September 15, 2005

Last night I saw Jeff for the first time since he went away to a strange place to get his Master’s. We headed towards a patio in search of beer, both of us talking at the same time about different things, and me flailing my arms like I usually do. He’s now recording an album, something he envisioned in those painful lonely months in London when he lost hope in humanity and music was the only thing that kept him going. He wants to use pictures of my naked ass for cover art, he said.

We talked about his album for a while and my own attempts to find meaning … or a job.

“What’s your deal job he asked?”

“Jesus!” I exclaimed, a bit taken aback by the scope of his question — I was just hoping to find a decent job that would allow me to clear off my student debt.

“You want to be Jesus?”

For a while, I didn’t know what to say. I drank more beer, ate some nachos, and stared carefully at my hands.

“I want to stumble from one adventure to another,” I said after several minutes of silence. “And I want to chronicle everything along the way — recording sounds, images and feelings, and somehow get paid for it all. If I could, I would just disappear in the wilderness for months at a time with just a camera and a notepad, and then come back to write about nakedness, hunger, and bears. I want to travel 2000 miles across the Appalachians, see jungles and the forests of my youth, and to take pictures of everything. But I’m not sure how I’m going to finance any of this.”

“So you want to be a travel writer?”

“Well, yes. And no. I just want to go and blog about getting eaten by bears.”

We nodded thoughtful, him thinking about his music, me about wilderness, and then went away Scrabble with men in cowboy hats.