I haven’t seen a hot shower or the sharp end of a razor in months and, frankly, I don’t give a damn.
What I do give a damn about is the current state of the U.S.A.
After half a bottle of brandy, ahem, I mean deep contemplation, I have arrived at a very serious realization: I can’t do much about it.
Not in the nihilistic sense. People tell me I’m fun to drink with, which is proof I’m not a nihilist. I say I can’t do much about it because, well, I can’t. Not yet, at least.
So instead, I’d like to focus on something I can control: writing.
I haven't published anything since my last good shave. Not that the two really have any correlation, except for the fact that if I’ve gone a long period without shaving, that means I’ve been rambling.
Rambling is what I call an input stage. Input stages include things like new experiences, traveling, meeting people, and consumption in general.
The opposite of input is output. The output stage includes pen to paper, solitude, digestion of experiences, and creation.
Think of it like eating. You need to eat, you want to eat, but after a certain threshold you’ll eat yourself sick.
That’s basically what I’ve been doing for the past month: gorging myself on experiences instead of taking the necessary time to digest them.
I was in Greece with monks, then in Istanbul with bishops, and somewhere between those chapters I landed an internship that lasted less than 24 hours due to a classic case of nepotism.
(While this was disappointing, it wasn’t shocking. This is how business is done basically everywhere besides The States. If your uncle is a friend, you’re in.)
My uncle wasn’t a friend.
After the rug was pulled from under my boots, I tumbled and fell right into the middle of a commune in the mountains of Armenia.
The day before that, I went on a date with a girl in the capital city, Yerevan, and received a call the same day from her big brother. He wanted to meet. Despite herniating a disk that same week, I agreed to it.
Now, entering a duel with your health bar hovering around 50% is not a Sun Tzu approved strategy, but as strange as it is to admit, I didn’t mind being beat up by him and his goons. I was rather bored and found the whole ordeal quite interesting. Refreshing, even! It’s nice to know that in some parts of the world, brothers still protect their sisters with fists and grit.
I set the location at the grand Saint Gregory Cathedral at sundown.
No, Saint Gregory isn’t my patron saint, but outside of that church is great sculpted horse straddled by an even greater man thrusting his sword into the sky. When heavy Armenian sun sets, that statue begins to glow and with it your deeply-rooted ancestral genetics that is no stranger to conflict and conquering.
It’s not every day you’re challenged to a duel, but if you are (and for the sake a life fully lived I hope you are), set it at the most magnificent location you can think of. That way if you lose, there’s still a chance of it being a glorious.
Not that I would know. That evening in front of the cathedral was not the evening to crack my victory streak.
In fact, the only cracking was on was the sound my knuckles made when they connected with that famously hooked nose that most Armenians are a bit self-conscious about.
A word of advice to the brothers of all the future women I will continue to unapologetically date:
I don’t date woman I’m not willing to fight for.
Secondly, if you have a diving board of a nose, do yourself a favor and keep those paws up. If you don’t, I’ll have no choice but to start playing my favorite arcade game with it. Believe me, I don’t want to, but I can’t help myself! When I see a Mole, I Whack-A-Mole.
*It’s important to note that nothing serious or negative happened on the date. We had a midday picnic and I had her back home well before dinner. Later, I learned that Armenian dating culture is a quite archaic and full of double standards. People don’t date, at least not publicly, unless they intend on marrying each other. Naturally, this leads to many secret relationships, and while that sounds romantic, we only need to look Romeo and Juliet to remember just how well that pencils out. Men do whatever they want and women are expected to be virgins until marriage. If a girl breaks up and finds a new boyfriend, that boyfriend will call her ex to ask how far he went with her. One can imagine how quickly this can become radically toxic, with men continuing to hold leverage, essentially in the form of blackmail, over women with whom they no longer have any connection. One woman told me that a practiced coming-of-age tradition for teenage boys is to be taken to the brothel by their uncle. I ran this story past another woman and she confirmed it wasn’t uncommon. She also added that it is not uncommon for a married man to hire a prostitute to live out his sexual fantasies with instead of with his wife. If he did it with his wife, it would make her into something of a draggle-tail.
Yerevan is older than Rome. It’s one of the longest inhabited cities in the world. Every time I visit an ancient city and see patterns like these, I am befuddled. How can a civilization span well-over 2,000 years and still operate with these conditions?
