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The Journey Is Home

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Inventing The Future

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Work Is Prayer
My universe is made of stories, not atoms: land, air and sea travel and the power of now. If I  wanted to be a multinational soul, I couldn't  do it in cities  where I taught English like New York or Los Angeles, Paris  or Tokyo alone-I needed to get consecrated  by sailing on the oceans.
 It's a wonderful thing to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don't know anyone; where, as Melville said,"God's one and only voice is Silence." 

 If hollywood is loneliness under a Hawaiian  palm tree, then happiness is solitude sailing through  the fjords

 Ship Happens

 Living on a ship, might be summed up as monotony tinged with hysteria. It's not real life but an alibi. It  is like going out of your mind everyday- in order to come to your senses; and a fool who persists in his folly becomes wise. After 10 ships, yes TEN, I no longer want to cast doubt on perfection-America.

 “It’s not about the money” is the lesser known,   I don’t have a dream speech. Wasn’t it Steve Jobs who said “Money is life’s report card. I've seen this kind of "success" as a drug of choice.More than that, success without fulfillment, is failure, yet, this kind of failure is going to get your best material. 

 As An Art Director and World Cruise Coordinator, the experiences at sea turned my can’t into cans and leveraged my dreams into serendipity a thousand unseen helping hands.

 Money isn't the root of all evil, boredom is the root of all evil, a spiritual anorexia- the despairing refusal to be oneself. The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are, once you  let go of the life you have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for you.

 Being born in America is like being kidnapped and sold into slavery and the shared hallucination of running on the treadmill of consumption and materialism.  It's a mask that eats up the face. It's also like winning the lottery,  a currency, and I wanted to spend it well.

 Yet, we value material, we ignore emotions. If I wanted to serve my  country,  I had to betray it. What was the  blue chip idea worth betraying? What was  the lie I told myself?  The disease of more in a world of plenty where most of the developing world is starving.  The lack of simplicity and the yearn for complexity was, and in many ways still is, my blind spot.

 The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom. I was  willing to risk pain ( culture shock)  to make a boring life interesting and re framing  (Home is a feeling not a place)  travel as a verb and not a noun. You have to DO it.--- A 1 man National geographic on that everywhere trip.

 The good, the bad and the ugly American- Why be difficult when you can be impossible--Hell was about to be other people,other cultures, other languages, and the National Anthem of Hell, was Frank Sinatra's "I did it my way". I had to make the switch from tourist to traveler, and adapt, otherwise this journey would be Karaoke traveling, a cheap imitation of the best yet to come.

 Without risk, faith is an impossibility. My  "leap of faith" to give up all things material was curiosity..The cure for my ennui and   boredom was "Any place but here" and "I want to be surprised everyday".  There's nothing ethical about the work ethic on ships. I got paid in cash, visited nice places,  had a hotel room and six all you can eat meals a day! If the passengers were behaving badly, there was always a new group every 7 or 14 days to keep my interest.

 Now that I  didn't need Power Point to explain my job, how much was I worth now that I was no longer in the w2 world of 9 to 5. I was a time millionaire. It was going to be about resourcefulness and not resources.

 Who does not love the sea? The beach is a place of healing and joy. The salt cleanses us and the sun embraces us in its warmth. The ocean heals the heart, mind, and soul. life is different. Time doesn't move hour to hour but mood to moment. 

 Yet, the sea has never been friendly to me. At most it has been the accomplice of my restlessness.So there is no cure for this  curiosity.TV is an eraser and Youtube and Blogger, a paint brush. My  leap of faith  to go on  ships was recreation and re-creation and re-invention. There are second acts in American lives, and third and fourths.

 No Man Is An Island, yet after age 40, land is seldom seen and you can count your friends on one hand.I am an expat, yet not every country will do. I don't know why, some countries fill the gaps and others emphasize my expat-ness. In reality those that satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them." Life’s a beach in an ocean of ennui is the take away from places like Fiji, Tahiti and the Maldives. These Islands are extraordinary within their limits, but their limits are extraordinary. Yet if I do the math, an emotional algebra adds up to 1+1=infinity. It's a pristine place.This is no 9 to 5. You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. It is just a fraction of you. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating  on a cruise ship, walking the painted line, where everything is nicely arranged--formal nights, shore excursions, shopping, bottled water.

