A Dream Deferred
The Story of How The Coronavirus Response in 2020 Derailed My Dream and Why that Might Have Been a Good Thing
The Story of How The Coronavirus Response in 2020 Derailed My Dream and Why that Might Have Been a Good Thing
Have you ever killed a dream? Something you worked hard for, something that felt like it was meant to be but then … something happened. Something that led you to the difficult decision: I can’t do this. I really, really want to, but donkey balls, I can’t!
It sucks.
I think poet Langston Hughes understood some of the various confusing emotions of deferring a dream.
Here I am, two weeks from the end of 2021 and about 18 months from when I put my dream on hold, trying to make sense of it, asking myself, not for the first time, “Did I really make the right decision?”
What would my life be today if I’d followed my dream? I’ll just have to keep wondering because, much as I’d love to have some sort of Parallel Universe Traveling Machine, I’ve lost Doc Brown’s phone number.
However, I’ve just woken from one of those nights where I go to bed super early and wake up in the wee hours and, at last, it all makes sense. As is my wont, I was just out ahead of my skis. The dream merely needed time to grow, to become more clear, more grounded. In this case, it’s very possible the dream deferred is still meant to be. Perhaps you’ll agree with me if you stick with me until the end.
But enough foreplay, the point of this piece is to share what my dream was and then maybe you can help me answer the question: Is this still a dream worth pursuing?
The Death of My Childhood Dream
To reveal my dream, I’d like to share an earlier dream that I pursued but didn’t fulfill. Or did I? I’ll let you be the judge.
As a kid growing up in the 1980s in a suburb of Tacoma, Washington, I always loved reading my local daily newspaper. In sixth grade, when we were assigned to create a business, I created a newspaper and in my sixth-grade yearbook, my answer for what I wanted to be when I grew up was “A sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times.”
I pursued that goal by enrolling at the University of Southern California in fall 1991, one of the top journalism schools in the nation, and I graduated with honors in 1995 with degrees in print journalism and political science. During college, I began working for the Los Angeles Daily News sports department and I parlayed that opportunity into a full-time job as a staff writer immediately upon graduation.
I was on my way toward fulfilling that sixth-grade dream.
However, something deeper was taking place within me. Before I even went to college, I saw movies such as Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July and had some hippie teachers in high school, which caused me to question the America-as-a-force-for-good narrative that was presented by nightly news anchors such as Tom Brokaw. And in my college years, I was introduced to critiques of the U.S. empire by people such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and I discovered the 100-percent listener-sponsored KPFK radio station which had shows like Democracy Now!
In short, I was losing my faith in the United States and this was impacting my desire to pursue my childhood dream.
Looking back on it, I wonder: Did I take to heart too much of the critique of America? I know I felt a sense of guilt for being the citizen of a country that in the 20th century was, through its military and outfits like the Central Intelligence Agency, spreading death and destruction around the globe from places like Nicaragua to Iraq.
Going back further in history, I felt deep sorrow over two of the foundational facts of America. First, for what my European ancestors had done to the native inhabitants of the continent, rapidly wiping away diverse cultures, mostly through disease, but also through warfare and broken treaties. These were cultures that had ancient traditions that connected them deeply to the environment. And second, there was the sorrow over the many dark-skinned inhabitants stolen from Africa, enslaved to have their life energies poured into the construction of a modern-day Babylon.
Still, was this all mine to own? Was I responsible?
I remember being home for winter break my senior year of college and when I presented all I was learning to my parents, my father gave me some wise advice, “Be careful not to take the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
It took me at least a decade for those words to resonate.
In the meantime, my growing cynicism was extending into the world of sports which I had a press box seat for as a budding sportswriter. There, I saw just how much money was corrupting not only the professional ranks but the colleges and how this was even dripping down into the world of children’s sports.
I remember being at a tournament for two exceptionally strong 9-and-10-year-old girls’ softball teams and watching as some parents argued for 30 minutes over some obscure rule while their daughters increasingly shuffled their feet in the field, merely wanting to play the fucking game already. And sometimes parents like that would call me at the newspaper to debate how the statistics we had for their child were not as high as they should be!
Why were the parents doing this? It seemed to me, it was more about winning, hoping their child could be one of the rare ones who made a lucrative career out of sports, than it was recognizing that for the vast majority of kids playing youth sports, the best lessons they can learn are how to enjoy the spirit of friendly competition and to be a good teammate while doing one’s best. In short, the parents were draining the spirit out of sports for their kids and it was heartbreaking to be an accomplice to this by writing articles that took this crappy world seriously.
