Escape & Awe

Sometimes the reality of my life becomes difficult and almost unbearable, so I think I need to escape. Sometimes I want to drop everything and just walk away. Leave my possessions, my friends and family and my job and head for the sunset. Other times I just want to sit down and escape from within […]

Sometimes the reality of my life becomes difficult and almost unbearable, so I think I need to escape. Sometimes I want to drop everything and just walk away. Leave my possessions, my friends and family and my job and head for the sunset. Other times I just want to sit down and escape from within myself making up worlds and stories that aren’t like where I really am.

Where would I go? Well, I have broken up my escapes and fantasies into categories.

Locales:

Ethiopia – I went to Kenya in 1998 for a couple of weeks and fell in love with Africa. It was not like America or anywhere else I had been. It is exotic and strange. I had images of Heart of Darkness and the Mosquito Coast and I had a romantic attachment to East Africa.

What makes me travel to Ethiopia is the rich history. I remember seeing the church that is carved into caves where pre-bible Christians practice their faith. The Nile runs through the country. I remember reading about the history of Bob Marley and about Haile Selassie and it changed my idea from the famine-waged land to a rich cultural country. I don’t know why I have some attraction to Ethiopia, but I always think about going there and traveling the countryside.

I feel like I would enjoy the simplicity of Africa and being at the crossroads of Africa and the Arabic peninsula. I fantasize about being a coffee farmer selling beans to artisan roasters in America.

Spain – I went to Spain in 2003 with my best friend and it was one of the happiest I had been. The trip was perfect with where we were staying and the routine we had while we were there. I just remember thinking that when I got back to the States I would start living the Spanish lifestyle: waking up early, drinking an espresso and eating bread and cheese, working for awhile and then having a big lunch, taking a siesta – a nap, working for a little longer, having dinner around ten or eleven and then going out till two or three in the morning. Alas, the American culture doesn’t allow for such a leisurely way of life.

I imagine myself coming back and buying the house my friend and I stayed and writing in the morning and then sitting on the veranda by the pool in the afternoon and watching the Mediterranean or the city below. I imagine owning a scooter and cruising around the coast from Gibraltar to Barcelona. I’d hang out with English, Scottish and a few American and Australian expats. I’d play darts in the bars and go on crazy adventures in Madrid.

I’d be Spain’s new Hemmingway.

New York City – Sometimes I feel like I do need a bigger city and more culture than I can get in Portland, Oregon. Sometimes I want to feel that hot humid city air. I read my New York friends Facebook posts and get jealous at some of the fun they have that you can only have in New York.

Sometimes I think about having a writer’s experience. Live in Brooklyn, not in the safe and gentrified part, but in a neighborhood that hasn’t been touched yet, if there is one, and live in a shoebox apartment and fear for my life when I have to leave to my crappy dishwashing job and spend my nights chain-smoking in my room looking out at the apartment building across the alleyway and writing.

Other times I am a successful journalist with a column and I make appearances on news shows and I’d live in uptown in a proper townhouse near central park. I’d take the subway to work and people would recognize me and sometimes I’d have to travel for book tours or go on assignment for work or be a visiting professor somewhere.

Cuba – I have always had a fascination with Cuba because in some regards it is forbidden. I love it for its rebellious nature, it’s history and it’s tie to the JFK assassination and the mob.

My idea of Cuba for escaping isn’t mob owned casinos or joining a communist government, but the shack on the beach where I would watch the sunrise and I would go fishing and ride my bike through town to get food. I would have a fire on the beach every night. I’d grow my beard long and grow old and people would come around to hear me tell stories or give advice. I’d never quit smoking cigars and I would learn how to roll my own.

Time:

1920’s anywhere – I’ve had the fantasy before Midnight in Paris came out. I’ve always been attracted to the 20s as it is an era that art really begins to break out of its mold and experiment. Jazz becomes popular, painting is getting into strange forms, classical music is stretching the boundaries of traditional orchestration, literature becomes interesting again and fashion has hit its peak.

I don’t care if I’m in Paris, New York, New Orleans or Kansas City. Even Portland, Oregon seems more interesting in the 20s.

All my time fantasies are me traveling back in time in a time machine that only I know about, so my fantasies are always doing what I love now then.

I would become a renaissance man and I would write, paint and compose music. When I see art, read books and listen to music from this era I think that I was born way too late. People in the 20s would get me. I have the fantasy that I would become an icon and would help further the cultural boom of that time.

Late 70s New York – I would go to that time and start a punk band, start a zine and hang out with all the cool people of that era. I don’t think I have to expound on that.

0 – 33 AD Israel – If I had a time machine I would go back to Bethlehem and see the birth and life of Jesus, just to come back to modern time and show a slide show of what really happened. Something about knowing the truth and bumming millions of people out helps me escape my reality.

Fantasies in my Head:

The Hero – I have a fantasy that I think about when I am riding the bus where my girlfriend’s office building has been taken over by terrorist and I’ve been keeping secret that I’m an ex commando and I get a bunch of guns and break into the building and start killing the high number of heavily armed terrorists. I always start off silent with a hatchet or two that I either throw or slip up behind them and open their throats. I then get into a large room where my girlfriend and coworkers are and in slow motion I enter the room and do gymnastics while shooting every terrorist.

Sometimes this isn’t enough. Sometimes there are more terrorists on their way and I have to switch to an offensive to a defensive position and have my girlfriend and her coworkers get behind desks and I take care of the onslaught of armed terrorists as they try to pour into the room. I have machine guns, grenades and an automatic shotgun.

I have a hero complex.

The Perfect Baseball Game – I usually try this when I’m having trouble sleeping. I am up to bat and my team is losing badly. In real life I can’t hit a ball deep if my life depended on it, but in my fantasy I pretend that I’ve just been hitting it shallow because I like small ball, so I get up to bat and foul it. I then ask for a different bat and the second pitch I go yard and hit a car in the parking lot. I then am playing center field and I make these great diving catches and strong frozen rope throws to get the double play.

Sometimes I think about going to the gym and get myself strong enough to hit home runs, but you know, why?

The 1000 Novel Ideas – I’m always thinking about stories I want to write. I try to act them out in my head. When one I like starts to play out I make a playlist with my music or with Spotify and try to let the music help the story play out. I listen to the playlist over and over again and just play out this story and try to get further and further with the plot and the character development.

Some of my ideas I start writing. I have about five novels unfinished on my computer. Sometimes I get back to an old idea and try to work on it. I love entering the fantasy world of my stories.

Some of my ideas are pretty silly. Today while walking the dog and listening to BBC news I started developing a story where I take the characters from GI Joe and make them less cartoony. I started developing a story line where they are all in trouble and being court marshaled and Duke takes them for his super secret special ops unit called GI Joe. I envision the movie the Dirty Dozen and make them fight COBRA, an Al Qaeda cell in Afghanistan that starts cells all over the world. Something about criminal military special ops unit that makes the idea of GI Joe so much more appealing to me. Would you read it?

Guilt & Regret – I also spend a good amount of time thinking about all the mistakes I have made or the things I didn’t do when I could have done them.