I’ve spent the past few days catching up with an old high-school buddy. we were both impressed with how the past 15 [15!] years had treated us. he wanted to know what I’d been up to and ended up Googling me. I wanted to write back ‘smoke & mirrors, man, smoke & mirrors’ because that’s all it’s been. did I travel a bit? yes. get involved in some fun projects? yes. have a few decent photos? yes. a few stories? yes. but who doesn’t? if anyone, anyone in question was so enamored with proving their life’s choices to put them all over the web, then they’d be interesting to. everyone’s got a story, everyone’s seen a few things – you don’t need a passport to do that. my photos are nothing more than a collection of photographers who have interested me, thus making me a bi-product. and that’s just it, isn’t it? we’re all bi-products of people far more talented than us. I’ve stood on some mighty shoulders, but, when you’re in the packed crowd, you don’t see that. you see the stander. the borrower. the one unable to hoist others up and takes advantage of the kindness put out before him. my friend is, as are some of you, doing good things. helping people. raising people. all I have is a passport and a phobia of settling. the people doing good things rarely have time to broadcast them. the people broadcasting are rarely doing good things. smoke & fucking mirrors. I don’t strive for greatness, I’ve simply become dependent on other’s attention. other’s approval. do I look forward to the day when I don’t care how many people ‘like’ my status update? god yes. oh my god yes. but I need it. and I don’t like it. am I writing a book because it’s going to change the world? no. I’m writing it because my Dad, a long time ago, told me to document this strange choice of roads. do I hope someday, someone picks it up and thinks ‘I should travel’, sure. but I’m not writing about travel. I’m writing about people who ended up traveling not because they were necessarily interested in travel, but because travel made their ownselves interesting. it’s sick and it’s funny and I probably will continue to do it until something, somewhere along the lines comes along that makes me say ‘okay [whew], I can stop now’. but it’s not now, nor do I see it being anytime soon. it’d be great once the book is out if I could relax, pay as much attention to others as I do myself, but something tells me that might not happen either. I need you to think I’m interesting, less my own interest in myself fades away. and so I go, I go-go-go, to the next place – putting myself in places you might not see because you might not see them. and that means I get invited to your dinner parties and you give me this great introduction and people ask me questions, questions that I wouldn’t have gotten should I have stayed on the other path. so oh my god, ask me things and don’t be impressed when I shy away from them – see, I know that makes it even more mysterious and that means more dinner parties and people remember you.

and what a great thing it is, to be remembered.