Experiencing all of this, I had to find ways to cope. So I took a page from the hippies, who I admired despite it not being cool to do so in my generation. I started to grow my hair longer, listened to a lot of rock music, and began to smoke a lot of pot.
However, I didn’t stop at pot but progressed to the harder stuff and by the mid-1990s, I had begun to regularly soothe the sorrow of my cynicism with frequent use of cocaine and heroin. By late 1997, I was a full-on addict and it was only through the grace of God that I survived those years, ending my existence in Los Angeles and moving back in with my parents at the age of 25 in the fall of 1998, not sure what I was going to do with my life.
My childhood dream, which I just about obtained, was dead.
Why I Left Journalism and Then America
Then again, the only aspect of the dream I didn’t fulfill was the exact newspaper I worked at. And, well, I worked with people who worked at the LA Times and while their pay may have been a bit better and their resumes a bit shinier, they were doing the same job I was. So yeah, in retrospect, I’m going to say I fulfilled that dream and found out it wasn’t all that fulfilling for me.
Thus, back to the drawing board to rainy western Washington to re-establish trust with my parents and figure my shit out.
In 1999, I landed what my dad thought was a good job, working in data entry through a temp agency for a prestigious investment company in downtown Tacoma. It was, for the most part, boring. But it allowed me enough downtime to surf the burgeoning Internet, reading sites about spiritual topics, deep politics and music.
On weekends, I’d go to clubs in Seattle to take in a healthier addiction: live music, especially improvisational bands. That fall, with some friends from college out to visit me to take in three concerts from the band Phish, that temp job offered me a full-time position under the condition that I’d stop surfing the Internet on company time.
I passed.
And then hit the road for a week of live music with my buddy Richard!
Which is how I ended up back in the world of journalism, this time for a local alternative weekly called the Tacoma Reporter. I really enjoyed that job and I helped that newspaper win some national awards.
Unfortunately, in fall 2000, I left the field for good for a few reasons. One has to do with how the publisher treated the editorial staff, but the other, bigger reason was that covering politics, even at the local level, was just making me feel cynical about the integrity of Americans and it was starting to send me into depression again. In short, I just didn’t have the heart or strength to keep at the job.
In addition, the newspaper industry was looking more and more like it had a bleak future and so I recalled what some older reporters had told me at the Los Angeles Daily News, “This business is dying so unless it’s in your blood to stick with it, it’s better to look for other work.”
Throughout those years, I was increasingly despondent about where I saw America going. Most people I talked to in those days thought I was crazy when I suggested that I felt America might become more and more like a Third World country with a massive division between the classes. But this was both what some of the people I paid attention to were saying and, maybe more importantly, what I was experiencing.
After all, I was paid a measly $10/hour working at the LA Daily News as a beginning staff writer, which was barely enough to afford my cost of living, certainly not enough to save up for the American Dream. And the pay at the Tacoma Reporter was even worse. I couldn’t afford to move out of my parents’ house, not unless I wanted to completely curtail my love of attending live music and I wasn’t willing to give that up. It was sustaining me.
When 9/11 happened and the War on Terror era began, I started to remember how in my senior year of college, I’d lived in a house with several international students and that experience had planted the seed in me that someday I’d like to live overseas.
Thus, in January 2002 when my next-door neighbor, a Japanese woman who had grown up in Japan but moved to the US in her 20s, introduced me to her niece, a gal from Japan, well, I fell in love with this “girl next door from halfway around the world.” I proposed to her in the fall of 2003 and by the summer of 2004, I decided to move here to Japan to start a new life with her, leaving both journalism and my crazy country behind.
Which brings us to 2019 and the intuitions that led to my dream.
My Intuitions
I’ve always relied on intuition to guide me. Let me tell you about two times where I did this.
Back in summer 2003 when that Japanese gal was telling me how some in her family had told her our relationship couldn’t work out, I’d said simply, “Why not?”
Because by then I knew. I knew I was going to live in Japan with her. Whether or not our relationship would work out, I didn’t know, but I knew we were going to at least try. Why did I know? Intuitions are hard to explain; they are like knowing the end of a story you’ve barely begun.