 When you’re perpetually  cruising , you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yes in yesterdays on the road.

  I know both sides because I am both sides: a tourist who doesn't know where I've been; a traveller who doesn't know where he's going. I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. I thought college was the longest vacation I ever took; but this Graduate School seamester is a kind of study abroad in Nomadic Pursuits
I meet therefore I am- a multinational soul. I shrink therefore  I am part of — and apart from  American, European and Asian culture. and the  countries I visit(ed) and live(d) in  are as eclectic and restless as ports of call  I "inhabit" for six hours or at most three daze. . Along with the displacement, and the associated "jet" lag" and culture shock, I  am simply a fairly glib product of a movable feast, living and working in a world that is itself increasingly small and increasingly hybrid---a transit lounger, forever heading to the all "aboard" by 6PM gangway.

 The cult of the amateur  wanderers is growing; global souls who haven't been everywhere but it is on their list; for whom home is a feeling,  not a place in the soil but inside yourself. I am one of the privileged homeless. Is there a  new kind of person being created by a new kind of life?


I sequestered  myself to the cruise ships to get away from poker and  the number one thing I hate about the game I love- see:TILT



Getting My Baht Outta Macau and Back To Bangkok




  It's not winning that makes a winner, but losing. The excitement is not from the winning, it's avoiding the disaster, because you're flirting with it every day. It's not like every game you play is the Super Bowl, but every game is the Playoffs.

 In March and April 2009, I had my head in the clouds with The Helium Report, #winning  and losing the American dream in Macau every night, playing high-stakes no limit- poker with out a helmet on The Hong Kong Express

  Note to self:  Every Americon Gambler is only a hand away from a very humbling wake-up call.

 The selfish brain fears death and looks for predictable experiences, poker is a great placebo that hijacks the brain with a predictable surprise: card players are surprised if they win and surprised if they lose

 . see: Poker= f(dopamine flow); Money= happiness in the United States of Unconsciousness



According to the promotional material for the song, It's A Beautiful Day is about a guy who has lost everything and couldn't be happier... it IS indeed a beautiful day. Like Rolling Stone- a song about liberation. Clarity I kiss the ground.





You love this town even if that doesnt ring true
Youve been all over and its been all over you
It's a beautiful day
Headlines 
"Every day is a journey," wrote Basho, "and the journey itself is home." If the Zen poet hadn't said that more than 300 years ago, I would have. I am Basho on a frequent flyer pass, with complimentary mojo on take off.



 Footnotes-  2009 All Aboard


Space travel sure is fun

Greetings from the user-friendly universe---The Peoples Republic of Santa Monica; Home of The Mac Store, and Apple, the forbidden fruit.

First in January, I was in the Majik Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a bit like Mars.

Then in February, I went to The Land of Smiles, Thailand, and walked on the moon.

Finally, in March and April, I had my head in the clouds with The Helium Report, winning and losing the American dream in Macau every night, playing high-stakes no limit- poker, on The Hong Kong Express.

Leaving Las Vegas
In May and June, I got my Baht out of Asia and went back to the United States of Unconsciousness, playing tournament poker in the black holes of Midwest bars and Las Vegas Casinos. Spent the best part of my losing streak...in an Army Jeep, from what I can recall.
There's that line from Sheryl Crow-Standing in the middle of the desert waiting for my ship to come in...
In July, I decided to take a World Tour-Cruise (creating my own luck) to get away from the game. I had a false start with a run at Amsterdam's Holland Casino.Nevertheless, mission accomplished---I love poker but I am not in love with it anymore. Poker and I have decided to see other PPL.

Last month was the Epiphany. On a visit to Monaco , I was scheduled to level up, turning my bogus Poker PH.D. from ESPN, to the real deal in Monte Carlo. I didn't have any gamble in me and didn't even walk through the doors. After all, you can only quit once.


