This is a very long post that uses the lens of my rules to give some kind of explanation of myself as a nomad. My first 30 rules were created during my initial time traveling in a Subaru Outback, and I have since added more. Although I stepped into the city life to finish a degree, I am heading back out again in some capacity, primarily starting in a Subaru Crosstrek in a monthly kind of setup. This post is one mostly written entirely for myself, and it is somewhat vulnerable to even share it publicly. Know that reading this is a violence to me, though lesser than I did to myself writing it; I consent to and welcome your partaking, but be aware of the pain of your own reflection in it.
Note: open and direct talk of trauma, suicide, addiction, dissociation, queer, death, grief, genocide, etc.
22,941 words, 142 minutes read time.
Introduction
From my early travels, alone, I once considered writing a memoir to describe my own perspective on what I did, why I did it, and how I did it. It never materialized, as I spent my time finishing a degree and working instead. This post will not attempt to achieve any such thing as grand as a memoir. Nonetheless, my goal is to provide, in my own words, a manifesto for my own heading out to nomadism once again. This post takes a more phenomenological exploration of my own experience with nomadism and desire to continue living nomadically, as opposed to any mechanistic or ethical position meant to be applied elsewhere at all. A thesis for this post might be that I am, in fact, a nomad, and what this means is extremely difficult and convoluted yet still worthy of exploration because nomadism is a valuable and defensible way of life. I share as an invitation for others to experience with me, but all who read this will have a radically different experience with it than my own–I embrace this.
For this post, I have chosen a specific lens, being an updated version of my “rules”. I will be using each rule as a prompt. There are now 38 rules. I settled the first 30 during my first nomadic travels. I have added the rest upon the years of study and reflection between the end of those travels and the start of these new travels. They became a way for me to explore the ideas that I actively chose to live my own life by. I had no interest in making them axiomatic. I have not and am not trying to memorize them, myself, even. I instantly had to create a rule–it became rule number 10–that no rule is absolute, in order to undermine my own rule system. One of the new rules explaining a specific, and important, heart of what my rules mean to me serves as the title of this post.
This is not a post trying to explain my rules. In fact, I think I have failed at doing so to date. This will be a unique exercise in which I will mostly be omitting my initial reflections on what each rule means to me. Following this omitted reflection, I will look through each of my rules to consider what it has to explain about myself as a nomad. What follows in this post is a desire for nomadism expressed through each of my rules. This will inevitably give some significant hints about what each of these rules mean to me, but I am not trying to be any more explicit about that than the rules themselves.
This is also not a post trying to explain why I am a nomad, even if it somehow explains that I am whatever a nomad is supposed to be to me. I do not think it is possible to explain why I am a nomad. I think the “why” question might be a type of fallacy. I remain unsure that causality is something that can be easily discussed in any sense with my nomadism. As one of my newest rules states, “The future is behind you.” Likewise, I put the tattoo that has been a personal future-facing identity of sorts for me on my back, facing said future, but away from my direct gaze: “I am a Survivor / I came through this / I am Stronger and Better because of it”. And it is in this space that my nomadism seems to live in my mind as well. In the future, to my back, in my blind spot. Where “why” makes less sense than in reviewing the past before me. There is now a “the last time” nomadism that can be reviewed, but in daring to draw any “why” from that past, I face my own words lamenting the violence I would do upon the self in those writings.
I do believe writing from my own perspective about my nomadism, and choosing a lens that I have actively chosen as explanatory of the principles upon which I navigate my life, can lead to a kind of explanation and manifesto for my nomadism. This does not have to answer any “why”, and I do not seek to. It can be a powerful window, perhaps. Some of the particular rules will be quite concrete in explaining nomadism; others will be left to abstraction.
I am not trying to particularly intellectualize with this post. This post is rather an attempt at an emotional expression of self construction. Inevitably, I am going to use some intellectual ideas and the like because that is part of this whole self thing, I think. However, there remains a point of this post and its structure that seeks to elude direct intellectualization. This is less an attempt at making legible and more an attempt at defiant expression regardless of legibility.
This post will be explicitly ideological. My nomadism is ultimately an ideological position, with all the many implications that come with that. My rules are ultimately an ideological system that I view the world through and am choosing to interpret my nomadism through. My rules are a system rooted in describing how I experience reality and my self. They are explicitly morally nihilist, and often lean into tendencies you can find in existentialism and queer theory. Likewise, my nomadism has a deep political nihilism to it; which lest anyone misinterpret, is more like some kind of political optimism about what I consider atrocious conditions than anything else. There is a kind of existential creation of a new, ascetic life inherent to my nomadism. There is a deep drive to live against the norms of the society that I find unbearable inherent to my nomadism. There is a kind of absurdist continuing to live in a society, even if in my completely own, ridiculous, ascetic way inherent to my nomadism. There is a deep acknowledgement that even if The State would label me the worst, I would still choose the life again, entirely because fuck off inherent to my nomadism. This post may not be about explaining the ideology of my rules, but it is through the ideological viewpoint of my rules that my nomadism will be expressed and explored.
My nomadism cannot really be removed from my rules and vice versa. My rules were created during my nomadism to sustain my nomadism even as it was dormant, and they have served that purpose. In some respects, explaining my nomadism through the lens of my rules is an ironic inversion. While I seek here to avoid explaining my rules, inevitably, explaining my nomadism through the lens of my rules is going to explain my rules to those who read carefully, perhaps more than it explains my nomadism, even if explaining myself as a nomad is my purpose now.
In addition to all that said, I should give further reference to my old nomadism as I begin. 10 years ago. “On Thursday, May 28th, 2015, I turned in my keys to the apartment and began the new life out of the car. ” So I wrote as I kicked off my first nomadism. I traveled initially out of a 2015 Subaru Outback, using 2 large AGM batteries and a custom wired solar setup. In 2018, I upgraded to a Subaru Ascent, but soon also left my job over harassment. I ended up going back to finish my Bachelor’s, staying in San Diego during the process. It is now time to head back to the road again.
The years of study and reflection since I left the first time of nomadism felt forced upon me, but it is important to state I have valued them deeply. My initial nomadism fell apart during an employment dispute. After months of working with my then long time employer about what I was experiencing at the time, I ended up quitting my job that funded my initial nomadism. I was able to secure unemployment on the basis of quitting over harassment and expending all available resources for alternative solutions. However, it was devastating, and I continue to recover in some ways from the experience.
I did complete my bachelor’s with a double major in psychology and mathematics during my reprieve from nomadism, and furthermore, I discovered philosophy. I graduated summa cum laude, even after failing my first attempt at abstract algebra (I got a high B on my second attempt, with the same professor). I am not a grand expert of any kind in any of these things, but I will continue to value learning in these areas for the rest of my life. These values will inevitably arise in the course of this post as well.
Now, the new nomadism officially began somewhere around December 2024. I am in a 2024 Subaru Crosstrek Sport, which I have basically gutted the back of and built in a bunch of storage and a bed using lumber from Home Depot. With solar energy, a large lithium battery, satellite internet, and an awning attached to the roof, I can go just about anywhere to camp, work, and live momentarily.
I am definitely okay with staying in hotels and have even thought of getting a small studio to replace my storage unit and have a place to take a shower, but I do not consider these against my nomadism or ascetic intents these days. In my early days, I did not even have the money for frequent hotel stays and developed campsites, so I stuck mostly to primitive camps as a way of life. While this was impactful for me, my nomadism and ascetic tendencies do not depend on those strict austerities right now.
Clearly, this nomadic thing is a way of life I have a deep desire for. I am drawn to the ascetic nature in many regards, and I find the rewards beyond worth it.
The foundations for the subculture of nomadism in the US today is in large part a cultural effect of the infrastructure built during the Progressive into post-war eras, led by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and Eisenhower. I like to look further back into the reaches of manifest destiny expansion and the nomadic elements that it created and coopted or failed to coopt. It seems clear to me that the cultural elements that created the nomadic subculture in the US today–dominated by retired snow birds, tech workers “escaping the rat race”, a handful of ascetics, influence-hungry posers, and a number of unhoused who found a solution in it–is a lot more complex than many like to approach. Despite fitting far outside the totalitarian wet dreams of the christofascist minority that is trying to dominate the US today, nomadism is a part of American culture worthy of protecting, even if it does have plenty valid critiques to be waged at it as well.
This nomadism is challenged in significant ways by a society that struggles deeply with many long threads of fascism, especially as that fascism is deeply accelerated by those in power today. Nomadism is deeply connected to issues The State takes up against unhoused people, often falling in the same fascist crosshairs of “solutions,” and in so, I have to believe protecting nomadism can have a role in protecting the humanity of the unhoused. Some people become nomads as a solution to being unhoused, and this complicates the overlap of not only nomads and unhoused people but also nomads and the downwardly mobile, in general, even more. Although nomadism can be liberating as such a “solution” for some who have been unhoused, even one who admits they would rather have a standard home is a challenge to utilizing it as something like a policy. Finding contentment under the same oppressions that has led one to despair is not anything anyone should be asked to be subjected to. That is, though I feel a deep connection to unhoused people, the austerities experienced by unhoused people are essentially the opposite of the consented austerity that lies in the nomadism I love.
This brings us back around to what this post is actually about, which is trying to explain my nomadism through the lens of my rules. Pretty much for myself. Any fellow travelers, I welcome you and wish you well on the rollercoaster of my mind.
Rule 1 : Right Now Is More Important
Learning that I have aphantasia was a trip. I never really could explain all of the ways that not being able to visualize things in my head resulted in nonsense. Every time someone asked me to close my eyes and visualize something, it was just nonsense to me. At some point, I wondered why it never came up in personality tests that visualizing does not work for everyone, and I mostly just concluded personality tests are bullshit. I learned some strategies to deal with the social ramifications, but I always found the visualization exercise stuff stupid because I did not visualize anything–everything they were saying sounded like bullshit. Even in therapy. I have come to realize that when I was doing EMDR therapy, I was mostly just extremely dissociating. This is related to how I now have a psychology degree.
After learning about aphantasia more, I also learned about Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory, or SDAM. SDAM describes a particular memory arrangement in which a person is not able to recall and “relive” anything from their past. There is a Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, HSAM, which has atrocious naming, but it is the true opposite, being people who remember almost every detail of their life, down to the specific date that such and such happened. Aphantasia is surprisingly prevalent in those who suspect they have SDAM, and vice versa, but it is not a one-to-one. After a lot of thought, I really think I lean quite heavily into aphantasia and SDAM, both. There is no formal diagnosis, but this explains my experience. I cannot visualize anything in my mind, and I cannot relive moments of my past in my mind. I simply have concepts that things did in fact happen at some point in my life, but it is like thinking about the idea of a jumbled puzzle of words in abstract space, where I can think out letters and connect them into whole sentences and meaningful tales only with significant work. Sometimes, I do enjoy the process of putting these concepts together in some kind of story, such as writing up a backpacking trip report.
It is like being blind to the past except for the history book you read. Yet the ideas of my past have often stricken me with powerful despair, regardless of my ability to relive it. I have long known that my PTSD is not the stereotypical type. In many ways, the PTSD was always a dissociative problem most of all for me, and the lack of visualization and strong memory sometimes made the dissociation even worse. This sometimes added to a sense of watching someone else live my life in a cartoon world from a cage inside my own mind somewhere that defined much of my dissociative experience. This might surprise some who would think lack of visualization and “reliving” in this way would prevent PTSD. Maybe it does for some. For me, it did not prevent the regular intrusion of the ideas of traumas happening in my mind until they became persistent narratives about myself that made it difficult to even get at the original ideas. It never seemed to prevent emotional flashbacks, which may be the closest experience I have had to a normal person’s memory, but confusing because no conscious memory. I do sometimes think this memory and visualization stuff has helped me, with lots of therapy and even more personal work, to be able to identify stories that are creating significant stress for me and my nervous system, and tell new stories that lead me towards posttraumatic growth.