All I know is I could feel myself drifting away from America and it felt right. Specifically, I remember going to a Phish show in summer 2003 just after my girlfriend had visited me, and during the concert, instead of dancing and being fully in the music and with the crowd like I had been at previous shows, I found myself pondering Japanese vocabulary in my head and looking forward to life away from the U.S.
Later that fall, I enrolled with the Japan Exchange Teaching (JET) Programme to become an English teacher in the public schools here and, in winter 2003–4, I was accepted to teach in the area where my girlfriend lived.
One thing about intuitions is they can be hard to explain; they are like knowing the end of a story you’ve barely even begun.
Flash forward several years to 2011: While many of my friends who had said they planned to stay in Japan for life were deciding to move back home to the US after the shock that was the Great Tohoku Earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster, my intuition was that Japan was, and would continue to be, a better place to raise kids than the US, so we decided to buy a house.
In December, I took one step into the very first house we would look at and immediately knew we were going to live here. The realtor need not have spoken another word to me. What he said didn’t matter; nor did it matter when the realtor called a few weeks later to express concern that the bank might not approve the loan.
“Yes, they will,” I told my wife.
Sometimes my intuition is just like that. It’s not something I can explain rationally; it just is. And when it’s strong, it’s never been wrong.
So in late summer 2019, when I started to have some powerful intuitions about 2020 being a huge, historic year for the United States and why it was time for me to give up my 15 year English teaching job in the public schools, I didn’t doubt. And my wife didn’t even bother to raise objections, even though she had some. She knew me well enough to know that I was going to go ahead with the plan.
Turns out, though, this time the intuition was only half right.
My Dream
I was going to write a killer book.
No, not a book about killers but a book that was going to fly off the shelves. I really did — and still do — believe in the concept for this book.
Its tentative title was: “2020 Vision: An Expat Looks Back, Is Here Now, and Gazes Forward at His American Homeland.”
The book is a travelogue where I take a five-week cross-country trip, interacting as much as possible with as many different kinds of people as possible, seeking to answer a question: “Can Americans still love each other despite their differences?”
You see, even though I’ve lived outside of the US since 2004, I’ve spent a lot of time on social media, especially Facebook. Perhaps too much time. Thus, I’d experienced how, in the past several years, there had been increasing vitriol between people and how much more quickly people were to unfriend long-time friends over political differences. I’d noticed the change starting maybe in 2014 or so, but it really began to go into hyperdrive in 2016 during that year’s presidential race.
I’m no saint, I got caught up in it, too. But the purpose of this essay isn’t to beat you over the head with my politics. That’s the last thing I want to do. So now, let’s turn to a key question:
Why Me?
At one point in fall 2019, I earnestly and self-mockingly said to my Japanese wife about the project, “American journalism is in trouble. It needs me!”
My wife replied, “Who do you think you are?”
Well, I think I’m a damn good writer and journalist who hasn’t been able to practice the latter in years but wants to get back into the game.
You see, at USC, not only did I graduate with honors, I was told by several of my award-winning journalists/professors that I had great talent and potential. I believed them and still do.
However, life has a funny way of making other plans for us; or maybe I was making this plan all along. I think it’s a bit of both.
Regardless, as I’ve already told you, I left the business in fall 2000. However, I never stopped following the industry. I also kept up — too much, I think — with American politics, though I greatly reduced my news junkie habit when I came to Japan in summer 2004 because I realized too much paying attention to buffoons like George W. Bush was not so good for me.
Instead, I started reading and listening more to authors such as James Howard Kunstler and John Michael Greer, who spoke about how America was beginning a long decline, just as previous empires had, and for a bigger picture, writers like Charles Eisenstein who questioned the story of Progress and offered glimpses into what he called “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.”
So all of this led to my intuitions of late summer 2019: America was going to have a huge, historic year in 2020 and, well, the 2020s were going to be a “make it or break it decade” for the country, much as the 1980s were for the USSR. Would America survive?
What an opportunity! A journalist is said to be a “writer of the first draft of history.” Thus, to be witness to the collapse the first truly global empire, to be a citizen of that empire but one who has spent half of his adult life observing it from the outside with a more bird’s eye view, well, this gives me a reasonably unique perspective on the American story. When I meet people on infrequent visits to the U.S., they often listen to observations I make about the country that I think aren’t all that profound and say, “Hmm, never thought of it that way.”
Long story short, I felt like the book was going to be a success and I was excited to write it.
