Righteous Love

Every day, I contemplate quitting my job and my apartment.

I’d sell my car, buy a van for a few thousand less, and just…travel.

I think about it every day.

And every day I talk myself down—remind myself how it ends: out of money by late summer, back to another job, another lease, another reset. Maybe worse than this one.

I know the downside. That’s the problem. It’s not a fantasy—I’ve already stepped outside once.

Six years ago, I removed myself from this modern world and saw it from a distance. And the only coherent thought I had was: How have I lived like this my whole life? Why do we accept this?

Then I got laid off from the campground and went back in.

Back into the jaws. Into a beige world of stoplights and hold music.

Things fell into place in Portland. Two years later, I’m still here. Four days a week I get on a bus at 1 p.m. and return a little before midnight.

And somewhere inside that structure, I did the best writing of my life last year—which only complicates things further.

Because it’s clear, at least to me, why I’m here.

And yet I still have to do this.

That lack of logic bothers me more than the work itself.

I put one book out in January. Another is coming this summer. I feel the work moving forward—and at the same time, I feel myself resisting the part where I have to step into the world and push it.

Not out of laziness. Something closer to refusal.

Because I’ve already seen the alternative.

I know what it feels like to step outside the system, to live closer to the pace of the natural world, where time isn’t segmented and sold back to you. And once you’ve seen that, it’s hard to fully accept this again—not the speed, not the noise, not the constant pressure to participate.

What exhausts me isn’t just the pace—it’s how completely we normalize it.

The rushing. The noise. The way everything becomes a product, even war, even attention, even identity. The way we reduce ourselves to numbers, to demographics, to voices on hold being recorded for training purposes.

And underneath all of it, something simpler keeps asserting itself:

I just want to be near things that are alive.

Trees. Birds. Rocks. Weather.

Not as an escape, but as a recalibration.

Because nature isn’t an alternative lifestyle—it’s the baseline we’ve drifted from.

So I sit here in the tension between two realities I understand too well.

The one that’s stable, structured, and quietly draining.

And the one that’s, uncertain, and probably unsustainable in the long run.

Every day, I choose the first.

Every day, I question it.

Years ago, I wrote a line in American Outback:

What if they threw a civilization and no one came?

At the time, it felt like a passing thought.

It wasn’t.

It’s a question I keep returning to—not with anger, but with something closer to a kind of stubborn, even hopeful defiance.

A refusal, maybe.

Or, if I’m being generous about it—

a kind of righteous love.