PTSD did teach me a lot about contingency. So maybe the right now is highly contingent on countless threads of the past. That is always true. There is no escaping that.
On the road, I find the importance of right now purely. Understand, when I leave these beautiful places I travel, I cannot–in my mind, like many others can–revisit them again, lest I travel back once again. In nomadism there is never any guarantee I ever will travel back again. There are no images but those I take with my camera that I can ever think of to remember these places again. My mind does not seem to store any such images, or most any of the experiences at all, anywhere. There can be, at most, a hope to return and experience it once again. Which, fairly, I have made happen a lot. As another rule suggests, that hope comes with a negative expectation that chance will not allow me to revisit ever again, even in my own mind and memory.
This and some experience absolutely butchering taking pictures with a point-and-shoot, I finally got a DSLR and began to teach myself how to shoot and edit rather good pictures with it. I continue to look back over many pictures and enjoy many great ones that I have taken. Although I never sought to be a great photographer or anything, the photos do offer me a unique relationship with the past that is otherwise impossible to me.
Every moment carries its own grief that it is gone in the next moment and I will never really be able to experience it again beyond this idea in my head that it has, indeed, happened. So every moment is worthy of being savored. Including the worst. So every moment is the most important moment of life. Staring at the most beautiful scene imaginable only amplifies that.
Knowing each moment will vanish into imperceptible fragments of concepts in my mind makes the right now seem essentially incoherent. Just a collection of sensations and potentialities. Oh, hello, Hume.
I never did much like explaining why I do things, what my motivations are for this or that action. Hell, I have resisted any explanation of why I have entered the field of constant becoming that I find nomadism to be. Some sense of cruising the potentialities of utopias or dystopias or apparent realities seems more accurate to my experience of right now and motivation more than trying to explain some essential drive to which I have never felt any connection.
Besides, getting bent out of shape over things that haven’t happened is a waste of time.
Roronoa Zoro, One Piece, Episode 164
Rule 2 : Seek The Beauty In Everything
It is not enough for me to just camp below the shadow of Mount Whitney in spring and stare upon the Eastern Sierras in awe. Although… Well. I mean. C’mon. That is beautiful.
There is also the times when I have to figure out how to poop in a bag, carry the bag of poop out, and find a safe and appropriate place to dispose of it. I have done this enough times, I know how to do it, but few would call it beautiful except maybe me who had exactly that idea in mind when I wrote this truly, honestly, damned by God himself rule.
There is a beauty to carrying your own literal shit and disposing of it appropriately.
There is a beauty to watching everything you have built, every hope you have invested the last years of your life into, disintegrate, but standing against it and finding a new hill to roll your boulder up. There is a beauty to sitting with a friend who you just watched attempt suicide and talk about how much you want them alive. There is a beauty to being a child unable to control their own body being paraded around as an atrocity to humankind and finding the strength from that resilient, defiant little bastard–in the most loving, endearing sense–to energize your adult life. There is a beauty to carrying all of this and recognizing when it is relevant in an exciting, nomadic life.
Do not ask me to wish for another life, no matter how much I ever hate this crazy, beautiful one. I am invested in my story, even as I change it, and I am vulnerable to my potentialities.
If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.
Quentin Crisp
I find myself unable to say at which point I began to embrace failure in my queerness and also start to view and particularly value the lessons other people taught me in their failures. In the case of my parents, especially, I came to really value their failures even more than their successes. I do not think they ever set out for it, but they taught me it is okay to fail. It has been through watching them grow through failure that I came to value them in my life, not through watching them remain in any way successful, let alone static, whatsoever.
At some point in one of my psychology classes I decided to come out, and I described how I really see my queerness as a kind of failure against the gendered and sexual expectations of the norms I have known through my life. I have come to embrace something of the asexual/aromantic/agender language, but I still just prefer “queer”. For me, “queer” includes a kind of “weird” failure on the edges of the social field that I live in constantly. I have come to embrace this as its own beauty, just as much as my parents’ failure as parents is its own beauty I value more than their successes.
Rule 3: There is a time and place for everything
Lieh-tzu served as my friend while being forced out of travel. So, let Lieh-tzu have a word:
Before this Lieh-tzu liked travel. Hu-tzu asked him:
Lieh-tzu
‘What is it you like so much about travel?’
‘The joy of travel is that the things which amuse you never remain the same. Other men travel to contemplate the sights, I travel to contemplate the way things change. There is travel and travel, and I have still to meet someone who can tell the difference!’
‘Is not your travel really the same as other men’s? Would you insist there is really a difference? Anything at all that we see, we always see changing. You are amused that other things never remain the same. You busy yourself with outward travel and do not know how to busy yourself with inward contemplation. By outward travel we seek what we lack in things outside us, while by inward contemplation we find sufficiency in ourselves. The latter is perfect, the former an imperfect kind of travelling.’
From this time Lieh-tzu never went out any more, thinking that he did not understand travel. Hu-tzu told him:
‘How perfect is travel! In perfect travel we do not know where we are going, in perfect contemplation we do not know what we are looking at. To travel over all things without exception, this is what I call travel and contemplation. That is why I say: “How perfect is travel!”‘
Rule 4: Always expect the worst and always hope for the best
Supposedly, the worst that can happen is forms of death. One form of death is the obvious, physical death, for which is appropriate to prepare against in my nomadism. Another form of death is the loss of nomadism, which I have already experienced and thus cannot be told I should not prepare for again.
From being paraded around as a subhuman pariah at about 4 or 5 years old, to witnessing the suicide attempt of the best friend I could find in my tweens, to the things that happen when you are using drugs heavily in questionable circles, the most traumatic experience I have had is the death of the first nearly cohesive self I constructed around my first nomadism. I have held on to the idea of the moment that self could take no more and somehow trusted the fragments of what remained to take over.
The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss–an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.–is sure to be noticed.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
The moment that that self gave up, anything left of “me” felt the deepest grief. The self that collapsed fully expected there would never be a successor to see nomadism again, and anything I had left had only to agree. But there was a hope. That self left a hope behind that this nomadism, this only happiness I ever really experienced, would be in grasp once again. In some ways it drove whatever fractured sense of self I had towards it once again.
That is the best of the attitude. Sometimes, I feel this is what my nomadism is all about, but honestly, I think my nomadism is a lot more complex and unexplainable than this.
My nomadism is not anywhere close to being all happy bullshit. Even if it is sometimes pretty humorous.
Rule 5: Laugh at yourself
Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production
Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure
No time to laugh at yourself as the scatological.
I shit in a bag and carry it out to throw away elsewhere sometimes.
It is surprisingly serious in many contexts, but when you are doing it, I have to be honest… I shit in a bag and carry it out to throw away elsewhere sometimes, and it is funny as hell.
Rule 6: Never stop changing
I have left my heart shattered in pieces along the road–
I have no hope of piecing it together again.
Grief or no,
the road has left shatters of
Itself
embedded within me,
Unremovable.
…
I hope to continue the relationship.
Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed. In my clients and in myself I find that when life is richest and most rewarding it is a flowing process. To experience this is both fascinating and a little frightening. I find I am at my best when I can let the flow of my experience carry me, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals of which I am but dimly aware. In thus floating with the complex stream of my experiencing, and in trying to understand its ever-changing complexity, it should be evident that there are no fixed points. When I am thus able to be in process, it is clear that there can be no closed system of beliefs, no unchanging set of principles which I hold. Life is guided by a changing understanding of and interpretation of my experience. It is always in process of becoming.
Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person
Rule 7: Be radically self-reliant
Someone once told me that you can’t really be more radically self-reliant than nomadism, and I do not think I agree. It is no secret that there is a good community of burning man people who do the nomadism thing, at least part time. In some ways, those connections are the cause I even have this annoying rule.
Nomadism can be hyper-individualist, especially from the outside or for those just entering. This seems to lead to the idea that a radical self-reliance is ordinary practice. None of this is necessarily true. There is a deep community running through the nomadic subculture today.
Go to hell, Burning Man, I’m hijacking this to my own meaning.
Buddha said, “All things are non-self,” as a common English translation says from the Theravada Pali Canon. I cannot say that my rule suddenly means to be reliant on nothing just because of stating this quote. That would probably be a misinterpretation of both my intent in citing it or what (some people would say) Buddha meant in saying that all things are non-self. However, consider one’s own feelings of excitement and anxiety–two emotions easily mixed together, confused, and both often irrational. These feelings are not the self. They are not the item I call to be radically reliant upon. None of the emotions or egoist concepts of “self” are. Neither, necessarily, are the rational thoughts.
In some ways, I really like the “self” that Internal Family Systems (IFS) offers. You can ask yourself what part of yourself is expressing themselves in your current experience right now. Simply, how are you feeling right now? Then ask yourself what is left if you let that part of yourself go for the moment to explore what is left without that part. Okay, simply, accept what you feel right now, and then what else do you feel? As you keep going down, IFS says that you tend to eventually arrive at a curious, compassionate, creative, connected, confident, calm, clear, and courageous (the 8 C’s of IFS) state that IFS calls the “self”. IFS’s creator, Richard Schwartz has explained that this is compatible with the Buddhist non-self I have mentioned above, and it works well enough for my purposes.
In nomadism, I believe these 8 qualities are some of the most important qualities to strive for. Connectedness would seem to contradict the idea of a lone wolf venturing out to the world on their own, and here I have listed it as a means for radical self-reliance to be sought in nomadism. Well, lone wolves are a tragedy. This is the most stark of the 8 C’s that IFS lets me look at for nomadism. However, all of these qualities are sufficient to rely on in nomadism, and radically so. Especially the curious and courageous.
This is also a point where my nomadism must respond immediately and directly against the self-sufficiency worship of fascism. I worry that the means by which some would knee-jerk into nomadism being a fulfillment of the most shallow version of this rule are susceptible to fascist ideals of self-sufficiency. To me, fascist self-sufficiency is utterly ridiculous, and I resist my nomadism or my rules being about any such ideals of self-sufficiency.
To be radically self-reliant for me must be something that resists authoritarianism, in all its forms. For me, this is clear on the basis that any “self” to be reliant upon must inherently be a construction within a social field. I do not think it has been possible, for a long time now, for me to create a “self” that is entirely legible in any such social field, and so to be self-reliant is difficult at baseline. In many ways, my personal nomadism is inherently both choosing and being foisted into a life of illegibility on any social field recognized in the Western world today and making something not necessarily legible but present and whole nonetheless. To be radically reliant upon an illegible self insistently. A self that resists the fascist suicide or the fascist reliance upon The State’s definition of a self in place. It seems to leave only such concepts as connectedness, compassion, curiosity, creativity, confidence, calmness, clarity, courage…
Rule 8: Always be a survivor
I hate taking pictures of my face, but I do not at all mind taking pictures of the tattoo on my back reading, “I am a Survivor / I came through this / I am Stronger and Better because of it”.
The tattoo is somewhat tragic in that it is painfully more easy to interpret as a reactionary slogan than anything I could have imagined when I talked to my therapist about the “Survivor” narrative making a lot of sense to me as a strong, future-facing, and growth-oriented narrative.
My therapist and I first identified a traumatic narrative I was holding on to that was also preventing me from growing, and then we worked together to create a new narrative about the trauma that was growth and future oriented. This was a narrative that I have always had a complex relationship with, but it served to give me a starting point to make my own further narratives in my life. I felt that the “Survivor” narrative was relatively one of great growth, and my therapist got me to expand it into the whole thing.
