The Stem

Seriously, if you read the first post, you are still wondering what I am doing. You may still be wondering if I write coherently. I brandished the cosmic chalkboard, and now allow me to tap my pointer on the little dots which I am.

So I am not in college right now. The bureaucracy still has a distant tether on my ankle, but basically I am a free man. With new shoes and shirts but mostly empty pockets, I am going to the Western longitudes of the United States, to see what really goes on out there. I am leaving the books on the Eastern coast, but the memories are coming along, and are weightless anyways.

The adventures begin on January 9th. I fly to Hilo, Hawaii, and meander down to the Southern tip of the Big Island, to a farm I have never seen. I know it is an organic Orange farm, and I know I have a place to stay. I guess part of the suspense of reading this journal is discovering what happens next.

But the larger culmination of my coming days is in the Spring. Beginning April 23rd, I set out on the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,660 mile path from Mexico to Canada. What I see is yet to be seen.

On the Appalachian Trail, my name was Ishmael. He is the wanderer in Melville's Moby Dick, set out on a strange ship with strange characters. He is an articulate orphan amongst heathens, savages and capitalists. He sees dark shapes below the seawater that he never catches. His journey carries him to the far corner of the world, in pursuit of Nature with a capital N, in efforts to put his fingers around the throat of something he can neither see or feel. He is a quester of the absurd.

The Seed

I do not believe that anything is random. The word itself is an imaginary definition. It describes something that has no affiliation to anything else, something entirely removed from cause, something like an island in the stream of time, but floating on top of the current. The closest approximation to a definition of randomness is an intergalactic alien interrupting my breakfast to hand me a trinket on a holiday it celebrates in another dimension. But even this is not random- it is pulled from a pool of possibilities that I have imagined and articulated.

In 1824 Nicolas Carnot expounded on an engineering conundrum. In developing an engine, he was faced with the common challenge of exchanging as much energy for work as possible. An engine which is fueled with copious amounts of gasoline but coughs out fumes and only moves a car slowly is therefore very inefficient. However, he realized the concept of perfect efficiency is impossible. No amount of energy can be exchanged for work without losses to heat, and this principle tore a rift in the previously perfectly symmetrical universe. Time only moves in one direction, since we engines can never return to past states of being.

Every thing builds on another. In a sense, it is impossible to erase an experience- even forgetting things do not eradicate them. There is no one alive today who can remember Mozart, but many remember what his music sounds like or portraits of his face look like, and in a sense it is irrelevant whether Mozart the man really ever existed. He is a giant and infinite stack of experiences added to time, just like everyone else before and after him.

There is a quite a detailed game plan to this universe, with many imaginary X's and O's drawn out on a cosmic chalkboard. None of us really have minds large enough to see the entire thing at once, but we can see the edges of our own chalkdust, and with good faith, we can imagine the larger letters we form. I'm not talking about a master plan devised by God, or really any single thing. I mean that there is an enormous equation, and it is unfolding in one direction, always adding the past.

Anyways, my intentions are not a culmination not only of weeks and years, but an entire lifetime, and abstractly, the lives before me. When people ask me why I want to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, I don't say any of these sentences. I usually have something wry to say. But if you really want to know, I really could not even tell you. I would have to hand you my lifetime, and let you sort through it.

But seriously, there's a reason. Sometimes I recite Thoreau's words:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

We are fleeting particles on this world, that only get to kick it briefly with other particles. If we don't understand our present particle-ness, then we may quickly be fused into a larger and different compound that does not even resemble what we once were. I want to understand this universe firsthand before I have it handed to me by someone else.