a lonely hunter

“All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.”
- Carson McCullers (author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter)

After a long stage of restless limbo, it appears I'll be on the road again very soon. I'm glad. I'm ready for a new place to settle. A place to put myself and breathe in a new routine. It's been an interesting and difficult couple of months - life has felt increasingly liquid, less concrete, like I can't get a grip on anything - am treading water in a vat of Jell-o. So many things up in the air - my emotions and things on no one geographical point on the map. Being a perpetual vagabond is a lonely endeavor. I know I do it to myself. But it often seems unavoidable. I long for roots, and I envy those who have them, yet I still can't seem to put them down - not for long.

In the days of old, gypsies used to move in packs. I guess I was born to the wrong time. I've been watching loads of Carnivàle lately, an HBO series that traced, you guessed it, a traveling carnival across the dust bowl of the Great Depression. It got cancelled after a couple of seasons about 5 years ago - I somewhat think it was ahead of it's time - I have a feeling people would relate more to the uncertain desolation of that era now. Me, I guess I've always related to the desolation of that era. But superimpose the magical wanderlust of a carnival on top of it... whoa... I know that. A life that's a series of places and incredulous events... I know that.

Maybe it's just a sign of being a life-thirsty American - who knows. But here's to getting back on that quiet road, to embarking on more jaw-dropping adventures, to hunting down a plot of land to stake a tent... and to writing about it.


Photo is by a guy who still travels with the gypsy packs, and astounds me with the emotion he can capture in a single still frame, Mike Brodie.

subtext

i am here.
on a shelf.
come & get me.


Photo is by Mike Brodie.

enjoy this. this one moment. right here.

"Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future." — Jonathan Safran Foer


Photo is by Mike Brodie, The Polaroid Kid, who has done a masterful job of documenting life of modern rail jumpers - people who are likely better at doubting the future than the majority of us.

no really, it's true

"In this broad earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed perfection."

-Walt Whitman


The photos are an especially fitting accompaniment to the Whitman quote I think - they're taken by Mike Brodie aka The Polaroid Kidd, who rides the American rails and documents a group of people who wade along on the periphery of society - squatters, drifters, what have you - capturing their lives, character, authenticity and faux-authenticity. Perhaps I think Brodie's images illustrate Whitman's view of the world so well since my own association with such folk has been so wonderfully refreshing.