I have since come to a relationship about what “Stronger and Better because of it” means, and well, it probably is not what most immediately assume. The “it” is the kind of narrative I currently choose to live that includes the strength and lessons I had to gain to survive. Such an “it” is never anything easy to pin down. “I” am always making a new narrative that makes “me” confidently “Stronger and Better”, as that “me” is always evolving and growing with new narratives. As a “survivor”, I have sought to embrace the traumas I have survived as part of my self. My narratives suggest I do need many of the experiences of victory that are present in my traumas for the growth I proclaim as central to the “me” I submit to others. I have always needed those parts of my self–I consider them my strongest, no matter how difficult it may be for me to express them many times.
Nomadism is always about making such new narratives that incorporate lived experiences with a challenge to the future to me. Sometimes, they are flawed. Sometimes, perfectly fine narratives clash against an insane world and cause intense misery.
My first nomadism began after “I am a Survivor / I came through this / I am Stronger and Better because of it” became the slogan for my self. This would prove a shallow kind of self that I needed more than. It could not sustain the kind of trauma that losing nomadism was. Nonetheless, this now remains a powerful part of this new self and any future self I am likely to make.
Already, the fascist tendencies of Americans have led to difficulty with mail and banking for nomads in the US. I have been denied loans because of inability to meet all requirements to prove I live somewhere physical during my past nomadism. These are the financial problems that can cause an unhoused person to remain unhoused unwittingly. Criminalization of those unwittingly unhoused threatens potential criminalization of the ascetic nomads immediately, and this is not new, even with acceleration. The acceleration we now experience includes decreased access to durable lands for seasonal activities including but not limited to camping, as well as increased criminalization and harassment from bureaucracy. Again, these are tools wielded most brutally against the unwittingly unhoused, and nomads are unwitting accomplices, if not among the originally intended targets themselves–many are.
I deeply lamented living in San Diego as the city partook in a massive campaign to, in my eyes, effectively nullify the 8th Amendment of the Constitution of the US to make criminalizing homelessness legal, there taking a strategy of secreting unhoused people off to poorly managed tent camps hidden from view of the public. I found myself on a few occasions cussing out police enforcing the criminalization. It was ultimately a useless outlet of my own anger and not much more. My despair has increased as a new federal administration has accelerated the abduction of immigrants and the brutality wrought upon them. Complaining about being a nomad making banking and such difficult supposedly because of anti-terrorism laws simultaneously seems meager but enlightening to a broader connection.
On that note, it is worth sharing that ridiculous time I was on a French TV docuseries, for an episode about people living in their cars in the US. My part was kinda fake, if I am honest, but I tried to give an honest representation. I literally did what I showed there a lot, so it is not dishonest. It was just a staged version of what I lived, from my experience. I was also so giggly. I was so happy then. I had a self and was living it. I miss them.
If you want my full self, please do watch this whole thing.
Being a survivor as a nomad is no glorious matter. There is rarely any reward at all (most of us do not make the poser influence monies). Nomadism would never be worth it to me any other way.
Rule 9: Always listen actively
It is pretty damn hard to navigate by the stars when the truly dark skies are few and far between. In the darkest skies I have seen, the contrast is always made most astute by the recognition of the horizon dotted with the hypnotizing lights of civilization.
I still often think about the time I came to a campsite on the banks of a river in Wyoming, deep in the middle of nowhere. A local family was camping with their dogs. They did not listen to my political stance at all, but felt deeply unheard about their own. Ultimately, it was riddled with contradictions, the sort of which only people choosing fascism could be riddled with. They had actual complaints–complaints about their own experiences of exploitation under the boots of capitalist oligarchs framing false narratives of their lives. Clearly, they felt no one was listening. They seemed not to even have the words to say what they were actually getting at, and were left to resort to fascist pleas in place of the illegible pleas of their heart. I do not feel guilty leaving immediately the next morning, but I feel no more guilty having stayed and listened to them as they approached begging me to give their politics a chance. Listening to them taught me a lesson about power’s application of the tools of dehumanization and material threat.
When I did one of my first major backpacking trips–a section hike of the San Diego County section of the Pacific Crest Trail–I got my absolute ass kicked. After hiking 30 miles through mountains half covered in burn scar and the other half woefully still without shade in the chapparal, all in a day peaking over 100F degrees, I hiked into town the next day for water and some snacks. I was able to snag a ride back to the trail by some stranger who lamented the entire trip about marrying his “bitch of a wife” instead of living out the kind of adventure I was on. He played Jimmy Buffett’s Cheeseburger in Paradise. I was so happy to get a cheeseburger at the end of the hike. I listened to everything he had to say and concluded I never want to be that man. I never mentioned my disgust; I simply heard out his lament, responded when he was looking for signs of me listening with an appropriate reflection, and got the hell back on the trail, wishing only to remember him as someone I would never want to be as I walked the trail away from him.
Most of the places I travel through have a story to tell. As I have driven around Nevada, especially, beginning my nomadism again, I have spent some time to stop and think about the relationship I have to the land I tread through. What stories does this land have to tell me? Surely, I cannot understand what the land has to tell as well as the indigenous people who have generations of relation to this land, but still I can hear. Colonization and boom and bust lie across the land. Settlement and abandonment. Destruction, creation, and ultimately a memory that the land seems to continue to hold if you stop and hear it for a bit. From ghost towns to Civilian Construction Corps trails, to petroglyphs and the remains of ancient peoples, the land is littered with a history to tell. From cities to mountains to canyons carved by valleys and enormous geological formations, the land has a story to tell. It is speaking, and it remembers.
Rule 10: No rule is absolute.
Thus when a man is in a good frame of mind he ought to make himself laws and rules for the future, and then carry them out strictly, drawing himself away–abruptly or gradually, depending on the nature of the case–from situations which are capable of corrupting him. A lover will be cured by a voyage undertaken just for that purpose; a period of seclusion will stop us from keeping company with people who confirm some bad disposition in us. Francisco Borgia, the General of the Jesuits, who has at last been canonized, was given to drinking heavily when he was a member of fashionable society; when he was considering withdrawing from the world, he retrenched gradually to almost nothing, by each day letting a drop of wax fall into the flagon which he was accustomed to drinking dry.
Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding
Fuck off, Leibniz, my love 😘
Rule 11: Always maintain an adventure mindset
You’ll need to approach your situation in a somewhat detached and rational manner, while gearing up your mind and body to accomplish the insane if necessary, thereby smashing all self-imposed limitations. Funneling the intense energy of insanity and uniting it with the sound coolness of rational decision making creates a potent force in emergency scenarios. Condensing this potency can best be summed up in one simple statement: the clarion call “Party On!”
Cody Lundin, 98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive!
Not everything calls for the insane. To say such approaches the suicide cult of fascism. My attitude about this is that if most days are not an automatic, chill kind of adventure, you either should be pushing yourself for some reason, or shit is going down. On a normal day, the adventure mindset to maintain is primarily one of stubborn curiosity and courage. These can lead one to moments called for the insane, but most days are pretty fun in the adventure mindset, even if ennui threatens the way.
The adventure mindset I have in mind is certainly different from the fascist mindset. The will to power seems to drive fascist ambition far beyond simply the adventurous, into the suicidally ambitious. This adventure mindset is resilient, but ultimately curious first. Fascism creates an unreality and forces it upon an unwittingly “self-sufficient” public. The nomadic adventure mindset is cool and rational but willing to make the leap of faith into the unknown reality and update assumptions as necessary. It is curious even when it hurts, not forcefully demanding. My adventure mindset ultimately prefers to take insane risks to achieve some kind of continuation of a life it is not even very enamored with in principle. The suicide cults of fascism are an insult to the adventure mindset in this sense.
The adventure mindset in my nomadism is the embodiment of curiosity. Killed the cat… brought it back… etc. The adventure mindset is an embrace of the hopeless reaching for that satisfaction, perhaps. Having the courage to seek it. At least for me.
The adventure mindset embodied by Lundin’s writing, as I take it to my nomadic ways, shows a uniting of a potentially insane amount of pure will coupled with cool rationality to solve problems. At a baseline, however, this insanity is ultimately unnecessary, held in reserve for when it is needed. The adventure mindset is curious and sits in the synthesis of rationalism and empiricism with quiet, cool resolve. This careful coupling is a great model for the adventure mindset of my nomad way.
Party On!
Rule 12: Embrace the unknown
I am no fan of ignorance, but who am I? I feel like a dumbass just writing this post, and my editing is wrought with self-doubt. This rule is not about embracing ignorance, but it is a lot about embracing a humble awareness of ignorance. It is about a Kierkegaardian leap of faith into the absurd in a lot of ways as well. Or perhaps Montaigne says it well…
If others examined themselves attentively as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, but those who are aware of it are a little better off.
Michel de Montaigne, Essays
My parents now talk freely with my siblings and me about growing up in families that really did not open up and talk a lot about their emotions and histories. When problems did arise far enough, problems were solved largely in private, or with religious leaders if necessary. And my parents raised us the same way.
As I was in high school and realized that my experience matched that described of people with PTSD in an annoyingly relevant way, I once went up to my mom and told her that a teacher suggested I consider this possibility given what I had said. My mom brought up a symptom list of PTSD online, read it out loud to me, and dismissed me. I stopped talking about it for a long time.
When I finally went to therapy and got diagnosed with PTSD in my 20s, I finally worked up the energy and confronted my parents with the diagnosis. They thought I might be coming out as gay or something (I never felt a need to come out to them about that like this, though). I just did not want to live in my own kind of pain amongst them any more.
He who is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility… When such a person, therefore, goes out from the school of possibility, and knows more thoroughly than a child knows the alphabet that he demands of life absolutely nothing, and that terror, perdition, annihilation, dwell next door to every man, and has learned the profitable lesson that every dread which alarms may the next instant become a fact, he will then interpret reality differently
Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
As I grew up, my father often spoke of one of his earliest memories being parking up the road in land of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in so-called North Carolina, and walking down to the house of his great great grandmother on his father’s side, where she was outside chopping wood as they walked up to visit her. I likewise grew up hearing how his great grandmother on his mother’s side passed down a different American ancestry, highlighted in my brain by several art pieces that I stared at again and again the entire time growing up, into my adulthood. The Scottish and English side seem much easier to trace, although I find them obscured by American whiteness as well.
I also grew up hearing obscure stories from my mother’s side of another American ancestry obscured by abuse and a refusal of my great grandfather to allow his wife to speak openly about this ancestry. How this works out is hidden behind these traumas. The ancestry of Mennonite and indigenous Northeast European from my grandmother on my mother’s side seems to be much more clear, but also ridden with their own stories of immigration and traumas. And just as on my father’s side, the German ancestry seems just as erased as these by a consuming American whiteness.
The more I have read critical thoughts about race and ancestry, the more I have struggled with how dehumanizing I find whiteness. On some level, taking all stories of Native American ancestry at face value, there has nonetheless been a multigenerational normative choice towards generic American whiteness, in all of its dehumanizing glory. Sometimes, it feels all hidden away. Hidden are any actual meaning of the stories. Hidden are the diversity of living along the edges of colonization that the stories claim has made our family. We do not seem to talk about sovereignty when we talk about those stories in my family. Gone is the past. History feels to me to be abolished in my ancestry. Long live whiteness, the king. Dramatic or not, at times this feels accurate to my experience.
What would it even be for me to so much as try to even start to reject the dehumanizing nature in whiteness? I do not know. Even trying is an unknown to me. We have the odd stories of our European ancestries, just as we have the odd stories of American ancestry. They are all erased into a kind of incoherent whiteness.
I think a temptation I had in the past to cite of my nomadism as some kind of connection to some non-white ancestry was moreso a seeking to break from the dehumanizing strangle of whiteness than an earnest seeking for a connection to anyone else I could cite. Perhaps, in the future, I find a way to make stories more material. I might enjoy that. For me, and for now, there is no looking at any such materialization without an embrace of the unknown. A kind of leap of faith into the unknown.