The Plan: Insane? Yes! Freakin’ Awesome: You Betcha!
Overview
I would arrive in April 2020, spend a week or two gathering supplies and basing my camp at my parents’ place in Western Washington. I’d take a short road trip to California to spend a week with a dear friend who I’d made online a decade earlier and to go to the first of several live concerts, this one in the Bay Area, before heading back to Washington and getting ready for the main event.
I would then set off on a five-week tour of the US, mostly via train. I’d follow my intuition and synchronicities to guide my travels to fascinating people who would pepper the pages of my book. In addition, when I could, I’d stay with friends on the road — some whom I’d met in person but many who I’d only developed relationships with online. And of course, those experiences would also enter the book.
Now, I was also drawing on an inspiration, a book I read during that intense late summer of 2019, John Steinback’s Travels With Charley. In that one, Steinbeck, who had been living abroad for a while, set out on a cross-country journey by car with his dog Charley in the summer of 1960, also a historic presidential election year, a key turning point in American history, the race between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
There’s much more I could say about that book and its influence on my plan but I will save it for the book. For now, let’s get into the details of my journey.
Part I: One Rule, No Driving By Myself
That’s right, I would have to rely on public transportation or rides from others, including Uber or taxis. Why?
First, I don’t like driving or being in a car. I’ve been biking, no matter the weather, for 17 years now and can count the number of times I’ve even been in a car on my hand in the past year.
But second and more importantly, there are three subversive ideas behind this trip and book:
I wanted to show Americans that a person could get all over their country without driving to help them feel less car-dependent.
I wanted to meet people and hear their stories, so I could have a tapestry of American life for my book
I wanted to do this all as cheaply as possible. You see, I believe that one of the leading causes of the death of America is because of the worship of the dollar. U.S. life is centered around money. Everything costs something. People constantly talk and think about money. Yes, I am aware I am using absolutes and there are exceptions. But it’s been an increasing understanding on each visit home that money has taken such a grip on American culture that the only way forward is to live in a way that this grip begins to loosen up.
Now, I don’t know how well I could have succeeded at #3. But one thing I’ve done over the years is build a rather widespread and diverse group of good friends online and I was going to rely on them to give me shelter at several of my stops and maybe a potato chip or two. In return, I’d bring my fun-loving personality and tales from the road. A good deal, eh?
And speaking of the road — or in this case, mostly the rails using Amtrak’s 45-day pass — let’s get to the itinerary!
Part II: Itinerary
Leave date: Late April/Early May
Transportation: Amtrak train (unless stated otherwise)
Leg I
Start: Tacoma, Washington
Destination: The Bay Area
Plan: Meet some friends (some old, some I’ve only known online) and take in the sites of my favorite U.S. city, San Francisco.
Leg II
Start: Bay Area
Destination: Denver, Colorado
Plan: Cruise across the wastelands of central Nevada — writing about aliens and Burning Man and other crazy, fringe shit from the train — into Utah, where I would visit the Great Salt Lake and test if the human body really does float better in salty inland lakes, then Colorado, where I’d stop to see two concerts of a long-time favorite band, the Disco Biscuits, and then do some camping and hiking there, hoping to meet (and make) some new friends.
Leg III
Start: Denver, CO
Destination: St. Louis, MO
Plan: Over the Great Plains to the St. Louis area for a Cardinals baseball game with one of my dearest college pals.
Leg IV
Start: St. Louis, MO
Destination: New Orleans, LA
Transportation: Not sure, but likely a bus or donkey (Believe it or not, there is no direct Amtrak route from St. Louis to New Orleans. Those two cities share a historical connection as Mississippi River cities, so this seems wrong. A friend tells me this is because I was supposed to take a raft, a la Huck and Jim.)
Plan: Possible detour into Arkansas to visit an online friend, then to another friend on the Gulf Coast who was going to act as host and guide to New Orleans, tops on my most-want-to-visit cities in the U.S. because it is, along with San Francisco, one of the two Soul cities of America.
Leg V
Start: New Orleans, LA
Destination: Tucson, AZ
Transportation: On the train again! Cue Willie Nelson…
Plan: Head across Texas to meet another online-only friend and into Arizona, where a friend from Japan now lives.
Leg VI
Start: Tucson, AZ
Destination: Las Vegas, NV
Transportation: Bus or friend’s car
Plan: Hopefully travel by night through the hot desert to Las Vegas for a weekend of debauchery with my friend and a few other friends I met in Japan, one a crazy Japanese bloke who would fly in from Japan.
