Feral?

I’m calling this project GO! because, if there is one thing I can say in my favor, it’s that I do not stay where I am put.

I was originally going to call it Feral, because one of my go to jokes for explaining myself to the people I meet is that I left my Missouri home with essentially zero life skills. That I was, in effect, feral. And I am sure that over the course of this thing, the fact that I was in no way prepared for anything when I wandered out into the world, that I was essentially relying on brute survival instinct and the kindness of girlfriends, all that will become self evident in the stories that get told. But my wife was quick to point out that calling it Feral was kind of leaning into the negative. For as much as I enjoy the joke and the simplicity of painting myself as a kind of Tarzan with an Aries K, fleeing the Ozark jungle of my birth, for the dizzying heights of civilization where one learns to take pleasure in things like public transportation, the many disappointments of voting for the Democratic Party, and cancelling plans at the last minute - for as much as I enjoy that self-caricature it is not the whole story. And, as Cyndi went on to say, that small part of the larger truth is a very limiting corner to paint myself into. 

So, I decided to reframe the thing a little bit. Yes, I had never balanced a checkbook, I didn’t know how credit worked, I had never signed a lease or mastered many basic math skills. That is true. I also couldn’t cook, clean, or process negative emotions.  I could do some basic car repair. Then I moved to a place where having a car was totally impractical, thus rendering my one life skill moot. All of this is true. But what’s also true is that I didn’t stay where I was put.

When I was a young man, one who had come within a hair’s breadth of failing out of high school and even closer to burning it down - accidentally? Kind of accidentally? - this need to go far and fast, away from where I’d started, manifested itself as poorly thought out driving spurts down major interstates in a semi hysterical rush to be anywhere but Missouri. The problem was that I knew no one anywhere else in the world and Missouri is one of the cheapest places to live in America. So, with no one to warn me about the abrupt rise in expense, I would suddenly show up in places like North Carolina or Northern California with no money, no marketable skills, and negative emotional stability. Then I would drive home. This cycle continued until a girlfriend called me to come live with her in Washington DC. 

Girlfriends will come up a lot in the course of this project. It takes a village to raise a child and it took a village worth of girlfriends to raise a me.

All of these things - lack of life skills, antipathy to higher education, blind panic - will be repeated themes, I am sure. But, as per my wife’s suggestion, I want to kick this off by giving myself a little credit. I refused to take what was on offer in the place and context I was born into. Whether or not that place had prepared me to access anything else, whether or not I was mentally or emotionally ready to be anywhere else, I did not just stay put. I went. I did not have any idea how to be out in the world, but I would not be kept from it. And, as someone who now spends a fair number of days each month in airports, I still, whenever I can and whether it’s a good idea or not, I still go.