What would it look like for me to take an honest look at my ancestry? I do not really know. I seem painfully disconnected from mine. The stories of my Native American ancestry seem as distant to me as the people who have no living evidence of connection at all, even if there is some living memory in mine. The stories from the times of the Civil War are generic and match tales many people in the US tell, just as much to cover up their real family history as to tell their own. I feel little connection. What would it be to look at and connect in some way to those of my family who lived in the time of the Civil War, or when they migrated from Europe? What would it look like to connect to my Scottish and English and other European heritages? I do not know the answer to any of this.
What would it look like to take some responsibility for whatever parts I can of the intergenerational trauma that whiteness has left on my family, self, the culture I live in, and the land I step upon? How much of the interfamilial conflict and violence, chains of addiction, and distance that grows between my family runs with the traces of colonialism and dominating white supremacy? How much of the culture of silence and hiding our emotions even from each other that my generation has often critiqued in my family is a product of these colonial and white legacies?
What of the distance I often feel with much of my family, especially those physically distant? There are many reasons out of my own trauma, which I have only begun to have gotten better at taking responsibility for, for such distance. Many reasons for continuing distance are related simply to the requirements of work and school, monetary limitations, and physical distance. Some reasons include interfamilial traumas, violence, and ongoing conflicts. Nonetheless, I wonder. What would it look like to connect to my ancestors in a way that allows for me to take some reasonable responsibility for these interfamilial, intergenerational, even ancestral pains? I do not yet know…
Rule 13: Never give up on a dream
It all seems so stupid
Depeche Mode, Shame
It makes me want to give up
But why should I give up when it all seems so stupid?
This rule has had more material effect than any other of the first 30.
Inside this cold heart is a dream
That’s locked in a box that I keep
Buried a hundred miles deep
Deep in my soul in a place that’s surrounded by aeons of silenceAnd somewhere inside is the key
To everything I want to feel
But the dark summer dawns of my memory
Are lost in a place that can never beCan someone please show me the way?
Anathema, The Beginning and The End
Can someone please help me?
‘Cause I cannot see and the silence is raging
Rule 14: Leave no trace
Nomads have brief but reciprocal relationships with the places we pass through. Including, and especially, the natural places. We often pass through places covered in cryptobiotic soil, literally alive and fragile to every step, and when we are not in such a fragile land, we are typically amidst forests and unique lands that deserve their own respect just as much. We regularly contribute in the odd economic landscapes of the lands we pass through, from hyper-capitalistic to those on the edges of capitalist advances.
There are lessons in nomadism to take from the corporate “leave no trace” shallow ethic we are bombarded with. In fact, I shit in a bag and pack it out when I need to.
Leaving it at that is shallow and irresponsible for the fact that we all live reciprocal lives.
Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.
Martin Luther King Jr, Letter from Birmingham Jail
Leaving no trace might be to live in reciprocity and in love and respect of others’ positionality to various kinds of sovereignty long before anything about what is “left behind.” I might dare to call others my friends and fight for their causes that have no bearing on my self, my own name be damned, just because they are my friends and we are inescapably connected.
I do not want to be the one that changed everything. I do not seek to be in that position. Even in an occasional day dream where I am, I find myself wishing to give it up and be forgotten rather than have my name mean anything grand. This has often contributed to my disillusionment with the idea of being a therapist. I seek only to live a unique life that benefits humanity for all of us living unique and diverse lives. This contrast is my preferred nomadic way. It is the position that makes nomadism coherent to me.
Then why are you putting your life on the line?
Monkey D. Luffy, One Piece, Episode 104
…
Just one look at this kingdom and even I can tell what most needs to be done! As if putting your single life on the line is enough!
…
At least try putting all of our lives on the line together! Aren’t we friends?!
Rule 15: It is always better to give things up
Obviously. Nomadism in this United States context is about giving up everything to live a life of ascetic travel. It is about saying that, in fact, some kind of giving up is the better way to spend whatever next stage of life one might be upon.
I met a friend in Colorado who was clearly sick, he and his wife cited cancer quickly. We hung out a few nights, including going bowling. For whatever reason–he was a little confused, himself–he decided to tell me a prognosis that meant soon death from a rejected bone marrow transplant before he told anyone else, including his wife. I ended up feeling like a kind of crutch for him to lean onto and not tell anyone, and some part of me wanted to provide that to him, earnestly. I considered for a time with my own anxieties, and I ultimately decided I needed to give the idea of this friend up, on some level, and let him move beyond telling a stranger who is good at gaining confidence. I left. I learned he died a bit later. I grieved, alone.
I have told people the story of my friend in Colorado that I lost, but no one I know seems to understand that tale. It is confusing and mythical to them. I have had to let go of the idea of anyone understanding what it is like to live that.
My nomadism ended. I did give it up, materially. I am still not so sure it was better that I did in any sense, but this rule is not about interpretation, it is about creation.
The first self I ever created was a self that themself demanded I give them up. This feels like speaking insanity, but it is my phenomenological experience of exactly what happened. That self knew the fragments of any potential self it left behind. It moved forward anyway, exactly because that is exactly what that me knew is what needed to happen in the face of the times that that self experienced. Truly, my past self demonstrates what it means that it is better to give things up–they gave up themself and trusted to live nonetheless. They were never wrong.
Rule 16: Self-expression is a necessity
This is another case that I could wrap up this entire post as this rule is what it is all about. Creating this post is making arguments that defends a new kind of self as a nomad. This is exactly the self-expression that this rule states is a necessity.
Yet we must look back at the self-reliance and the insistence on the somewhat illegible self that I wholly embrace.
As teenage me moved to my third high school, I began to embrace a love of poetry, and I expressed myself in complicated ways. I could not, basically by my worry about the powers that be interpreting me incorrectly, express that I wanted, deeply, to end my own misery in death. I could not express that I was struggling with religious skepticism, even as anyone who tried to get close to me expressed the same. So I wrote elaborately vague and metaphoric expressions of my pain in the form of poetry, intentionally hiding my pain and obscuring it behind impossible to interpret ideas that satisfied the powers that were to be over me.
This has led me to a vague and elusive kind of self-expression often enough.
And then I hit the road.
In travelling and creating my blog, I learned how to describe my life in earnest. I learned how to, even if I hid some of my worst pains through the old methods, create an expression that some people seemed to enjoy. I found this surprisingly powerful at times.
Nomadism is an expression unto itself. Is it enough? No. It is certainly not enough. A fuller expression of whatever the self is is necessary, and I am not so sure it is possible. I am certain it is not. Every attempt at it must be seen as reaching to this necessity.
Rule 17: Comfort is secondary
There is no discussing nomadism under this rule without talking about the ascetic value that is this rule itself, except: I’m living in a fucking Subaru Crosstrek. This would stand into being a van, but I am still in a goddamn Subaru Crosstrek.
However, consider that I put literal months into making my Crosstrek relatively comfortable to travel out of. This rule does not say that comfort is unnecessary. It simply says it is secondary to more important matters.
In 2010, I over-packed up my small Sebring convertible and took a solo road trip from San Diego to South Dakota and central Wisconsin. Along the way, I nearly ran out of gas while driving through a large oil field in the middle of Wyoming. I visited family and the ground where I spent a significant time of my life growing up.
In 2011, I once again over-packed the same Sebring and took another solo road trip comparably similar. I spent time visiting family before heading back home. It was a strange time in life, and my documentation about it was less than I left for myself with others. Something did stick with me about how much I really did love the road from this trip, and even found it often comforting and open with possibility.
In 2013, I packed up the same Sebring and did a similar road trip. This time, I hit up a ton of national parks, including Grand Canyon, Badlands, Grand Teton, and more. In many ways, this prepared me for a large focus on national parks and monuments as I traveled around as a nomad.
A Crosstrek does not actually feel all that much larger than roadtripping in a Sebring. Neither are greatly made for it. If it was about physical comfort, I doubt I would ever be a nomad.
Many other nomads openly seek nomadism out of a retirement from “the rat race” in the US, largely expressed as a break from the dominant culture of regular and constant work, most commonly in the corporate world. In some regard, most of the stereotypical retired snowbird are a version of this that often remains straddling the status quo in a way. Nonetheless, this screams of a kind of ascetic rejection of the capitalist status quo in effect, and can probably learn from radical ideas of “Rest as resistance” and the like. While I feel a deep connection to this ascetic ideal, this has essentially nothing to do with why I am a nomad. To me, there is a funny amount who just got a nice tech job and cite this ascetic perspective in a kind of odd paradox; it never felt right for me working as a software engineer.
I do find the “rat race” exhausting and impossible for me to keep up with at the end of the day. I tried to get into product management as a kind of attempt at leaving software engineering and move towards being a therapist, but I have found it not what I had hoped it would be. Staring at a screen all day without connection to the world around me burns me out entirely regardless of what I am doing. These unnatural work arrangements of modern capitalism are ones I find insufferable. Although I find the paradox of working in technology and an asceticism hilarious, I can say clearly that I would rather embrace the asceticism, even if escaping the “rat race” is not what I would cite as my motivation, even forced to give a motivation.
I find the asceticism of living out of something as small as a Subaru to be particularly valuable for its own sake. I live primarily with electricity and construction that I generate from the sun and otherwise put together with my own hand. I am forced to create a connection with the land that I step on and even the annoying rodents that try to build nests on top of my engine if I do not move for days on end. It is this connection that entirely attracts me, even if my tendency to nihilistic rejection of capitalism could land in a similar position.
Rule 18: Hardship only enhances adventure
This rule came about in an era that I was saying I did not see nomadism ever coming to an end for me. Then it did.
I went camping on a mountaintop in Central California at one point. A group of young men, in their 20s and 30s, showed up. They had the courtesy to walk around the campsite and tell everyone that they intended on drinking, and if they were being too loud, just come over and talk with them. For some reason, I decided to go ahead and go hang out and have some drinks with them.
We were all pretty drunk when they began to look at me different and start talking shit about queer people. They seemed to spot me already and were fishing. I recognized the position and decided to speak up, “What do you have against them?” Within a second, I was staring down the barrel of a rifle. Alone. It wasn’t the only time.
When I landed back in the city, I made damn sure to land into a queer district. I ended up in the Hillcrest area of San Diego. They closed the street I lived on for the Pride Parade every year, so I just had to step outside, or even watch it from my window.
When I walked down the queer district sidewalk, I often felt I just got seen as another gay man. It felt more lonely than the gun in my face when I was truly alone.
I prefer the gun.
The first time I ever felt truly seen is among the first stories I have. I was so dissociated through my teens and twenties, I could not recognize how clear I held the story until well into my 30s. The early story in my head goes that I was dragged around a house as a subhuman pariah. A piece of garbage who dared, by physically existing as I did, to steep below the gender of even the girls the abuser held me in front of as less than. “Even the girl can control her bladder better than you.”
Patriarchy can go to fucking hell.
But I was seen there. I was seen as failing to meet any of these gendered constructs. I was seen in my beautiful failure. She twisted my beauty into something terrible, and fuck her. Fuck her for being the first to see me and being the goddamn devil about it.
I did fucking win in the end.
When I lost nomadism, I lost my career at the same time. It was not a career I really ever wanted. Sometimes, a semblance of desire for it showed up, but I often hated that desire in many other parts of myself. When I got a job as a software engineer, I stated to a close friend that I would have rather kept it as a hobby than a career. I never went to school for it, and I did not want to go to school for it.
In the loss, I ended up seeking the dream of a degree in psychology. I studied the general major, as well as specializations in mental health–a precursor to a graduate degree for counseling–and another in addictions. As I completed my perfect degree with all of this psychology, I decided to add a second major in math. I did the math major in just over a year–it would have been shorter if I had not failed abstract algebra the first time. By the end, I was exhausted but proud.