Fire In The Belly

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The Promised Land Is Right Where You Are

When you are following your bliss




What good is having a belly if there's no fire in it. Wake up, drink your passion, light a match, and get to work.
My universe is made of stories, not atoms: land, air and sea travel and the power of now. If I wanted to be a multinational soul, and leverage  my best asset,me,  I couldn't do it in cities where I lived like New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo or Paris  alone-I needed to get consecrated by sailing on the oceans.letting my  soul & spirit fly, into the mystic.


It's a wonderful thing to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some  place where you don't know anyone; where, as Melville said,"God's one and only voice is Silence."





The sceneries  paint  themselves.  I'm just the middleman.
 You can't create experiences like this, you undergo them.

If a man speaks in the forest and there are
 no women around to hear it, is he still wrong?

Living on a ship, might be summed up as monotony tinged with hysteria.


 It's not real life but an alibi. It is like going out of your mind everyday- in order to come to your senses; and a fool who persists in his folly becomes wise.  If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it, After all, success doesn't come to you, you go to it. It's not easy getting a gig on a ship.The Only Easy Day  on board was Yesterday.

Ship/ Shift Happens

The Greeks invented the idea of nemesis to show how any single virtue, stubbornly maintained gradually changes into a destructive vice. Having a vague and abstract love for everybody and everything has its moments,  but by becoming passionate and vowing fidelity to concrete relationships, persons, institutions, and places are ideas whose time has come.

Fire In The Belly-

“There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?' 
If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.” ― Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man
Steve Jobs said, “Money is life’s report card"; Sam Keen, "Nice gets you a C+ in life"  This is the lesser known, I don't have a dream speech. After all, the first 40 years of "childhood"  are  always the hardest. Growing old isn't optional, growing up is.
Good men and good women have fire in the belly. We are fierce. Don't mess with us if you're looking for someone who will always be 'nice' to you. Nice gets you a C+ in life- Sam Keen

 I've seen this kind of "success" as a drug of choice. More than that, success without fulfillment, is failure, yet, this kind of failure is going to get your best material. 

 Choosing experiences and travel adventures over working away your life for material things is what college is all about, right? So why stop there.

 I am  STILL happier when I spend money on experiences instead of material goods.

 As An Art Director and World Cruise Coordinator, the experiences at sea turned my cant's (no resources) into cans (resourcefulness) and leveraged my dreams (I haven't been everywhere but it is on my list) into serendipity a thousand unseen helping hands. 

 As I stated in my Youtube channel bio--No matter how low the budget bar gets, I always manage to limbo my way under it. If you think about it, I am the Wilt Chamberlain of shoe-string travel.putting up #'s so unthinkable, mere normals will never, ever reach them.-300 ports in 38 months...

 Money isn't the root of all evil, boredom is the root of all evil, a spiritual anorexia- the despairing refusal to be oneself.

 The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are, once you let go of the life you have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for you. I have  come to love this new self, not by being  a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly, and renewed with a sense of wonder about this.  It’s only by becoming intimately acquainted with these narratives that we can begin to live consciously and, as the Sufi poet Rumi said, “unfold our own myth.”  

We live  in a storytelling economy, and  gets paid for the stories we tell.

 I too am  constantly writing and re-writing my autobiography in this blog.(but I get paid in attention more than cash.).

Being born in America is like being kidnapped and sold into entrepreneurship
  •  the shared hallucination of running on the treadmill of consumption and materialism. It's a mask that eats up the face.  
  • ...It's also like winning the lottery, a currency, and I wanted to spend it well.Yet, we value material, we ignore emotions. If I wanted to serve my country, I had to betray it. 
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are -- if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

What was the blue chip idea worth betraying? What was the lie I told myself? The disease of more in a world of plenty where most of the developing world is starving. The lack of simplicity and the yearn for complexity was, and in many ways still is, my blind spot.The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom. I was willing to risk pain ( culture shock) to make a boring life interesting and re framing (Home is a feeling not a place) travel as a verb and not a noun. You have to DO it.--- A 1 man National geographic on that everywhere trip.

