The Shadow on My Bathroom Wall

A hard frost has fallen the last two nights, and today is Halloween. The skies are clear and biting, leaves are crammed into black plastic garbage sacks and lay waiting on the front lawns. Neighborhood cats are abandoning their local perches in exchange for electric blankets inside. Or if you are my family’s cat, you have been confined to the garage because you have an unshakable habit of urinating on all things great and small when allowed inside the house. Our dog doesn’t really care what season it is as long as his family stays close, and I carved a pumpkin yesterday, the first in nearly five years.

I feel like I am living in a different era, and it’s been almost three weeks since deciding to stay in one place for the winter. I swing from both extremes a thousand times a day—excitement to trepidation, contentment to restlessness. Experiencing the autumn in the Northwest is by all means a treat, but the trick is the imminent winter slowly approaching and lightly tapping you on the shoulder, breathing down your collar.

I went to a corn-maze (or is that maize—HA HA?—sorry) last night with some friends. My town has those kinds of “fally” things: corn-mazes, apple picking, pumpkin patches, harvests, yellows, reds, and oranges, and the smell of smoke escaping a chimney into a night’s nearly freezing air. It is strikingly refreshing yet often feels unsettling because it seems so foreign. In my most recent years, autumn meant sweet potatoes, festivals, hot mineral baths, persimmons and miniature oranges, heated tables with blankets draped over them, and hot green tea in the mornings.

It’s easy to feel paralyzed during this period where not only am I in flux, but the season is as well. It seems like everything around me is morphing, and one of the things that provides me with comfort is a daily routine. Somehow having an idea of what ought to be done during the day and in which order to do it can be terribly consolatory, and I say “terribly” because I’m not sure if establishing a routine is the answer to how I ought to best fit myself back into a world that is both familiar and confusing.

Thus, with this quandary in mind, I look to the greats:

Good ol’ boy Ralph E. once famously opined that, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and devines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.”

Billy James says, “ For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.”

Now it seems that these two dudes have some solid and valid advice, and although they don’t necessarily contradict each other, there seems to be some juxtaposition that leaves me wondering which way is best when it comes to creating a habit.

Namely, do I take my morning dump at the same time every morning, or do I switch it up in order to maintain a fresh and uninhibited outlook on life?

In this light, the morning dump serves merely as a metaphorical tool to effectively ask the question of which habits are worth keeping, and which fall into what Emerson called a “foolish consistency.” Granted, taking a dump is a biological imperative in many cases and many would argue that it is not a “habit,” but more of an “urgent inkling.” I’ve had numerous conversations with people—mostly guys now that I think about it—who are passionately convinced that in order to reap the maximum pleasure from one’s morning he or she ought to take a dump at the same time each day (and if you are my younger brother, in the company of the sport’s page).

But, does doing so make us categorically opposed to the acquisition of a “great soul,” which is to say, do we place ourselves in danger of being attacked by a hobgoblin if we take our dump consistently everyday on the hour?

Let’s pass the mic back to James for a final thought: “The more details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.” Seems to me that he is saying that setting one’s bowel movements as best as one can to a habitual alarm clock allows one to achieve full mental and spiritual potential. To think, taking my dump everyday after my morning coffee will free my mind! And here I thought that it took years of mediation and insight into the true nature of reality to achieve such a state of mind. Silly me.

Lucky Dog

I read somewhere that autumn is a time of renewal, a time to get one’s ducks in a row. Or maybe it wasn’t renewal. Maybe it was moving on they were talking about. Or growth? Maybe coming into one’s self. Something with a cocoon metaphor? No, that wasn’t it—oh, yeah, I think it was just change. That would make more sense, what with the trees and all.

I’ve been back in America for nearly 3 months now, and yesterday marked the official end of my travels, of my ambitions for transience. Moving from one place to the next, hanging out in different groups of people—some had a lifestyle like mine; others were more markedly “on their way,” whatever that means. It’s easy to look back at the past few months nostalgically, as somehow they were a fantasy world whose border lies somewhere within the two states of “employment” and “unemployment.” Funny how money often establishes itself as a division between things; social classes, various qualities, definitions of success to offer a few examples. So many—too many—things are largely dependent upon whether or not you have a green substance known as money in your pocket. And I’m not talking about boogers, folks.

But, money can also lead to possibilities. Had I not chosen to spend a lot of money over the past 3 months, the following might never have happened:

There would have been no trip to a lookout tower in Northern Idaho with two of my best and oldest friends. We wouldn’t have eaten that vegetarian chilly and suffered the gaseous explosion that infested the tower for two days straight.

I wouldn’t have driven from Portland to San Diego with another great friend, and I wouldn’t have eaten at a spectacular Indian restaurant on a foggy and cold summer night in San Francisco.

I wouldn’t have gone surfing with another close friend, taking breaks to come back to our towels to sip beer. I also wouldn’t have taken long runs on the beach, and wouldn’t know anything about Pipe’s breakfast burritos.

I wouldn’t have taken the hook out of a golden trout’s mouth, nor would I have seen a full moon from the perch that is the Sierra Nevada grandiose. There’s no way I could have gotten that rather intense hiking crotch-rash, either, without dishing out a little moo-lah.

I wouldn’t have taken part in the glorious wedding of two close friends during a weekend up at Mt. Hood, where more old friends and I drunkenly compared James Brown impressions around a hot tub. I wouldn’t have pulled my one break dancing move in the middle of the dance circle at the reception.

If I didn’t spend my money, I couldn't have gone to Japan for a quick week to see the woman I love, spend time with her and her family, and drink wine at an Italian restaurant while looking out at a sun setting into Kobe Bay on a warm September evening. We couldn’t have tried to projectile-launch chewing gum into each other’s mouth on the infamous bullet train bound for Tokyo.

I couldn’t have accidentally found a mountain lodge with my Dad in backcountry Montana after a day of fly-fishing where we met a family of moose and he caught a beautiful fish on a FUCKING BUMBLE BEE imitation. There’s no way we could have been the only guests at the lodge like we were, and order wine, and go to the hot tub in which we were to accidentally lock ourselves.

No money, and I couldn’t have hiked hilly miles into another backcountry lodge where cowboys, real cowboys, live and whiskey and coffee are the main staples of one’s diet. There’s no way I could have caught the biggest cutthroat trout of my life if I hadn’t spent a little money to get there.

I would never have learned how to splint an open femur fracture, and I still wouldn’t know where the xiphoid process is located, or even what the hell it is. I couldn’t have watched a seal fishing at dusk under a bridge that looks straight out into the straight of San Juan de Fuca.

Lastly, I wouldn’t have had my armpits grabbed and been lifted up at a reggae concert by my younger (but bigger) brother. He wouldn’t have kissed my hand in downtown Seattle, thinking it was his girlfriend’s. To think! He and I wouldn’t have drank cheap beer in front of a television screen trying our god-freakin’-damndest to beat Super Mario 3 if I hadn’t dumped out a little dough to get where he is.

Although I now find myself with an almost empty pocket, I have a handful of gems (not boogers, mind you) that are memories scattered throughout perhaps the biggest transition of my life to date. This is where you say: “Hey, John. Master Card called…they want their commercial back!” Then I would say, “Naw, I’m just lucky.”