I sought out classes at a community college while I struggled with direction after my degree, but ultimately came to seek out nomadism again. I met good friends at the community college, but I had no direction and found myself burning out quickly. I do not know if graduate school lies in my future, but I know a direction that survives the burning of chaff that is my desires is the only way that can get me there.
Rule 19: Don’t take anything for granted
Nomadism is the only lifestyle I have lived in which I would regularly wake up and proclaim to myself, “I love this life.” Quite to the contrary, much of my life, I have been quite miserable and seeking to take on something else entirely. I spent much of my teen years cursing the sky at whatever god would listen. Much of the time I spent since leaving my initial nomadism had more of a mantra about how much I was not fully enjoying my life, and I have known it the whole time.
The first time I hit the road, I spent some time before hating everything about the fractured sense of self I had. As I constructed the self that left for the road, this transitioned into an enjoyment of this new self. As I continued on the road, this new self continued changing and growing in ways I found largely beautiful. Sometimes, an intense naivete underlined everything I did, though it was driven by a deeper urging for some kind of personal liberation.
On some level, I never really expected to actually finish a degree, but it came to be anyway. About the only reason I could think of to get a degree was towards being a therapist. Seeming to lose nomadism, it seemed the thing to start working for again. I spent moments entirely suicidal as I finished my degree, but I just kept on adding more classes anyway.
Take your life
Frightened Rabbit, Floating in the Forth
Give it a shake
Gather up
All your loose change
I think I’ll save suicide for another year.
While stationary for the last part of my degree, I picked up a regular habit of walking through Balboa Park in San Diego. I strung together a couple 9 mile hikes and would wake up early in the morning to do it. Until the homeless sweeps came through in the same hours, hoping to avoid drama of the public and put a stain upon my feelings about the exercise.
Rule 20: Knowledge without experience is unreliable
I totally did the same thing returning into nomadism that I did the first time. I followed some idealist concept of how the best way to do it would be, and I bought a bunch of stuff to do it.
The first time traveling, it took a couple of years before I actually had a stable setup, and even then, I was regularly swapping out gear and how I wanted to set it up throughout my vehicle. In the Outback, Tivona, I made a goal to be able to stick everything into the trunk space and travel like that. This helped establish an austerity that also opened up new possibilities at times. I cannot remember how seriously I took this informal ideal into my late travels. Nonetheless, I went from a system of bins to fit everything in to a much looser system. I went from my 2 big AGM batteries lying flat in the trunk space to hiding in the spare tire bay, with the spare tire booted to the roof in a new roof rack. Eventually I upgraded to a lithium ion battery box.
This new time traveling, I have been coy about sharing my setup entirely, and in fact ended up going out quite slowly. My initial idea of a setup was basically trying to remember as much as I could about doing it in the Outback and perhaps give myself a couple of upgrades. I ended up spending a bunch of money on stuff that I am almost assuredly not going to use. And then I packed up what I had so far and tried camping out before deciding for an entirely new setup. Ultimately, I gutted the back end of Imogene, the Crosstrek, and built out a new battery setup, storage box, and bed platform with plywood, joining pieces, some 2×2, and some 3/4 inch square pieces. I bought an outdoor umbrella and ultimately just bought an entire awning attached to the roof.
So far, camping with Imogene, I have learned that the car battery drains surprisingly easy just by going in and out of the vehicle regularly and leaving a door open long at all. Back in Tivona, I had this issue once, but after removing a light bulb in the door, it did not matter. The light bulb was all that was draining the battery. Imogene has similar lights in both side mirrors, and has a lot more going on every time the doors are opened.
I had a mouse in Mirja, the Ascent, that I was traveling in at the end of my first travels. I was sleeping in a tent at the time, and the mouse chewed through from the engine and got at food inside the car. In Imogene, I have had one mouse from leaving my back gate open overnight get into the car, and a rat build a big nest in the engine compartment. I have known about this possibility for a long time, but experiencing it is new.
Rule 21: Always be ready to move
The wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else–with the wind, an animal, human beings (and there is also an aspect under which animals themselves form rhizomes, as do people, etc.). “Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us.” Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of n dimensions and broken dimensions. Conjugate deterritorialized flows. Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.
Deleuze & Guattari, a thousand plateaus
Sometimes, in camp, it is better to setup so that it is difficult to pack up and move. This rule is not itself about nomadism, and the most obvious of just being nimble is not really the point. It was just as relevant when I lived in an apartment for 2.5 years. Sometimes moving is just setting a new direction within the same world. Sometimes it is changing whole worlds.
Rule 22: Hesitate to make a promise
I always hated making promises. At points in my life, I have outright refused to make promises that people asked me to make, entirely just because I hated making promises. There was never a particular reason for it. I guess I wasn’t interested in failing people on some level, but some of it was entirely just because I read some line in the Bible when I was like 8 or 10 and it was kind of a prototype rule to not make any promises. There are many verses warning against swearing, i.e. making a promise, although I tend to think I overinterpreted that when I was younger.
I still don’t make many promises. Goddamn rule tells me to more.
they all say they are my friends, and that I shall have justice, but while all their mouths talk right I do not understand why nothing is done for my people. I have heard talk and talk but nothing is done. Good words do not last long unless they amount to something. Words do not pay for my dead people. They do not pay for my country now overrun by white men. They do not protect my father’s grave. They do not pay for my horses and cattle. Good words do not give me back my children. Good words will not make good the promise of your war chief, General Miles. Good words will not give my people good health and stop them from dying. Good words will not give my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises. There has been too much talking by men who had no right to talk.
Chief Joseph
Rule 23: Always fall in love
I was unsatisfied with my experiences of therapy in many ways, but romance and gender questions were an illegible space in therapy. Outside of therapy, I was pretty good at ensuring the illegibility of for me for a long time, so there was no relief.
I still often wish to defy any particular sense of what “queer” means when I identify as it. It will always be about the little me who stood against being paraded as “below even the girls” in their own way so young just as much as it is about what expressions of gender and sexuality I exhibit today. It is about how I embraced the word “queer” to discuss how much a significant part of me hated being queer, well and long into my adulthood. It is about how I fell in love with being queer on my own path.
I felt as fondly of the person I was in a romantic relationship with as I entered therapy initially as I have anyone, and I enjoyed my therapist for discussing some more active issues of my PTSD. However, I regularly complained to my therapist that I kinda just did not like being in a romantic relationship very much. The discussion mostly ended in my therapist giving me some good advice for riding it out in the context of a relationship, but when that relationship ended, his aim of any conversation was to convince me to seek out long term romance. It was never a space I was going to get comfortable with some of my more asexual/aromantic tendencies.
It was on my own I fell in love with being queer.
I have some consistent political annoyance at queer struggles being reduced to “who you love” when that has felt a tiny part of my queer experience, outside of a less-than-painful experience of failing on some level.
My queer has always been about who I am as an individual more than who I am in the romantic/sexual field. Attempts at matching my queerness with the typical liberal lenses of queerness has felt like abject failure on both our ends.
I ultimately fell in love with my own failures.
I laugh when a strongly sexual and/or romantic type cringes at this rule while it is made by and about me, who is ultimately somewhere along some kind of asexual, aromantic, and agender. They miss everything about it. In my way, I love their ignorance.
Rule 24: Make yourself vulnerable
I was less scared of walking around the glass floor of the Seattle Space Needle in a kilt than I was on the spine in the Borrego Badlands, imagining the sandy spine giving way under my foot and dropping a scary amount to the desert floor below. I have thought about doing the hike including that spine again on a regular basis ever since.
Since I began writing this post, I realized that this post is a major part of trying to create some kind of coherent self, probably more coherent than the elusive one that I have lamented the loss of. When I first set out, I never had the explicit intention of creating any kind of self, but as I developed my rules, and when my first travels came to an end, I found the self I had constructed to be one of the most important personal things I had done in my journey. Its existence proved to make me vulnerable to some of the worst pain I have ever felt. And now I am at it again. Making myself vulnerable again.
I have long been something of a social butterfly. It is not that remarkably difficult for me to meet people and make friends, but as quickly as I may meet a new friend, I am just as quickly often off on the next adventure. There are many people I consider friends of a sort, no matter how rarely I see them, if ever again.
It turns out I am probably pretty bad at the idea of pen pals or any other means of keeping in touch with much of anyone very well. This is something that still annoys me about my own tendencies from time to time when I am confused about life and enjoy my local friends. I think sometimes about historical times when traveling significantly would be the same time not talking to people, and some of the implications of that. It sounds nice to me. Not for the solitude, but for the trust in life to send the important ones back around at the appropriate times.
At my most down about my friends I never see, I like to contemplate the interconnectedness of us all. How we may be separated by countless miles and barricades, but we will forever be inseparable in the grand fabric of reality.
These isolated paths
Is all that I can see
My faith in gravity
Just about has a hold on meAnd it makes me wanna cry
Anathema, Distant Satellites
Caught you as I floated by
And it makes me wanna cry
We’re just distant satellites
Rule 25: Everything is easier when its done
I cannot remember finishing my degree. I cannot remember starting my degree. I know these things happened. My fractured past lies before me like a puzzle bleached by days of blinding sun. Concepts. I bounce from one to the next, constructing something. Here is a detail: Thursdays were so important. I have the concept of not enjoying them. Do I only have the concept because other people kept mentioning Thursdays were difficult, or did I feel that way, too? I have no certain memory either way. To me, finishing my degree might as well have been incredibly easy. I doubt it felt like it in the moment. Especially as I failed abstract algebra.
I got this idea about everything being easier when it is done from a friend. I liked it so much that I added it to my own rules.
Setting out on the road again. Constructing a new self again. It all seems so difficult. It all is so difficult. Yet when it is done. When it is accomplished. It will be as easy as any other task I have completed. As difficult to remember.
Rule 26: Humbly give yourself credit
This is where I explain Imogene’s build for the new setting out. When I trade to another vehicle, I will take many lessons from this build to do that one. This has been an intense build that I learned an immense amount from. I am giving myself credit for this, but I think some people are intensely interested in it as well. It is part of the nomadic experience.
Having a math degree helped a lot in the build out of Imogene, but it still proved remarkably difficult. I had no such background in the first build-out, and I still learned enough about wiring and solar to put together a 2 battery 12V AGM system with a regular 300W of solar.
In building out Imogene, I had already taken out the back seats and tried to make something work. As my initial trials proved that I needed to do a proper build-out, I decided to build another electrical setup, along with a storage box and a bed platform. I got the general idea of a fold-up bed platform that was as long as my one camping mattress. This would need to fold-up, or else the front seat would always have to be folded all the way forward. Somehow, I needed to fit a large enough battery and all the wiring and solar equipment alongside that as well. I started with the battery box.
Battery box
As I first set out, I already had a new 200W fold-up panel from Renogy. It is quite flimsy, but it works absolutely great. Building from this, I hopped onto Renogy and bought some more. I knew I wanted a second 200W panel for when I drain the battery a bit and/or the clouds kinda suck. I added on a new 200Ah LiFePO4 battery with built-in bluetooth and self-heating functions, and a 40A solar charge controller. I topped it off with a 700W inverter.
I dropped into West Marine for the rest of the wiring, fuses, and such. In short, I have 3 circuit breakers, 1 dual bus bar (one positive, one negative), a small fuse panel internally. I also added a master switch to the battery to turn the entire thing on and off, mostly to preserve battery and the like.
I measured out the inside of my car and planned out a box on some graph paper to house the battery, wiring, and so forth behind the drivers’ seat. Then I went to Home Depot and bought a bunch of plywood and metal attachments and started building.
