Napkin Thoughts

            I originally wrote this on the back of a torn, stained napkin I got in a diner in the tiny town of Reed, Wisconsin. I wasn’t in Reed when I wrote on it. I was in New York, in a couple’s apartment. I had only just met them that night at a bar, but they were kind and drunk enough to let me stay the night. The sounds of lovemaking coming from their bedroom—only one thin wall separated us—gave into heavy snores at three o’clock. Only then, when I was finally allowed to sleep, I found that I could not. I got a trembling in my fingers and I knew I had to write something. I searched their apartment for a piece of paper, but found none. I flopped back onto the bed, prepared to let my thoughts be erased by a cleansing sleep. However, my hand brushed against the front of my pants and I felt something in my pocket through the fabric. It was this napkin. I scribbled furiously until the napkin was completely tattooed before collapsing into a long sleep. When I looked at the words that had spilled out onto the napkin in the morning, I found that they were mostly incomprehensible. Over the last half a year, I had emulated Dean while also half-heartedly searching for him (without method or much initiative) in my typical passive manner. Despite only knowing him for that brief night, I felt his influence deep within me for a long time. Like a set of values or a deep-set disease, he stuck with me and changed how I acted. Finally, sitting in that couple’s apartment, I finally began to feel the effects on my body and mind of such an unhealthy lifestyle. The words on the napkin were like unhealthy humors leaving my body. I felt as though I had aged sixty years in six months, both in my body but in terms of my wisdom as well. Conventional wisdom it was not, and evidently the high volume and velocity at which it had streamed into me had tired my brain out. What did I learn? It is again—like the meeting with Dean—difficult to put into words.... If I could extract one aphorism from the experience (and this will absolutely be a diluted version of the true experience) it is that in our stagnant society, movement of any kind—road trips, going on a run, or even migrating to a different continent is necessary. It is not the same case as with a shark—we won’t die immediately if we stop moving. Instead, it is a slow drip of poisonous inaction into our veins. Staying in one place leads to a monotonous routine—an infinite loop in which we are doomed. If you were to spend every day of the rest of your life the same way, why not just die today?  Anyway, I had found that going too far the other way was also dangerous. Spending each day in radical amazement and frenetic movement had taken its toll. I think had I continued that lifestyle for another month I would have ended up a drug, drink, and dream-bloated corpse floating in some river—still on the move even in death.