Changes in the site, changes in the life.

If you’re new here: Welcome. If you’ve been here before: Welcome back.

So, I’m developing the details of my next travel excursion. Let’s just throw away that whole thing about “settling down” and moving into New York with things like leases and apartments and gym memberships that go unused and cheap sofas that have metal bars in all the most uncomfortable of places and making plans with people and being forced to come up with a whole variety of new excuses as to why you can’t come to this bar or that house party or that National Bowling League match (“Uhh… man I would, but I have a rule that Tuesdays are my ‘Wallow Alone in Drunken Misery’ nights. Yeah… yeah, you wouldn’t want to see that. I’ll catch up with you next time.”). Sure, that was the plan (and I guess that still will be the plan if I get offered some sort of amazing job), but times have changed.

Chaaaaanges.

Specifically, I just visited my French Canadian friend in Montreal, and – God Damn – but I seem to have gone and stuck myself with the needle of that most addictive and life-altering of drugs: Adventure. The thirst for newness and the quest for an escape from the stale and the fixed and the placid and the mortuary-like day-to-day existence of most of America, most of the Earth.

Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit.

And what a problem to have. It is true isn’t it? Once an addict, always an addict?

I had successfully pushed the last packets of adventurous adrenaline receptors deep, deep, deep down my throat (ending up somewhere in the vicinity of my left buttock), but they were only hiding and waiting and plotting for the return that was so expected it is almost laughable now to even see.

I kept the beasts at bay by remembering how much I enjoyed the company of my friends and family, by remembering home-cooked delicious dinners from Mom, by remembering the easy comfort of living at home, by remembering long nights in the Big City and deep laughs and hazy collective memories of long lost pasts, but it was all for naught as those monsters of Adventure and Danger and Adrenaline burst forth and have clawed straight up my throat and back into my brain. They’ve switched out my eyes; they’ve replaced the slides of my room and my New Jersey countryside and my people with maps of distant lands and cities, stacks of words of bizarre rooms in Last Resort places, and the redish tint of the bull’s eye. I’ve become enraged with my target in sight, engorged with drooling lust, foolishly captured by an parasite that has wormed its way into the sector of my brain that deals with Hopes and Dreams and Desires.

Fuck.

So, the journey must continue, of course. The wheels are moving already. But this time it must be different, yes, much different.

The last was a run – an escape – from Civilization and Knowledge, and there can be no replicating that experience (nor would I even want to attempt).

I was, “young, dumb, and full of cum,” and now I’m (only a tad) older and (slightly) not as dumb and still (very much so) full of cum. So the trip must be different.

I headed to Cambodia with the open mind that can only come with youth and a lack of experience. It also helped that I was heading to one of the poorest areas of the world so any real problems I could have faced would have been (relatively) easily manageable. My youthfulness can not be overstated; it is the reason I felt so comfortable to live and try and fail at will – I knew there would always be more time for me to get “serious.”

(Of course, one could argue my time in Cambodia was an entire exercise in wasted time and two years abroad simply put me two years behind in my career, but fuck it, that doesn’t matter much because I wouldn’t have altered a damn thing about it then even if I had known what I do now.)

(That is a falsehood sack of shit lie. Of course, there are plenty of things I would have changed about it [most related to work, my writing career, and my romantic entanglements], but I’m not one to live in the past, and “mistakes” [if we want to call them that] keep life interesting.)

So, this next trip shall be different. I have a few different ideas for where I want to go, but, most importantly, it will be a “working trip” since I can now say with only a slight amount of embellishment, “I am a mother fucking writer” and I will be writing and submitting articles wherever I go. Slight embellishment only because I am currently – *currently* – at approximately 50% of my desired travel goal income. Since this is a “working trip” I think I should probably actually make enough money to cover my expenses, correct?

So, therein lies the rub; I’ve been working as a writer for three months (as in actually getting stuff published on places that want to give me money) and I’ve already arrived at that 50% plateau. So, is it feasible to believe I will – in three additional months – hit my 100% goal? Possibly, maybe, unlikely, definitely unsure, who knows?!

Perhaps it happens. Perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps my plan changes tomorrow because I get a random job offer to be a sea captain in Brazil. Perhaps I get attacked by a clan of rampaging mutant chickens? Who can tell?

But we continue onward. We look for freelance work. We ask our friends. We write many things during the day. We send emails. We spend too much time on WTF. We make long, meandering Grilled Life posts on new and improved websites. We look up month-to-month apartments in various cities across North America. We tap our fingers impatiently. We hope. We dream. We wait.