My first real quit: DirecTV call center, February 2002. Crippling social anxiety and a lifelong phone phobia had my number, so I excelled at awkward pauses, nervous laughter, and average call times. Even if custom designed by the damned to torture me singularly, no greater corporate hellscape could exist. With its fluorescent lighting. Forced cheery attitude. And “this call will be recorded for quality assurance”s. This “O Fortuna” doomed workplace realization hit hard on September 11th, 2001. I squirmed in a vaguely ergonomic desk chair, staring up at the reality show terror on the big screen surrounds, while numbly guiding shell-shocked midwesterners through common billing question. This, I’ve come to learn time after time, is what we do during a disaster in America. Put on our capitalist blinders. Pretend everything’s normal. Vainly attempt to blandly exist. Blessedly, in the back of my mind, I had a plan. An Edward Abbey-style monkey-wrench one to wander in the wilderness for months on end. Every needling workaday torture concealed the tiny gem of my freedom. I put in …

I wondered as I wandered solo down the boardwalk on Isla Mujeres in Mexico… in a wave-like refrain while staring into the “where is my mind” Caribbean… who will be the love of my life? On the next turn, in a splash of spray paint and Spanish, the concrete answer: “Soy el amor de mi vida.” I wasted many years steeped in a bitter hate of myself. No matter which way I looked at me: I did not fit in. Anywhere. Too little. Too much. (Somehow simultaneously.) Too weird. Too black sheep. I spent many years vainly attempting to escape myself. Thus, a little wonderer becomes a little wanderer. “Wherever you go, there you are,” my uncle (a ceramics artist-now gone from this world) warned before I left on my first wild hare of a trip to Russia at age 18. He was right. There I am. Wherever I go. And I have been to hell and back. Routinely. Like a sick commute. But I found that I can turn the worst of times into …

My pale flesh and potatoey filling were genetically designed for perpetually overcast and infinitely melancholy Irish scapes. Yet here I am, planted in the unblinking desert. I had two (2) semi-disastrous / semi-humorous Sunday desert sojourns in just the past two (2) weekends. Desert misadventures…ill advised. But for me, constantly attempted. As if I am doomed to be spectacle for scavengers someday. One misadventure ended up with me fetal-positioned beneath a sliver of sagebrush shade beneath a noontime unrelenting sun, with just 0.7 of an impossible mile to reach the Bonneville Point trailhead, once a wagon-rutted route on the Oregon Trail. This is the place where, according to legend, the relieved French fur trappers declared “Les bois! Les bois!” pointing at the trees along the Boise River, a sight for sore just-slogged-through-the-most-hopeless-of-Utah eyes. This is the place where, according to that 99 degree day, I would perish of sunstroke. A member of the Oregon Trail video game generation dying alongside the Oregon Trail IRL. Irony lives…at the very least. My translucent white skin flushed bright …

I scream. You scream. We all scream. (Dead stop.) This would be the tagline for my nihilistic ice cream store called Waiting for Fro-Yo. (With tortured irony, we would not serve frozen yogurt. But will perpetually imply it’s coming soon.) The sweet shop’s staff would posit in a monotone Werner Herzog droll: “Yes, we all scream for ice cream. Yet, do we also not all scream for the existential horror of our fleeting, insignificant lives?” And: “Would you like sprinkles on that?” For a cherry on top feel, I brought this vintage yellow sunbrella all the way up Squaw Creek (groans: racist nomenclature) for this fashion shoot at the waterfall dead end. (“No exit,” Sarte would say.) I hiked here in the early spring. The creek was ice cold and the trail upstream and underwater. No extremities had to be amputated due to frostbite however. Licked it. vintage yellow sunbrella with cane handle with the name Candi Miller handwritten on the band, $7 – Antique World Mall | screen-printed polka dot, acid-colored lips ice cream …

Put your tray tables in an upright position, and prepare for departure from 2020. On your right, a once-in-a-millennium scene of cosmic proportions and galactic significance. Though a rather shoddy photo of it (as I took it myself, handheld, shaking in the subzero temps of the Utah high desert). In a spontaneous gambit to witness the Great Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, I rented a magically-available yurt in the dark sky preserve of Dead Horse State Park near Moab, Utah. We could all use a little escape hatch from the universe. A shift into a new alignment. A different perspective entirely. Tho I imagine on the earth-bound Galactic Federation spaceship, the on-flight entertainment is exclusively limited to 1985’s “Cocoon.” Because we all know that when the aliens land—instead of delving into the timeless secrets of the universe—Boomers will just try to mine them for their next-level Botox and anti-aging secrets. Victoria’s Secret blue satin jumpsuit, $15 – Antique World Mall | Smithline Exclusive brown knit coat with fur trim, $55 – Antique World Mall | …

“Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road,” – Karen Blixen, Out of Africa Before I left for Kenya, I read Karen Blixen’s (nom de plume: Isak Dinesen) book, Out of Africa. Taking place at about this time 100 years ago, the Baroness owned a coffee plantation just outside of Nairobi. Her book is ripe with the soul of the country and its people, with less of the entitled colonialism than I expected. Karen wanted nothing more than for her bones to lie in rest in Africa. She did not get her wish. Her coffee plantation suffered locusts and other acts of God, and she was forced to leave the land she loved, later dying of malnutrition in her Dutch estate. A minor tragedy of dislocation. On the day I took this picture, I wanted nothing more than to make it out of Africa. I’ll likely process the full scope of traveling during the outbreak of a worldwide pandemic over time—peeling off …

“Banish the ghost of coronaaaaahhh…” Before my trip to Kenya, I went to Passport Health, a traveler’s clinic for immunizations and fear needling. There, I was handed a terrifying brochure filled with the potential dangers of my destination. Typhoid. Hepatitis. Yellow fever. And a long list of other shit-inducing diseases borne of filth and mosquitoes and the social nature of human existence. It totaled $1500 to completely mitigate the fear of the unknown. I paid $500 to slightly assuage it, which my Kenyan friend found baffling and idiotic. I also paid dearly for taking the live Typhoid pills that made me vomit for hours on end over the course a week. I took off into an exponentially panicked world. When I left one week ago, the novel coronavirus drifted in and out of the public consciousness. It still felt like a somewhat foreign concept. Other people’s problems. A few days after I landed, COVID-19 did too. Blessedly not via the conduit of me. Since then, it feels like the entire world has screeched to a …