The good, the bad and the ugly American- Why be difficult when you can be impossible--Hell was about to be other people,other cultures, other languages, and the National Anthem of Hell, was Frank Sinatra's "I did it my way". I had to make the switch from tourist to traveler, and adapt, otherwise this journey would be Karaoke traveling, a cheap imitation of the best yet to come.Without risk, faith is an impossibility. My "leap of faith" to give up all things material was curiosity.

The Power of NEW

The cure for my ennui and boredom was "Any place but here" and "I want to be surprised everyday". There's nothing ethical about the work ethic on ships. I got paid in cash, visited nice places, had a hotel room and six all you can eat meals a day! If the passengers were behaving badly, there was always a new group every 7 or 14 days to keep my interest.Now that I didn't need Power Point to explain my job, how much was I worth now that I was no longer in the w2 world of 9 to 5.

 I  am  a time millionaire. It is  going to be about resourcefulness and not resources.Who does not love the sea? The beach is a place of healing and joy. The salt cleanses us and the sun embraces us in its warmth. The ocean heals the heart, mind, and soul. life is different. Time doesn't move hour to hour but mood to moment.Yet, the sea has never been friendly to me. At most it has been the accomplice of my restlessness.So there is no cure for this curiosity.

TV is an eraser and Youtube and Blogger, a paint brush. My leap of faith to go on ships was recreation and re-creation and re-invention. There are second acts in American lives, and third and fourths.No Man Is An Island, yet after age 40, land is seldom seen and you can count your friends on one hand.I am an expat, yet not every country will do. I don't know why, some countries fill the gaps and others emphasize my expat-ness. In reality those that satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them." 

Life’s a beach in an ocean of ennui is the take away from places like Fiji, Tahiti and the Maldives, even Alaska, aka, The Big Alone., It is when laziness finds respectability.

 These "Islands" are extraordinary within their limits, but their limits are extraordinary. Yet if I do the math, an emotional algebra adds up to 1+1=infinity. It's a pristine place.This is no 9 to 5. You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. It is just a fraction of you. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating on a cruise ship, walking the painted line, where everything is nicely arranged--formal nights, shore excursions, shopping, bottled water.

When you’re perpetually cruising , you are what you are right there and then.

 People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yes in yesterdays on the road.I know both sides because I am both sides: a tourist who doesn't know where I've been; a traveller who doesn't know where he's going. I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. 

I thought college was the longest vacation I ever took; but this Graduate School seamester is a kind of study abroad in Nomadic Pursuits.

  I meet therefore I am- a multinational soul. I shrink therefore I am part of — and apart from American, European and Asian culture. and the countries I visit(ed) and live(d) in are as eclectic and restless as ports of call I "inhabit" for six hours or at most three daze (days).

 Along with the displacement, and the associated "jet" lag" and culture shock, I am simply a fairly glib product of a movable feast, living and working in a world that is itself increasingly small and increasingly hybrid---a transit lounger, forever heading to the all "aboard" by 6PM gangway.

 The cult of the amateur wanderers is growing; global souls who haven't been everywhere but it is on their list; for whom home is a feeling, not a place in the soil but inside yourself. 

 I am one of the privileged homeless. Is there a new kind of person being created by a new kind of life?

 "I'm not really choosing between experiences,I am choosing  between memories of experiences. Even when I think about  future vacations, I don’t think of my future ports of call normally as experiences. I think of  my future vacations as anticipated memories."

 Here it from the Oracle himself, Joseph Campbell:

Bon Voyage AmeriCAN Dreamers

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 On
Cunard's Queen Mary 2 :NYC to New England
with calling on Halifax, and  Boston Harbor on July 4 2014-
 and a stopover at UMass JFK Library, a trip highlight.
More Americans died in the D Day invasion then the whole Iraq war

Cruiseships Come True


 Freedom is, not WHAT you do to what has been done to you, freedom is  nothing but a chance TO BE BETTER

 But freedom isn't free. 3 years ago, I visited the beaches of Normandy, and had awe and gratitude for the sacrifices made so that I could have a future, and  live the AmeriCAN dream- traveling  freely around the world.


Impossible Is Nothing-Traveling is an activity not an accomplishment, but what an active run I have had!