It was total improvisation. I accidentally created it backwards, with a door I intended to face towards the outside of the car now facing to the center of the car. I realized that I was mounting my charge controller in a way that was less efficient for air flow than it was designed for and I ended up convincing myself to buy 2 120mm fans and a fan controller board that regulates them by temperatures. One intake and one exhaust fan creates an appropriate, intentional airflow across the charge controller and throughout the entire unit, including the battery, to some degree.
For output, I have the 700W inverter as well as a 12V port that I regularly plug a 3-way 12V splitter into. I also have a total of 4 standard USB-A ports and 4 USB-C power ports directly built into the box.
Bed
The bed was also largely improvised. I started with the basic idea of creating 2×2 framing with plywood top and yoga mat stapled on for padding and some stability with a mattress on top of it. I quickly decided that I wanted a slight of U-shape to the bed, kind of like I experience sleeping in a hammock regularly. I also knew immediately I wanted to make sure that it could fold up for traveling.
I measured out a central platform, 2 platforms in the back, and a series of 5 platforms in the front. I built out 2×2 framing for each with metal joints and plates to secure them. Unfortunately, I screwed up and did not really measure it appropriately. When I cut the plywood by measures I had originally intended, they all ended up being smaller by about a half inch in one dimension. This worked out to just make the bed a few inches longer than my intention of doing it just that much shorter. It is actually kind of nice and made attaching hinges easier.
The legs were the most painful part. I had to measure out each leg independently based on where I wanted it to land. Having the platforms built out, I held it in the car with a level and measured it, torturing myself with weird twists and my unsteady hand. The lowest part of the bed made the primary base, which I attached unmovable legs to. All of the other legs, on the other platforms, are attached via hinges and locking support intended to hold a door open at 90 degrees but which I use kinda like fold-up table supports.
I throw on a nice self-inflating mattress on top of it with some basic bedding and it is a surprisingly comfortable bed!
Storage Boxes
I started the entire wood working build with a totally psychotic little storage box right behind the drivers seat. I use this to hold a bunch of tools and things, and the battery box sits on top of it. It’s just a standard rectangular box, although all the sides are mismeasured and slapped together like total shit. I kinda like it.
The main storage unit sits next to my bed in the very back of the car. For this one, I decided to be smart and built the entire thing in FreeCAD first. I constructed a box that included a small and a large shelf, and all reinforced with 3/4 inch square framing. The outside and shelving was 1/2 plywood.
However, when I built this box and stuck it in the car, it was unable to actually fit into the car alongside my bed platform!
I ended up throwing the original box in storage and starting entirely over, accounting for angles. I used the original plans as I designed on FreeCAD, but I mixed it with an empirical measure for each framing piece. The box ended up having a long side towards the front of the car and a short side toward the back of the car. This took me back to empirically improvising as I did most of the build, but with the aid of the a priori process, I was able to do a somewhat complex solution with surprising ease. I even used a level a lot, ensuring that the box and its shelves are basically level when the car is level.
Rule 27: There is no bad, and there is no good
I can find no justice in the world I live in. I find no answers to the psychic pains of injustice anywhere in modern psychology application. There is just the dehumanization of prison and similar applications of so-called justice systems. There is just a “merit-based” system where merit has absolutely nothing to do with it. There is just admitting you are subhuman and submitting to authoritarian control of your will under the so-called liberal rule of law that always tends to look more like conservatism and fascism in practice. There is just being within the boxes defined for you as acceptable and any semblance of justice revoked the second you fail.
In a world with no justice, I find no reason to hold to any morality. I find only reason to reject it and move on in the nihilist space of possibility.
Rule 28: Research before memorizing
Although I set my rules down to numbers and everything, I never bothered to take any effort actually memorizing them, especially not to their specific numbers.
When I got my first studio apartment in Las Vegas as my first nomadism ended, I setup a Word document with one rule and one picture from my travels per page. I printed this out and taped it up around the apartment as the first decorations. Eventually, when I ended up back in San Diego, I repeated the exercise, but I framed each picture and rule and hung them randomly all around the apartment.
I still never bothered to memorize them and their associated numbers.
In high school, I basically slept my way through Algebra 2 and did not have any space left for precalculus or the calculus series. When I decided to add on a second major in math, I needed to go back to the basic math techniques first. Over the next year, I studied all of the calculus series, linear algebra, proofs, real analysis, abstract algebra, history of math and math education, and more.
As much as I enjoyed a lot of it, I really kinda hated the Calculus series as it was taught. I felt that it was just a bunch of rote memorization of tricks and basic application of that rote memory. It was real analysis, abstract algebra, history of math, and those sort of classes that I was really loving math about. As much as I work as a software engineer doing a kind of applied math, I still prefer the analytical over the rote tricks.
Rule 29: Always seek to experience
I am leaving this harbor
Bjork, Wanderlust
Giving urban a farewell
Its habitants seem too keen on God
I cannot stomach their rights and wrongs
I have lost my origin
And I don’t want to find it again
…
Did I imagine it would be like this?
Was it something like this I wished for?
Or will I want more?
Nomad time is slow. As if the universe obeys the efforts of the ascetics and gives us more time with this chosen life.
As my job now requires me to be in the office once a month, I have worried about whether I can get the full experience of nomadism that I wished for before. A long dream of nomadism for me was to just go out with no one and nothing holding me down for a deadline. In short: the open road. A constant one-month deadline puts a difficult spin on any attempt at that kind of dream.
Will this new cycle carry the same benefits of the slowness of nomad time? Is nomad time dependent on the pure experience of the ascetic life, or does it have some relation to the constant traveling nature? Is it all too hopelessly complex to figure out what the hell I am talking about?
If nothing else, the experience is new to me. An experience of its own. Worth experiencing. Every experience has to be experienced by someone. This is the experience given to me.
Rule 30: It won’t be like this all the time
My earliest memory includes me ensuring that my parents, perhaps most of all, could never know about my body. I had to hide my body. My self. Everything. It had to be hidden. It did not take long before my mom noticed I was a completely different person in the scenarios calling for that and moved me to an entirely new state, miles away.
Driving down a dirt road in a canyon after camping out for a few nights on a mountain at the top of the road, every self I had constructed broke down. They could not take it any more. Everything I relied on to travel full time for years, my entire identity, was crushed, and could take no more. My greatest joy was over. The first real “self” I ever made of all these pieces crumbled. It was over. I have never been able to travel the same again.
The Twilight Sad released an album with title that is a variation on this rule. James Graham, a founder of the band, described:
It can be taken in a positive or a negative way. For example, ‘It won’t be like this all the time’… in a positive manner would be to kind of cherish the moments that… life gives you that’s good and you’re happy… and then the negative aspect would be, if you’re in a dark space and going through a tough time, tomorrow’s a new day, and there’s always people to help you, so… it won’t be like this all the time as well.”
James Graham (The Twilight Sad), interview
In my darkest days of the end of my nomadism, this album was my soundtrack. It paralleled that moment of nomadism to me so perfectly, especially for this rule.
In the months that led up to quitting my job and ending my first nomadism, I noticed my PTSD relapsing. I began having intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, and a weird kind of survival drive. I began dissociating to the point that I stopped writing on the blog except to describe the backpacking trips I desperately went on to feel connected to Earth and the present again.
After I quit the job, I found myself in the height of a full PTSD relapse with the new trauma. I was dissociating so bad my brain seemed to be constantly screaming. Everything was so loud, or impossibly distant. I was having emotional flashbacks driving down the road, or in the middle of the night, waking me up to utter dread. Everything I used to love about living out of the car felt painful, and I did not want it any more. My beloved nomadism felt more like just being unhoused.
But it hasn’t stayed like that, either.
Now it seems I embark on a project of making a new self, changing everything again, and making myself vulnerable to everything again. I finished my degree, got stable employment once again, and I am back on the road. I worked on the PTSD, and came to terms with parts of myself I avoided even through years of past therapy. And I am back on the road. Still a nomad.
Freefall, weightless and terrified
Stavesacre, Freefalll (From Hand to Hand)
On I go crossing over from living to so alive
And… I know weeping is cast for the night
But joy… joy comes in the morning
The next 8
The first 30 rules were created during my initial travels. I interject a pause here for my own reflection that the following rules expand into where I have since grown my own thoughts. These were created upon reflection on a time of dormancy. Future rules return to the realm of travel once again.
Rule 31: Grieve
As the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, I had begun working on finishing my degree and was continuing to struggle with employment. As this time progressed, both of my grandfathers passed, largely due to age. However, due to living far away, having essentially no money, and not really having the time to take away, I missed both funerals. It was a kind of deprivation of grief I really never expected to have as much of a struggle with as I found myself facing. I will forever have a pain of facing that grief depravingly alone. No one grieved with me. I needed to find my own way to grieve.
There was no prompt to what came next for me.
I happened to receive an odd joke toy that my one grandfather had. It is a cute thing that just hangs a rock and tells you the weather: if the rock is wet, it must be raining, etc. After my other grandfather’s funeral, I received a shell casing from the salute he received as a military member, and my mom bought me an eagle feather with a bald eagle painted on it, which is symbolic of that grandfather in a major way. My mom also made ornaments from both of their clothes, and I received one for each.
The first apartment that I got in San Diego was a cute Spanish Courtyard style home. It was essentially a singlet that was cut in half to make into a one bedroom apartment. However, in the dining room space, built into one of the walls was a little altar, as one might put religious items and the like.
I ended up setting up a little altar to grief, putting together the symbols of my grandfathers into a display for me to remember them regularly in my life.
When I moved to the second apartment I had in San Diego, where I stayed for 2.5 years before re-entering nomadism, I ended up buying a small table to house the same display and continue my new found way of grief.
I still carry these items in the car today. I still grieve in my own discovered ways.
Rule 32: Recognize the universe in everyone
In the course of following the brutal acceleration of oppression into genocide of Palestinians since October 7, 2023, I came across multiple different religions that have some concept of the death of each person being the destruction of an entire world. In trying to consider what to write for this post, I have found reference to Jewish texts that one translation reads, “if one destroys a single life, it’s as if he destroyed an entire world, while if one saves a single life, it’s as if he saved an entire world” (Sanhedrin 4:5). This does capture a lot of the idea.
Countless times, I acted as an immature skeptic, somewhat prone to right-libertarian focusing on the drug war, as I experienced friends cracked down on by police and manipulated by a system that did not seem to hold any actual justice to it whatsoever. Initially, I thought my favor towards people who actively use drugs and against the system that would seek to eradicate them would be a roadblock to looking at studying addictions and substance use counseling.
As I continued my BA, I picked up Richard Miller’s Drug Warriors and their Prey, where he does a historical case study analysis comparing the tactics of the drug war in the US, up to the early 1990s when it was published, against the tactics Nazi Germany employed in The Holocaust. It is an intense book, and in publishing and otherwise, it has some links into right-libertarianism that can be problematic in a modern world where much of right-libertarianism has been coopted into the dominant fascist ideology of our day. Nonetheless, it was an important step along the path of my fight against the ideals that would identify people who use drugs as somehow damaged and unworthy of life without authoritarian correction.
“They talk about it like it’s an overdose crisis when in fact it’s basically genocide” is a quote highlighted by researchers, Lavalley, Steinhauer, Bundy, Kerr, and McNeil, in December 2024 in the International Journal of Drug Policy, working with indigenous people who use illicit drugs in so-called Canada. As fentanyl has spread throughout North America, the indigenous people of so-called Canada have faced not only the deaths of the drug, but ongoing violent policing and other tactics that the First Nations peoples have long accused the Canadian government of genocide with. As such, the experience of the overdose crisis is that of an ongoing genocide that preceded it. I find this remarkably hard to argue against, not only in the context of so-called Canada but in the so-called US as well.
