Well hot damn, here I am on the road again. It feels marvelous and freeing and energizing to be out and free again, although it's embarrassing to quickly realize how much travel savvy I've lost in the last two years of relative stability. In a kind of Fibonacci Sequence of unfortunate realizations, I've become aware at increasing intervals of things I forgot at home or simply forgot I should pack at all: one block out from my door, I simultaneously realized that I'd forgotten to put my sneakers into my bag, and suddenly remembered where I'd put my headphones and why I'd been unable to find them at packing time. On block two, I remembered that I'd forgotten to pack my bathing suit. Block three: my gold lame headband. Block five: a Metrocard. Block 8 (actually inside the subway station at Bedford): travel umbrella. Uptown in Manhattan: travel guide. Before going to sleep: online flight check-in. Landing in the awesomely named Louis Armstrong Airport: a lock for my valuables. I swear.
And I used to be a professional! Literally, a professional traveler. I worked for that barrel of monkeys over at Fodor's Travel, writing for their Japan guides: the whole swoop of life for me was about being a savvy traveler (the necessity of a frugal and cunning mindset was made all the more acute by the fact that Fodor's didn't really pay anything...despite writing a travel guide for richies, I was sleeping in a tent in the park and dodging police). Since finishing the Fodor's job I've been more stable than not. A trip to Israel toting my baby cousin on a horrible Birthright trip, a whip-crack tour of Northern California college campuses with the same cousin, a trip back to my people in Japan. But no solo travel--no making it on my own--and I, apparently, have lost the groove.
With the travel, as with other aspects of my life, it seems like I need to confront the current moment as one of "starting fresh again." I'm in circus skills classes again for the first time since December (and oh my god, I suck), I'm ukuleleying again for the first time in ages (ditto), aikido has begun to re-enter my life in a way I hadn't thought possible after my heart hardened towards it at the dawn of 2008 (holy jesus lord is it hard), I'm writing again (this one I'm still good at...and I even got a job doing it! a real job! writing all the time!), I'm starting to take photos again (kind of at a loss for what to shoot) and, finally, here I am traveling again. Thinking about any of these persistent passions of mine, I can take a small step back from my immediate self and see that I've lost most, if not all, of the momentum that I'd built up with it. For some things, like aikido, I think that I've undone the work of years, thousands upon thousands of hours. And if I want to continue with any of them, there's no recourse for picking up the strands I'd let go slack. It's not that simple: the old ties have decayed entirely, and if I want to go back in, I'm just going to have to begin entirely anew.
If I've lost the momentum I had once built up with my hobbies though, it's probably good for me to remember that momentum isn't everything. We often build momentum at the expense of stability, solidity, centeredness and poise, and perhaps these are qualities I've been cultivating in some respects while my forward motion has flagged. I have felt cursed for a few years now--since living in Matsuyama broke my spirit--with a lack of passion, a cold furnace in my chest where once I burned white hot for the things I loved. I'm the Tin Woodsman. To keep working, the woodsman replaces his body parts one-by-one with machine parts as his cursed ax chops each of them off; once he trades his body entirely, however, he finds that he no longer has the heart with which to love like he used to. He was lucky enough to have a Dorothy and an Oz...maybe I have an Alita and a Sean and a New Orleans. Oh my.
Quick-n-dirty food, music and sights report: all I've had so far are a cup of excellent coffee--which may or may not have had chicory in it, but I don't know the taste and was too sheepish to ask the stone-faced girl at the counter--a slice of fabulously flavorful lemon bundt cake, and a cool glass of fresh lemonade. As for music, I've only been here a few hours and haven't seen anything live yet, but Professor Longhair did burst into my headphones (my dads' headphones...see above) to wake me up RIGHT before we got the "going to be landing soon" announcement--the song, you guessed it, was Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Like something out of a movie. And I'm still bike-less but views from the bus windows and the small strolls I've taken have been jaw-dropping: this is a pretty, pretty town. Peering down some streets you'll feel like you're looking into the display cases at a fancy cake shop or window shopping in a bridal store for Disney princesses, with house after house in improbable, heart-warming, clashing pastels dripping with lacy bunting, beautiful scroll-work, home-made or scavenged sculptures, tooled cornices and ornate iron railings wrapping two and three stories of romantic balconies. I am happy to be here.
