; too many people had asked her for food. The ‘emergency’ bundle required photo id, social security number, and personal story. After collecting my date of birth, location of birth, home state, and phone number, she reached the essay questions.

“What led you to be in this state of emergency here with me today?”

Holy shit.

What had led me to her? What had led me to entrust myself to a mildly psychotic boy and hitchhike to the redwoods on a quest for his jewelry box? Why was I wearing filthy olive cargo pants and an ancient backpack? Why was I in Willits, where the Dow plant leaked chromium into the groundwater and half the residents had facial ticks?

Why was it already January 2008?

Where were my friends and my plans?

Was I falling apart? Was this, in fact, a true emergency?

Well, Ma’am. One day I turned so ironic that the world suddenly became moving pictures. I no longer cared for a specific picture, just a colorful one. There is color is everywhere, so I shrugged my shoulders and here I am.

Ma’am, I fall in love too easily and read too many big books. Also, I’m lazy and arrogant. These traits just get uglier with time.

I told her we’d had a ride back to San Francisco but the driver had turned out to be insane.

“And how did that make you feel?”

I felt…I didn’t know what I felt.

“And what would you do to avoid this next time?”

Ahh, yes: “I would leave a larger margin of error.”

“A what?”

“Margin—of—error.”

She wrote my words down verbatim, then gave us two bags of bread, peanut butter, jelly, pork and beans, pudding, tuna sandwich, tofu sandwich, and cheese snacks.

~~

I was born a quarter of a century ago in Salt Lake City, Utah. My first vivid memory is of getting a miniature plastic doll hand stuck up my nose. My grandma made me blow it out and ever since then I’ve hated blowing my nose.

My parents moved to Denver and had my brother, moved to Pasco, Washington and had my twin sisters, then moved us all to Idaho Falls, Idaho. Mormons followed us the whole way. We lived out in the country, and there were Mormons, Barbies, horses, and mountains. I was obsessed with dolphins. I had a child-sized ATV which I used to visit my best friend down the road. We would play with Barbies, and every time the story was the same: Ken kidnapped BabyBarbie and tortured it. Barbie saved BabyBarbie, beat up Ken, and cried over Baby. I have no idea what that means for my womanly nature.

My dad moved up in the world and we moved to San Antonio, then El Paso, Texas. I never feared moving away from Idaho, because my parents explained that San Antonio had Sea World and I could pet the dolphins there everyday. Upon arriving to San Antonio, my parents pulled straight into Sea World, where we lived in our camping trailer for a week.

The parents weren’t as ingenious when we moved to El Paso a year later. El Paso had just been announced the murder capital of the country, they told us. My mom described it as a “wasteland.”

I hit puberty the second we arrived. Weight gain, hormones, and having to ride the short bus explain everything about me from 5th grade to 12th grade. Fat, angry, defensive, always in love, I saw no choice but war.

At first, I fought against people. In 5th grade I loved Josh, so I stole his lunchtime Clamato and tried to make him feel stupid. In 6th and 7th grade I loved Rajiv, so I tried to beat him at math competitions. In 8th grade I had my first steamy dream, about Matt Spencer, so I argued with him everyday in English class about special relativity, which neither of us understood.

War became more civilized in high school. Like a good intellectual, I gave up on people (who were tragically imperfect) and moved the battle to ideas. In 9th and 10th grade, I loved Mikey, the charismatic drummer. I didn’t have to hate him, since he didn’t even know me. I would stalk him in the hallways for a daily smile. Instead of the boys, I hated my math teachers.

Love is an opiate, but so is math. At almost every moment back then I felt furious, disgusting, and about to explode, so math was used constantly. Ironically, there was no more vocal barrier to scribbling math in classes than math teachers who wanted me to pay more attention.

But with math, just like with boys, I still never believed I’d make real contact. This began to torture me even more than the first problem! And thus, by 11th grade, without even having read him, I had sealed myself into the classic spiritual trap of Jack Kerouac, where I stayed for eight years.

The Kerouacian Pit is a danger to all aesthetic seekers—lovers, mathematicians, philosophers, Christians. The Pit arises when an impassioned appreciation of the Ideal combines with a secret loathing of self. For example: Divinity and Christian guilt. Or: Human Genius and the secret belief in personal ineptitude. Or: Love and a notion of predestined failure.

In the darkness of the Pit, a furious escalation takes place. Rather than being a salve, the Ideal is misused as a drug. More crack is always necessary, and desperation always deepens. The personal relationship with Bliss is lost. Mortification of the soul intensifies as the Ideal is attenuated into a finer and finer, more and more unattainable goal. Finally, the Ideal shrinks all the way down to Kerouac’s diamond infinitesimal, and the seeker dies of loneliness and nihilism.

Death is not assured of course. People find their way out. My escape involved Friedrich Nietzsche and a Native American medicine man—it was called The Love Epiphany, celebrated immediately afterwards with The Great Soul Explosion 2007.

One day in 2006, before the medicine man but after Nietzsche, about half a year before I made it out, Benjamin Youngstrom and I were sitting in a Mexican restaurant in Haight Ashbury. We were in grad school and bitching about it, just like grad students do. Nietzsche gives the best indictment of what we were bemoaning, but lacking a Nietzsche text, I will use Kierkegaard’s:

Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm, and shrewdly lapsing into repose…Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed.

The criticism applied to myself most of all. But having realized that, I couldn’t stand still! Over the tacos, I decided to drop out of grad school, ex-patriate to South America, have love affairs and be a writer. Benjamin decided to do this too. Together we would be two-thirds of a literary triumvirate, third member still to be found. Our triumvirate would transcend literature and eventually snowball into a social movement—exactly like the Beats. This plan is, basically, still in action.

I left school and began to run things bohemian style. Free food was easy. Free entertainment amounted to learning the guitar. I hired Andrès, who conveniently owned a short bus, to drive me down to South America in August. I went with someone entirely different to Costa Rica and Panama. The Love Epiphany, un-coincidentally, began its birth pangs shortly after, just in time for summer in Berkeley. With Andrès on the backburner, I communed with Allen Ginsburg, learned to sing, went naked camping, mastered barking on didgeridoo, and finally had a damn love affair. Summer camp for hippies.

Then August arrived.

Like a hangover.

(go to Part 2)

2 Comments so far
Leave a comment





Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>

Name (required)

E-mail (required)

URI

Your Comment