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I desperately needed to unplug so I started a blog. But aren’t we all paradoxes?
Early last November, after warding off the urge for about a year and change, I threw my dog in the backseat of my car and pulled out of my house in the Hollywood Hills and drove home to Washington DC in time for Thanksgiving. There was a lot I loved about the life I’d built for myself in Los Angeles, deep roots with friends from growing up there, completely different roots with friends I’d made in 20 years of making tv shows and movies and video games, and the more than occasionally magical new roots that were forming with the dozens of new friends who’d lived in my house in the past couple of years. But I was born in DC, and my parents had moved back there with the first Clinton Administration and now my older brother had moved there and gotten married and had a kid thereby officially making me Uncle Jesse. Finally. Then my little sister married a guy from Baltimore and bought a house there and took a job at NPR in the District. My family was converging. A new chapter was being formed together, without me. And I felt torn. I didn’t want to be apart, I wanted to be a part, of that, of whatever it was that was happening. Parents becoming grandparents, a baby becoming a girl, my kid sister becoming a grownup, there was too much to keep up with just through the Fam text chain and pics and vids. I needed to be there and I needed to be there without feeling like the clock was ticking, like the sands were slipping and everyone was expecting me to vanish any moment. I needed to be there open-ended. Which meant I’d need to have my dog with me. And since I don’t fly her, that meant I’d be driving. I hadn’t driven cross country since September of ’97 when like a thunderbolt I realized I had to move to LA and try to become a tv writer since it was the only thing I could imagine myself doing. I did that drive in something like 54 hours, practically nonstop straight through, in a ’90 BMW overloaded with everything I owned. I took two naps, in a couple of rest stops, one underneath a tree I remember. Took off from DC on a Tuesday morning and was pulling into Westwood Thursday afternoon.
I didn’t see much. I didn’t feel much.
Well, pulling out of LA was a lot more emotional.
I left the house in the care of my two friends who’d been living with me the longest. Philippe who’d been there six or seven months at the time and Alexcia who was just shy of a year. Many moons, we called it. They’d become the heart of a place that was filled with art and music and life and dancing and good healthy food and yoga by the pool and meditation on the hillside and naked people frolicking in the yard and vegetables growing in the garden and fresh fruit and chickens wandering free and strangers dyeing clothing and drums and photo-shoots and poetry on antique typewriters and dinner parties and breathwork and breakdowns and crying jags and breakthroughs and life and death and all that shit. It wasn’t easy to leave.
There was one other thing, though.
I was struggling to make things up.
The post-election reality was too crazy-making, too insane, I couldn’t look away from it without feeling guilty. I couldn’t lose myself in make-believe when it felt essential to devote my energy to the real life story that was unfolding, the terrifying reality of everyday destruction, of… I don’t really wanna describe it. Everyone’s got their own version of how they feel about the federal government right now. It’s all the parable of the blind men trying to describe an elephant except this one’s made entirely of assholes. What mattered to me was that I hadn’t done enough work to elevate the voices that resonate with me and that that’s my job as a citizen. I got civic pride. I don’t dodge jury duty, I relish it. I’m a patriot. And Los Angeles is pretty well covered with elected officials whose patriotic voices I appreciate. California is peopled with an abundance of ambitious leaders of quality and a minority of garbagemen. My energy would probably be better used elsewhere. I joined a group of other writers who felt similarly and found myself gravitating towards the Texas transplants. They asked me to help them contribute ideas and words and thoughts to some races in their homestate and I felt plugged in to something useful.
By the time I hit the road for DC I knew what I needed to do. I needed to spend time with my family and I needed to pick a campaign to devote myself to once I got there.
There were many tears in the days leading up to my departure. I don’t think I really made it clear to anyone what kind of leaving this was. I don’t think I really knew myself, but I suspected that once I was in DC, I’d probably be there a while. At least a couple months. Maybe three. Maybe I’d stay through the winter and see what happened in the Spring. Maybe a job would pull me back again. But I didn’t say I was moving. I just went for a drive.
That was last year and if I can figure this out, I’ll try to put up all the letters I sent home from the road. Of all the voices in my head, the voice I use to tell my family what’s going on in my life has become my favorite. It used to feel like homework or like a status report, but at some point along the way that shifted. It turned into a type of honesty without intent, just simple communication of the light and the dark and the scenes in front of me and the memories that get spurred and the questions big and small. There are other voices in there too. There’s one for selling. I don’t like that one all that much. There’s one for entertaining strangers. That one works pretty good with a deadline creeping. There’s one for fucking with my friends. That one tends to come off a little angrier than I mean to. It’s been a decades-long process of coming to understand that, much gratitude to those who’ve threatened, but not followed through, on revealing the emails I wrote in college.
Anyway.
Turns out...
Despite a couple of relatively successful careers...
Just after I turned 42 years old I moved into my parents’ basement.