Doctors “over-prescribing” opioids is often cited as the start of the so-called overdose crises. If you narrow a small window of time, you can find a correlation that would suggest this. Unfortunately, expanding beyond this window causes the correlation to vanish, especially in the years that law has tried to force medicine to work under a flawed assumption of causation that their “over-prescribing” caused an increase in overdose as inspired from this flawed correlation.
The responsibility of being the first in history to charge the government of the United States of America with the crime of genocide is not one your petitioners take lightly. The responsibility is particularly grave when citizens must charge their own government with mass murder of its own nationals, with institutionalized oppression and persistent slaughter of the Negro people in the United States on a basis of “race,” a crime abhorred by mankind and prohibited by the conscience of the world as expressed in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948.
We Charge Genocide, Petition to the United Nations, 1951
The truth is that I do not know what to do with my passion for people who use drugs. I never expected to have it. I never sought it. I just found it. I lived in their space, partook in their practices, their culture, studied the policies and psychologies that are applied to them, and largely stand against the status quo that defines every easy access at doing anything about their oppression. I am them, and I do not know what to do with it.
The genocidal practices of the drug war–albeit all I really comfortably know is the US’s, but from Philippines to Canada, the drug war being used as an excuse to attack people extends far beyond the US–make any actual help for people who use drugs difficult. We are often resigned to edge cases like handing out Narcan for use on the street as our best means of actually saving lives; mind you, this tactic finally did reduce some overdose rates before current attempts at rescinding it by the eugenists in the Trump administration.
I initially dropped out of college after realizing the path I was on was pretty unrealistic for me. One professor had us write a paper about who we could not treat as substance use counselors. I thought really hard and settled that I would have an extremely hard time counseling Christians. My professor told me straight that I was going to have a hard time in the substance use counseling world. Turns out it is dominated by christofascist norms that would rather enslave people in the name of the great white race before actually liberating people from addiction. I have absolutely no interest in that shit.
Addiction therapy, as most think of it, can barely break 10-15% success anyway. Which is a big number if you count heads, but not anything I would hang my hat on. Mandatory therapy is just a fancy word for prison, more often than not complete with the slavery and the genocidal logics.
I adore harm reduction. Narcan, of course, but much preferable to that, tactics as overdose prevention sites. Unfortunately, without some exceptional blessing from the federal government, overdose prevention is seen as building “drug dens” by the current US drug war. Instead of taking a harm reduction of allowing physicians to work with patients with easily doseable drugs, the US drug war follows a disproven correlation and continues to disallow physicians from prescribing doseable drugs, leaving people who use drugs to unpredictable doses on the street.
The solution some people are looking for from me is legalization, regulation, harm reduction, and non-authoritarian–better yet, anti-authoritarian and liberating–social, spiritual, and ancestral leadership and healing. Saving lives.
The enslavement and genocidal allowance of death that the drug war continues to perpetuate is a continual death of entire universes of potentiality and relations.
Throughout 2024, the Trump campaign ran a platform of promising explicit ethnic cleansing across the US. He called it “mass deportation” and a lot of the media continues calling it “deportations” even as the brutality gets more and more obvious. During his last administration, whistleblowers came forward with outright genocidal practices like unconsented hysterectomies happening in the immigration camps.
Watching entire universes being called “distractions” by the political party that claims to be the only viable resistance to this accelerating fascism is utterly devastating and terrifying.
Rule 33: Truth has no path
Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living. A dead thing has a path to it because it is static, but when you see that the truth is something living, moving, which has no resting place, which is in no temple, mosque or church, which no religion, no teacher, no philosopher, nobody can lead you to–then you will also see that this living thing is what you actually are.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
My father grew up protestant Christian and my mother grew up Catholic. We went to a few different churches, mostly in the protestant vein, as I grew up. I read a lot of the Bible and partook in a lot of the traditions around professing the face and baptism and all that jazz.
More unfortunate than not, the first gender and sexuality books I really got into were of the Christian variety, when I was in high school. These typically shallow and authoritarian angles really only confused me for longer, I think. Nonetheless, at the last church I went to in high school, I had the joy of arguing with the boys in the youth group about how they acted towards trans and gay people. After a large push for a Day of Silence, raising awareness of the harm caused by harassment and discrimination of LGBTQ+ students, several of the boys in the group decided to partake in a reactionary “Day of Truth”. I took out my Bible and began arguing that they were putting on the image of evil and needed to abstain, regardless of what they thought otherwise. They did not really listen to me.
I have been quiet about my queerness for most of my life, but I have never been able to sit by and witness the hate extended to others in total silence.
I stopped going to that church, but I ended up living with some of the connections I made there for a year several years later. We joking called it “The Commune” and I still sometimes laughingly talk about “The time I lived in a Christian Commune”. It was mostly cool. We had a big garden in the back and tried to live somewhat intentional lives as friends in the same house. It got weird. I left on my own terms in the end and have not really done any Christian religion ever since.
I stumbled into philosophy entirely by accident. I blame Judith Butler. Not really… but kinda.
While living in Las Vegas, I started a habit of regularly doing a 9 mile hike around part of the city, starting and ending on Fremont Street, being that my apartment was right on Fremont. I started to listen to audiobooks during these walks, starting with odd things I found interesting, often in psychology and history. I read many books, many of which had openings towards philosophy for me. However, before taking a Psychology of Gender class for my degree, I decided to read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. I ended up incorporating the ideas in the text into the paper that I wrote for the class.
Soon, I was reading A.C. Grayling’s History of Philosophy and going on to read a lot of big names in philosophy. I had an early interest in adding in Eastern thought, but I ended up working all the way from Montaigne through Kant. I added in some things like Darwin, Foucault, etc.
Ultimately, I got into the ancient Greeks and Romans, spending a couple years working through the great books of the ancients, including philosophy and literature. This expanded to texts into the medieval ages and across the world, even as I continued mixing in others.
I have a long future with philosophy ahead.
Regardless of going to church or not, I often continued thinking of spiritual matters. I often worded it in Christian terms, and regularly enough got looked at and questioned if I was being sacrilegious. Only to find a lot of my thoughts kindred in Spinoza. It may have been some of this readings like Spinoza that helped me look towards religious texts again. Reading Taoist and Confucian texts as a break from Western philosophy also contributed significantly to this, increasing my curiosity about religion far more broadly.
In 2022, I had finally achieved curious enough about religion again that I read a book about the major world religions. As I began expanding what reading “the ancients” meant in the following year, I began adding Hindu texts as well. This included the Ramayana and Mahabharata, as well as some such as the Rig Veda and Yoga Sutras.
Since that time, I have read texts from Jainism, various branches of Hinduism, Theravada Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, Baha’i, and further texts like Maimonides and John Calvin. I am not really sure what the hell the point of any of this reading really has been. The best I feel I have is some hedonistic, “I really enjoy reading these texts.” However, I feel like that defies my real perspective here. I think curiosity drives me more than pure enjoyment. Frankly, John Calvin is boring, and some of these texts are a little weird for my pure enjoyment. I still continue entirely out of curiosity and some kind of love of the reading anyway.
Rule 34: Experience must tell its own meaning
You know, it seems as if all the energy that went into holding the arbitrary pattern together was quite unnecessary – a waste. You think you have to make the pattern yourself; but there are so many pieces, and it’s so hard to see where they fit. Sometimes you put them in the wrong place, and the more pieces mis-fitted, the more effort it takes to hold them in place, until at last you are so tired that even that awful confusion is better than holding on any longer. Then you discover that left to themselves the jumbled pieces fall quite naturally into their own places, and a living pattern emerges without any effort at all on your part. Your job is just to discover it, and in the course of that, you will find yourself and your own place. Looks as if the whole of life is pretty nondirective, doesn’t it? You must even let your own experience tell you its own meaning: the minute you tell it what it means, you get the same antagonism you would get from a client, and you are at war with yourself.
Carl Rogers (Miss Cam), Client-Centered Therapy
Following Google Maps as I drove around Northwestern Washington towards a distant campsite, suddenly I found myself driving down gravel roads. It started in a big burn scar that was very recent, but ended up by some ranches that looked quite high end. The smoke in the air grew thicker and thicker. After the ranches, the roads shrunk into forest roads into the national forest.
Before long, I was staring out my window at trees with active flames. A couple of trucks from the National Forest Service pulled over to let me pass. If they tried to get my attention, I was kinda freaking out and just passed them without noticing. At the end of the forest road, the staging area for the firefighters had a number of members standing in discussion. They looked at me like I was mad. I drove away, entering the nearest town and continuing on to the campsite that was safe from the fire.
At one point, with an apartment of my own and a rich social life, I began doing a lot of endurance focused calisthenics. It wasn’t the most important thing in the world to me, but I generally enjoyed moving my body around. Until I visited family for a week one time and just broke the habit.
One day, a month out of my last work out, I decided to try doing some squats again. I ended up feeling remarkably sore. And it kept getting worse. Until I woke up one day and pissed out what looked like dark black tea. I went to the ER and got diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis. A bag of fluid via IV and I was discharged to follow up to ensure I was clearing the proteins in my blood.
For as little as I could move for a couple of weeks, I chugged as much water as I could until I started feeling better again.
Aside from some initial stretching, I started going walking when I could. The walking turned into outright hikes, and I quickly planned a hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back in one day. And soon after completing this, I hiked Section A of the Pacific Crest Trail, through San Diego County, in the absurd heat of September.
I often cited the hiking as the initiator of my first nomadism.
At first, on the road, much of my hiking was just limited to pretty easy walking around national parks, though I would try to include some more difficult hikes. I did eventually do some wonderfully difficult hikes in multiple parks and began to challenge myself more.
Finally, in August of 2017, I began actually getting into backpacking again, starting with a large backpacking trip I planned for the eclipse that came through that year. I hiked into the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, absolutely falling in love. Through the start of 2020, I went on a wonderful number of absolutely amazing backpacking trips. Even as my world fell apart, I hit the heights of my backpacking dreams.
As COVID set in and I faced a lack of funds to travel for hiking, I began taking semi-daily walks around the Las Vegas city. As I then moved to San Diego, I began doing the same semi-daily walks around Balboa Park, complete with wearing a kilt, weighing my backpack down with actual weights, and using trekking poles.
This lasted until I ultimately sacrificed it to staying up late during my math major. I simply did not have the energy to wake up early enough for the hikes and stay up late enough for the math homework. I favored the math homework, and the hiking has been somewhat relegated to a dream again.
Rule 35: The future is behind you
In an apartment after I had terminated my round of therapy that resulted in the “I am a Survivor / I came through this / I am Stronger and Better because of it” saying, I lived right across a busy street from a tattoo shop. After some thought, I decided that I wanted this slogan tattooed on my back.
Although the saying represented the new me, I wanted to put it where I am vulnerable and have the most difficulty seeing from my own perspective. Sometimes, it is easier to show someone else than to see the tattoo myself. Others point out flaws in this space before I can easily notice.
After high school, I began smoking tobacco and using alcohol and other substances on and off with regularity as I tried to cope with the accelerating doom untreated PTSD had for me. I made friends with many people who use drugs. As my use progressed and I found myself in positions hurting others, I struggled with questions of whether I was struggling with addiction or what my issue was.
Eventually, I reached some kind of thing I called “sobriety” for a while, and I cited it often as I began my initial nomadism. I would have my fair share of drinks or cannabis here or there, but mostly kept clear of problem uses. I kept smoking tobacco, and I kept trying to quit.
After the first nomadism ended, I felt I was going so insane, I wondered if I had smoked too much of some bad kind of cannabis and had a psychotic break. I seriously questioned it so much, I sometimes still have to remind myself how illogical the idea is against all of the evidence I have. I just ended up drinking more and using more cannabis in the retraumatization than I ever worried about having caused my fall.
However, as soon as I began to fall off the road, I quit smoking after reading Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking, probably with the help of all that substance use counseling school I did.
