"Off I went, into the gnarly wilderness, rolling hills choked in smoke, blushing deserts and ghost town arcades. In my vessel were relics of a capricious past, trunks and crates filled with sophomoric dissonance and carbon fiber anthems of rebellion. Money poorly spent on impulses laid across the tapestry of a wild and failed escape from reality. Happiness back then was a polyurethane figure disguising my consumerism as patronage. Happiness was a $45 grill gingerly balanced between beams on a wrought cinder fire escape, a grill populated with earthly delights from butcher stalls and bodega bays. Happiness was laughing in the face of all the ghosts in my past still haunting me. It was always short lived and it was never enough. No drink, or herb, or fungus, or powder-packed chemical candy collection could take away the contempt. No soft skinned sexual indulgence could properly gap and plug the hollowed out bottom of my soul.
Away I drifted, as every construct crumbled before my eyes, they rippled through my very understanding of humanity and compelled me to bend with the momentum. My tears bled like hot acid through the loss. But once I had sloughed away my old, rotten skin, I saw the entire landscape evolve into brilliant prisms of recompense. I was suddenly given a shooting gallery full of left-eye sobriquets, once an insult to my being and now transmitting in ultra liquid clarity.
Where I saw inevitability, I now saw resolve.
Where I saw regret, I now saw hindsight.
Where I saw vehement provincialism, I now saw expulsions of precious human energy better spent on benevolence and compassion for the community.
Where I once saw a tragic and forceful devolvement of my ideals, I now saw an opportunity for augmentation, for extreme growth, to drown my lungs with a breath I never thought I would scream.
Goodbye, but never Good Riddance, to my former lines of thought. They are forever a delta in the sands of my muddy psyche, but the fires have done their work and the underbrush is now gone. I walk into the darkness with my paths unclear, naked and alone.
But I will never be afraid again."
----Day 2, Portland OR