England is another example. How have you blokes still not figured out a single dish more palatable than a bowl of canned beans with cold shredded cheese on top?
But I digress. Back to the commune.
It was run by an author, promoting it as a place of creativity and authenticity. That should have been my first warning, but as Victor Hugo once said:
“Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.”
And it’s true. Besides a used toothpick and bits of unidentifiable crumbs from various nibbles, my pockets were quite barren. That’s why I went to the commune. A bit of manual labor every day for a place to rest your head and food to eat. Sounds like a good deal. Plus, it was in the mountains, and mountains are always a good place to write.
If I had known my head would be resting near another bed occupied by horny Germans and the food would be everything but meat, then it is safe to say I never would have stepped foot within 50 miles of this place.
The first girl I met there told me she liked my color. To her, we all were colors, and our colors change through life as we mix and melt into others. There was probably some truth in what she was saying, but I couldn’t hear it. I was far too interested in how her armpits grew even more hair than my own.
Astounding, really.
Anyway, due to the multitude of banjos, bare feet, and paws scattered throughout every dirty corner of that house, I couldn’t get anything done. The cursor wouldn’t move.
This went on for what felt like an eternity. A terrible and torturing eternity. One in which you were surrounded by all the tools required to do your work—a desk, Wi-Fi, a flexible work schedule—and yet nothing could be created.
I reflected on certain artists, like Miklós Radnóti, the Hungarian-Jewish poet who continued to write his poems on cigarette paper while being marched to his death.
And there I was, unable to put words on the page just because there were a couple of Germans shagging around next to me and the house was a mess.
Pathetic.
This examination between creation and environment consumed me for three full days. I had nothing else to do during those days. A severe sickness overtook me and left me in bed, where my innards were blended, and my skull throbbed under the driving pressure of talons that used to be sharp.
I suspect the culprit of my sickness was Pickles, the three-legged cat notorious for lifting herself onto the countertops with nothing but her arms and diving that pink little nose into all the human food. Because the others thought that was simply too cute, they refused to throw her off the table. In other words, Pickles exercised a sort of diplomatic immunity.
I possessed not a shred of immunity. My stomach’s defense system was not prepared for the flank attack from Pickles’s leftovers.
For three days, I rolled in my cold sweat, looking out onto the Tree of Life tapestry hanging above the horny Germans’ bed, wondering: why can’t I create?
You don’t become an artist once you have the perfect environment. You don’t become a philanthropist once you have money. You don’t become a virtuous person once others treat you well.
Your environment doesn’t dictate your output. At least, it shouldn’t. The Stoics taught this, and artists like Radnóti proved it could be done.
If you want to create, or give, or live virtuously, you do it. End of story.
However, just because you can walk with a rock in your sock doesn’t mean you should. Eliminate resistance whenever possible:
“And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.”
–Matthew 5:30
If social media is distracting you, delete it. If someone is sabotaging your work, liquidate them. If you can’t create in a hippie commune somewhere in the mountains of Armenia, burn it to the ground (or leave).
I chose to leave. Hitched a ride north to Tbilisi, Georgia, where I’m writing this now.
Am I in a perfect environment for creating?
Trick question. There’s no such thing.
Have I removed enough resistance to make the act of creation easier?
Definitely.
Sure, my room is the size of a monk's cell, and like most monk cells, there is no A/C. The temperature today is 97 degrees, and I am sweating more than slightly as I write, but it is not so uncomfortable after a while. The fan is on high, and I’ve stripped down as much as is appropriate in a room whose only window (without a blind) faces a communal courtyard where children play under grape vines and grandmas in long dresses hang laundry on tired lines.
The good news is there’s not a single banjo or paw in sight, and the only bare feet around are the ones below my knees.
***
This was rushed.
As I said, the well of experience hath runneth over. If I didn’t take this quick bucket off the top, I would’ve drowned and gone mad like every other expat who travels too much and never pauses to contemplate anything besides which site he wants to see next.
Everything you read happened within the last four weeks. I say that to give you an idea of just how absurd a traveler's life can be. There are also three other peculiar occurrences that I excluded because they deserve pieces of their own.
As soon as I close this letter, I’ll start working on them.
In fact, I’d like to begin working on them this instant. So if you’ll be so kind as to excuse me, my dear reader, I need to go and prepare your next course.