Whatever you do, don’t try not to think about smoking. This is a tactic used by people who are quitting using willpower. They try not to think about smoking, but of course this makes them think about it even more. Soon they are obsessed and can’t get the cigarette out of their mind. You will think about smoking–but it’s what you are thinking that is important. Whenever you think about smoking, think how wonderful it is that you have broken free.
Allen Carr, Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking
As I have begun re-entering nomadism, I have begun looking at “sobriety” again. The truth is I no longer really believe in the ideas central to “sobriety” and find little value in it. However, there is something to intentionality with the use of substances that attracts me. I enjoy long periods of total abstinence just as much as I enjoy a rowdy night out.
Although the past is easy to view, the unknown that I must stretch to view… the behind me… the future… a beautiful land of potentialities.
Rule 36: Experience is not your self
For years of hearing about waterboarding, I never really knew why I dissociated at the description of it so hard I could not even process anything about it. I seemed to be overwhelmed with a weird kind of empathy my entire body wanted to refuse me even recalling the idea of.
When I finally told myself the story of being held under a sink and having my mouth washed out with for saying a cuss word by the same babysitter of other stories, things started making a lot more sense. I am more sensitive to but feel a deep understanding of my body’s responses.
Not only did my body’s revulsion to the discussion of anything related start to make sense, so did how my body has often stored much of my trauma. While learning to be stoic through the results of my trauma, my teeth often crumbled. Most of my teeth are covered in crowns, with their roots hollowed out and filled in via root canal.
I have struggled to speak of my teeth and often find it awkward when people compliment me on how straight and good looking my fake fronts are, even as they lose their initial shine. I have only recently come to terms with how much I have had to dissociate just to have the amount of dental work that I do have, which is a privileged amount.
It seems to make more sense given the history of a kind of oral abuse.
People say about trauma that the body “keeps score,” making you more vulnerable to illness. But in fact, your brain keeps the score. Your body is the scorecard.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Most of my earliest happy memories are packing up a station wagon and driving to South Dakota to visit, mostly from Wisconsin. I would sit in the back seat and write poems about my blue teddy bear and the odd ideas that come to a child. I dreamed about the people who made an entire life traveling.
We did not go camping often, but there were a few occasions when I was growing up. In particular in my mind, we enjoyed doing mini-golf. Eventually my dad would get into actual golf for a while, but it has not ever really been my thing. Nonetheless, a time that we were out at some Yogi Bear themed campground in Wisconsin stands out. We were camping with some church themed group, and we went mini-golfing. At some point, I decided to hit the ball as if I was playing real golf, sending it flying. I continue to think it was more hilarious than some part of my brain tells me other people did at the time.
I started high school in a state of mental anguish and despair. It was a relief to move to a new, larger city in my freshman year. I was able to jump into Advanced English classes, start a class in Accounting, and meet new people. It was a new world, and I really enjoyed it.
As the time approached to move to San Diego, my third high school, a day occurred where I was riding my bike home from school. I always rode my bike, so it was normal. I had been learning how to drive a blue Geo Metro that had been passed down to me, but moving from Wisconsin to San Diego, I left the car to my sister.
As I rode across a busy intersection on my way home from school, a large pickup truck suddenly stepped hard on his gas. I felt the bumper strike me and felt my bike begin to pull under the truck. I heard the breaks slam.
I stood up, ripped my bike from under the truck, stripping the front license plate and sending it flying into the intersection in the process.
The man followed me home for multiple miles, stopping me 3 times offering to take me to the hospital. The last thing he did is run. He was panicked.
When I got home, nobody was there. I waited for hours. Only to learn that my sister had been driving the Geo Metro that morning and crashed into a parked car, sending her to the hospital. She did not remember what happened and was ultimately told she fainted or may have had some kind of seizure to watch for.
We both lived, but the memory stuck to me.
My parents and I drove out to San Diego in our van in our move. I spent time in the back staring out the window, thinking. I began to dream about living out of a vehicle and traveling nomadically full time.
My mom later told me that she thought at least I probably would not be able to do that easily. She ultimately embraced when I actually did it, and I love her for it. I love her for reminding me that this was a deep dream of mine.
Rule 37: Become what you need
Starting in my second high school in a larger (to me) city in Wisconsin, everyone seemed happy to welcome me to try my chops in the advanced classes, and I felt I rose to the occasion with strong grades to match.
As I started my third high school in San Diego, I felt multiple teachers take an antagonistic angle at me, demanding I reach specific to them demands that they also refused to explain. I ended up pushed down to the less advanced classes, which I found absurdly boring and failed out of simply refusing to do the work in protest. It spread to the point of failing Spanish, ultimately because I refused to deal kindly with authoritarian teachers in that moment and would literally sleep in their classes in defiance, beyond their desperate attempts to force me to be at least awake.
To me, this is the same energy I took to graduating summa cum laude in my bachelor’s.
Into my early 20s, I was hiding my PTSD behind relationships, romantic and platonic, even as I crumbled inside, feeling ever more and more alone. As I finally hit my crashing point, close friends saw and were sometimes quite resilient in their requests to know what happened despite my strong defiance.
I finally became the kind of person who went to therapy.
I went to therapy every week for a long while. Sometimes more. Much of the work we did helped and provided me tools to recognize the somatic and psychic roots of some of my traumas. I learned the foundations of what I would now call owning and retelling my stories.
Eventually, my therapist told me I did not fit the diagnosis of PTSD any more and it was time to become a person who exercised and matured the tools I had learned in therapy in the real world and with my ordinary support system.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
As my PTSD relapsed and raged at the end of my initial nomadism, I found myself thinking about going to therapy just to get my story together. A deep kind of depersonalization overwhelmed me, and I felt incapable of putting any kind of story together again. I had no idea who I was any more.
This post is a kind of writing out the narrative my mind seemed to have been physically screaming at me for lacking. This is where I become what I needed. I have gotten my story into some kind of relatively coherent narrative. This is my story.
The main reason I got an apartment in Las Vegas to end my nomadism was to seek out therapy. As COVID set in and I decided I would rather wait than do Skype Therapy, I ended up never getting therapy in Las Vegas. I encourage those who can do therapy online to try it, but it does not work for me. I cannot speak of things I want to speak to a therapist about comfortably through technology I do not trust. I need a privacy the internet is contradictory to in my view.
Finishing a psychology degree is a rotten alternative to therapy. Reading philosophy is a lousy alternative to therapy. Life is complicated and messy.
Rule 38: Life is not enough
Somehow stumbled my way home, stood inside the doorway
Stavesacre, Rivers Underneath
Staring blind through rooms I knew were missing more than the paintings on the walls
It’s hard to call this home, I’m more than just alone
Have I been passed by and left behind again
When I first entered therapy, having watched what I considered my best friend in my tween years attempting suicide seemed like the most important topic. I spent years talking about it. It seems small now. I sat with the friend after and argued with them about how much their life is worth continuing. I realize now the latter was beautiful, but honestly, I needed years of therapy to break through how awful the witnessing was. After all that, the whole thing seems small. I have resolved the narrative so well that it is just a thing to say in passing. As is all I have really done here in this construction.
Yet suicidality is it. In finishing my degree in psychology, I focused a lot on gender/sexuality, addiction, and suicidality. Because these things are all major topics in my life. Suicidality has shown up more than the witnessing an attempted suicide.
As my first nomadism ended, I was in Portland for Pride. I started to walk out on a bridge with some idea of jumping off and drowning myself. I realized it and turned around. A woman was there and said to me something like, “You can go across the bridge if you want, y’know.” I said something about I know and continued on away from the bridge, knowing fully that I was walking away from suicide. It was far from the first or the last time.
I have spent hours begging any god who would listen to me to take my life and let me die. When I get stressed out, I tend to want to declare how much I want to die or kill myself or just cease existence. I have found it a remarkably stress relieving kind of self-harm. A kind of chronic suicidality that seems ever more impossible to act on. A kind of personal prison. I often say I believe in hell: it is right here–we are living in it.
Fighting suicide never worked for me. It is always there, always in my head. It was never just about watching my friend attempt it. It is a thought, nearly an ideology that I have a complex relationship with. Maybe that is the inevitable outcome of stubborn compassion with a chronic suicidality that seems to transcend every self I attempt to create. It is always there. Rather than ever pounding me with despair any more, it just makes me want more than life. The spark of a dream that transcends whatever temporal hell this reality might stick me in.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family, Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose D.I.Y and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life.
Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting
I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons.
Sometimes the idea of a shallow sort of self suicide seems to explain the kind of destruction of failed, incoherent, transient selves that I construct to get me through times. It made sense for the destruction of self that I embarked on to set off on nomadism the first time. It makes sense now for the destruction of the shallow, transient self I constructed to get me through finishing a degree and which can now no longer uphold even finishing more classes. I say self suicide to distinguish from the physical sort, instead intending a sort of dissolution of a concept of self.
If all I have is the life constructed to me by others, I think I would rather physically die. If all I had was legibility in the minds of others, I think I would rather physically die.
Life alone, in all its beautiful splendor, will never be enough for me. I will always want more. More life than life itself has to offer. A truth connected deeper to the grand fabric of destiny and reality that unites us all through our grandest diversities than my own life itself could ever be enough to give me.
Final Word
Over the course of this post, I have talked around kinds of “self”. One has been a kind of Buddhist non-self with IFS leading language focusing on compassion, connectedness, curiosity, and so on. Another has been a kind of psycho-social construction that many take for granted but can be lost and created, grown and restricted. I tend to think in a space in which the separation between these ideas is far less clear than some models like IFS that I cite tend to hit for me. Often, IFS’s 8 C’s are the ideal elements the Rogerian therapist would identify as unconditional love (or “positive regard” but they do Rogers a significant disservice not continuing to discuss his use of “love”). Carl Rogers took a more dynamic view of the self that is often in flux and can be broken down and reorganized, which aligns with much of what I have discussed of forming and losing senses of self. Taking a more queer angle, I tend to see a lot of the self as constructed on the social field, through a kind of difficult, reciprocal performativity. In ways suggestive of all these, I have explored a kind of new self construction through this post.
I am a nomad. What is a nomad? Well. Perhaps that is not so simple. Perhaps what makes a nomad is difficult. Is it a story? Perhaps every nomad, in the sense that I use the word, is more than a story. More than a life. An entire universe.
I don’t think it even matters what makes my nomad different from anyone else. Maybe everyone is a nomad in their own way and this is just my assertion of self using nomadism because my ascetic way has led me to the word. Or maybe I really am unique in some way about being a nomad. Who cares?
I finished the last rule talking entirely about suicide and why life is not enough for me. I named this post “Life is Not Enough” after the rule that I reflected on suicidality through. I proclaimed at the abstract that this would be violent to read, that it was even more violent to write. This violence, as if acting out a kind of destruction, is met with the construction that I have engaged in throughout this post. This destruction cannot exist without the construction, and the construction could never be complete without this ultimate destruction. A suicide of the self is exactly part of my nomadism, and it always has been. Hello, Schopenhauer and you’re will to live.
This post is so much more. If you feel heavy about the last rule ending on something so difficult, I ask you to think again about happier prior rules. They’re just as significant. Go read a couple again. I have. I do every time I re-read this to edit it. I bounce around. These rules do not have to be read in order. Go read it all again, out of order. You’ll understand me better for it, if that is what you want.
All of this self-construction. Defining myself as a nomad, whatever that is. There are ascetic elements to it. There are elements of everything a normal person would expect, being I just travel. There are elements of empiricism and curiosity. Courage and connectedness. There is a monism to my nomadism. My nomadism sustains much of my grief–grief itself being one of my highest values. Whatever a nomad is to me, that is me. It is kind of illegible. It is me.