 Geography is the topography of ignorance, a finite disappointment not only  when the map becomes the territory, but when you actually visit these hole in the wall places. In most cases, it's a lot better to transcend reality with imagination, re-framing the conversation. "Melbourne was awesome", "Ghana? Amazing!" India? a magical delight".   
The future just isn't what it used to be. Nevertheless, there is not one ship that doesn't sail to a port where life is not uncomfortable.  Yet, you don't quit countries, you quit people, and you can ONLY quit once- and I have to say the best ships are friendships, and I have met some amazing people while sailing around the world, and I have not given up on the inherent goodness of people.
Because it makes me happy-May 5, 2015 Rome, the start of
 my latest and greatest grand  voyage

So what if hell is other people! Go to hell for the company and heaven for the climate Liking many people spontaneously and without effort is probably my greatest of all sources of personal happiness.

The gravity of travel is that you need these three things to fo it: time, money and opportunities. The zeto Gravity thinkingvthst runs mu show is not about these finite resources. It is about resourcefulness and being clever enough to get what I want. Afterall, living on earth and doing nothing still gets each of us a round trip around the sun. You might as well do what you like regardless of the naysayers,because the Earth school kills all of its students, and procrastination is just suicide on the installment plan. When you life flashes before your eyes, don't you want to see a movie worth watching. 

 There is no time like the present.

 If it wasn't for the last minute, however, nothing would ever get done. No matter how many plans you make or how much in control you are, life is always winging it, especially, living and working on a cruise ship. Some people will say it is a "dream world". I love sleep and dreaming. It's dreaming with eyes wide open. And I can see the future, and it works!




H2 OMG-Enriched by A  Wonderful Osmosis in Flåm 6 days ago
Going out to sea is  the infinity of hope, the preview of life's coming attractions where you have final cut in your own movie.  You can lose yourself in the ocean's food for thought. Its  menu is the meal,  and itineraries are full of promises. It gives you a  sense of destination and the energy to get started again.
Yet, when I think of all the places I've been, and the stories I have told and heard, life at sea is a Constant preparation for something that never happens, and when you realize that, you have no fear of the unknown, and you live blissfully in a kind of fuzzy ambiguity. 

 Call it faith!  A passion for the possible. I am full of it, and shooting from the hip that is to say,   having an adventure is something more but nothing less than bad planning.  When I cold-called for my first ship job, and got it after a 12 minute elevator pitch, I began to trust myself, and ONLY  when you trust yourself can you truly begin to live it up.

   

Intoxicating - but I swear to drunk I'm not God.On our way to Norway's
most famous waterfalls-Vøringsfossen 
But I'm not a sailor . Maybe a sailor  with a small s. 

 Living on a ship,  however, might be summed up as monotony tinged with hysteria. It's not real life but an alibi. 

 It  is like going out of your mind everyday- in order to come to your senses; and a fool who persists in his folly becomes wise. Afterall this foreign travel, I no longer want to cast doubt on perfection-America.  The Sea calls me saying “I can help you lose your baggage without going to the airport. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. I can see again!

Vøringsfossen (Video)


The mommy party (Democrats) "How can I help" verses the Daddy Party (Republicans)_ DIY-Do It yourself


 There's nothing I wouldn't do for my country , and there's nothing it  wouldn't do for me. And that's the way we go through life - doing nothing for each other.  That's me ascribing to the Daddy Party.

Embracing the (expat)life I choose, .so much of it is about non-doing I have had  nothing to do and all day to do it. An accident of birth, being born in the USA,  I won the geographically-desirable-places-to-live-on-the-planet lottery, and have squandered my inheritance in the United States of Unconsciousness, a shared hallucination of "any place but here" and " the grass is greener". 

  I can truely have lived through direct experience this T S Eliot quote: "We shall not cease from exploration, / and the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started / and know the place for the first time.”

 The grass actually  is greener where you water it. Right now I am drinking from a Fire Hose!
Running On the rainy  chalk headlands in Southern England, in November.
 England has such amazing Coastline.Thegrass is pretty green HERE.

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