The first week I was home — and I say home, but I only ever lived in this home during the summer of ’95 when I interned at the US Trade Representative’s office and the summer of ’96 when I clerked at a video store, the latter having a lot more impact on my career path than the former — that first week my older brother says to me, “Hey, if you’re still around next week maybe you wanna come over for dinner.” I told him, yeah, I was gonna be here for a while. He smiled with one side of his mouth and shrugged, “We’ll see.” He’d done his time in the basement before he went to medical school, he lived down there with his girlfriend at the time. It was because of them that my Mom had fixed it up, built a kitchenette and a dinette, curtained off a corner for a bedroom, I’m telling you as far as basements go this is swank. Obama’s Ambassador to Italy used to stay down there when he was in town. He called it La Prigione, which I believe is a sexy way of saying prison.
“We’ll see.”
8 months later…
I don’t even know how to sum up the basement. I touched four seasons on the east coast, had a real winter for the first time in 20 years, felt love and life and death and learned a god damn lot down there. I drove up and down the eastern seaboard through snow and ice as far north as Niagara Falls.
We lost a family member, my uncle, a giant. Everyone converged on my aunt’s house in Boston. Despite the absolute sadness, I was grateful to be able to shepherd my brother and sister. Just to be present for my family. And then my extended family.
I turned my car in after the lease ran out and got myself metro cards for DC and New York.
I dated a ballerina. She thought it was cute that I lived in my parents’ basement. “Are you taking care of them?” she asked. “It remains to be determined who’s taking care of who,” I told her, “But no, I don’t think they need my help.” On occasion I’d be called upon to lift things. The stroller down the stairs. The kid up ‘em.
I was fortunate enough to get introduced to the Beto O’Rourke campaign for Senate in Texas and through my group of displaced Texans we put on an event in Los Angeles and then I talked my folks and the people on their block into putting on another one in DC.
By Spring, my house was starting to weigh on me. More friends had moved in and they were taking care of the place and each other, but I was starting to have difficulty picturing myself back there. I took a haphazard stab at landing a couple of tv jobs thinking that if I got pulled back I’d go, but I didn’t compete very hard. I suppose it was obvious, one of those ‘leave it to fate’ moments when you pretty much make your decision for yourself through your own lack of effort. The real effort would have to go into renting the place out. That’s real work.
Just about ten years after I moved in, I flew back with the intent to clear out. Toss it, store it, take it, leave it. Those were the options. It took a week and a half to go through everything I own, a week and a half where it became clear to Philippe and Alexcia that this chapter, this beautiful, productive chapter was coming to an end. I met with realtors and I fixed what was broken and I stashed everything I’d need access to in the garage and put a lock on it. Philippe and Alexcia did the same. She’s gone to sea for the summer, Greece with her family, Spain with her friends, last time I checked. And Philippe is off to Bermuda for a photo project. The chickens are moving out to stay with a friend. There’s a movie star moving in.
Oh. And I suppose I left out the other thing, the thing that made me make the decision to be back in DC again this fall. My brother’s having another kid. And my sister is having her first. So there’s babies all over the place all of a sudden. Uncle Jesse times three soon.
So here’s how the calendar looks to me…
End of August/beginning of September I’d like to see my friends again at Burning Man. Also that’s my birthday.
Beginning of November is the midterms and I’m hoping for a different outcome than the last election. If this thing goes sideways again, I may have to run off to Japan and learn everything about Sumo.
End of November/beginning of December these new kids are gonna start to show up.
For someone who doesn’t tend to make plans, those are a lot of significant events.
So…
That’s why I needed to unplug.
Really unplug.
I mean wander the earth get lost get found not look at your phone unplug.
Let your thoughts catch up with you unplug.
Let the news go on without you change your scenery change your point of view see something new unplug.
Get out of the basement be in the sunshine unplug.
I gave a little bit more thought to the time on the road this round. I bought a camper van. Bucket list. Dream. A 1999 Ford Coachmen high top that comfortably sleeps two, me and the dog, and I went on a mission.
A few missions.
Beyond just unplugging.
- Visit the coal mining towns in West Virginia and Kentucky where my father represented the survivors of disasters in the 1970s.
- Open my back doors to a lake or a river and make a cup of coffee on my propane stove and sit with my dog and write for a while.
- Go see if you can help your friends in Texas. Follow Beto for a few days on the road. Shoot testimonials of people who’ve turned out to meet him.
- Drop the dog off in LA with one friend, pick up another friend and head up to the Burn.
- Spend October in California and Texas doing whatever you can to elect good people in November.
- Go home again.
My father would simplify all of this and not just cause he’s not the kinda guy who makes lists, not to say that I’m Toad and he’s Frog, it doesn’t fit quite that cleanly. He just never lets his to-do list get past one item. He takes care of things right away. My mother calls that “impulse control.”
Before I left he told me, “You have one job: fall in love.”
So off I go.