Leg VII
Start: Las Vegas, NV
Destination: Los Angeles, CA
Plan: Take the train with my Japanese pal to Los Angeles where I went to college and where he spent some time in a gang of all things. We’d probably rent a car (since this is LA!), we’d visit old haunts, I’d see old friends (not sure he wants to see his!) and we’d be sure to try out a weed bar/restaurant in West Hollywood I’d read about.
Leg VIII
Start: Los Angeles, CA
Destination: Tacoma, WA (home)
Plan: Tired as rats after a turpentine travesty, my friend flies back to Japan, and I hop on the train, likely sleeping much of the way, but hopefully staying awake enough to enjoy the scenery as I’d planned to take the slightly misnamed Coast Starlight Train (it only stays near the coast through Santa Barbara). After all, I’m a West Coaster by heart and have long agreed with that LA rock n roll icon, Jim Morrison, who sang that the west is the best.
And, at last, after all that I’d be home where I’d take a week or so to recoup and then begin to put the book together.
“Sounds really ambitious, maaaaan,” my good friend, a classic Washingtonian hippie, told me via a direct message when I shared the above with him in late fall 2019.
Yeah, it was. In hindsight, perhaps too ambitious. Still, nothing has ever stopped me from shooting for the stars.
Part III: Philosophy of the Book (It’s About Time, Maaaaan!)
In my experience, time is not a flat circle, but rather a spiraling stairway, or … can I just say time is a trip and so what better theme for a trip than time?
As the book’s subtitle — An Expat Looks Back, Is Here Now, and Gazes Forward Into the Future of His American Homeland — suggests, I’d be looking at all three aspects of Time as we experience it: the past, the present and the future.
The Past: Because I’ve been living outside the States since 2004, my 2020 feelings of what the States are like are sometimes shaded by life in the early 2000s (and before), so this filter would have made it clear how much things have changed and I’d use it to reflect on those changes.
The Present: I’m a person with a few core spiritual beliefs, and one of those is the idea of being Present. Eckhard Tolle has popularized this in recent years, but I first came across the concept in the works of Alan Watts and in an iconic 1970s book, Be Here Now, by psychologist-turned-psychedelic-Eastern-mystic Richard Alpert/Ram Dass. Thus, as I’ve stated already, for this trip, I’d let intuition and synchronicity guide my adventures and observations, knowing they’d lead me to some great stories and to meet some fascinating Americans.
The Future: I’ve long been interested in pondering the future and have read and listened to a variety of futurists discuss where things are heading. So, I’d “gaze forward” at potential paths I see America or, rather, the many Americas, possibly going down.
Even writing those three paragraphs excites me, reminds me how good this book would have been, a book I’d work hard on to write. I’m sure I would have been proud of it when it was completed and published and it would have been a welcome addition to my life’s work as a writer and I believe to the world’s understanding of where America is and was in 2020.
Yet still, that dream had to die … at least its 2020 version (or is that vision?).
And man, killing it was hard.
The Death of the Dream (aka COVID-19 Comes To Japan)
In the wee hours on the last Friday of February 2020, the dream began to die.
That’s when I learned that my classes for the rest of the year were most likely going to be canceled.
You probably remember that February. More and more news was trickling out of China about this new virus. On my end, I was extremely busy not only with my normal work but with a new podcast I was producing twice a week and with my preparations for my trip. I wasn’t too worried about some new virus.
Thus, on the third weekend of February, I told a Japanese co-worker who had a trip planned to Australia in mid-March that she needn’t worry.
In retrospect, I was talking to myself, trying to convince myself my trip would happen and all the effort I’d put into getting ready for it was going to pay off.
Thus, on that last Friday of February when my classes were suddenly canceled for the year as the Japanese government scrambled to — what many suspected — save the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, I began to grow concerned but still I thought I’d be going.
The month of March certainly did come in like a lion but in 2020 it did not leave like a lamb. In early March, my friends all started to discuss imaginary bets about whether I’d go. I told them to knock it off. Until about mid-month, I held on to the hope that I could still follow the plan.
But then the shit hit the fan in the States. When I saw that the NBA was canceling its season I knew they were taking this thing very seriously. That weekend, I talked to my parents and they told me that the retirement community they lived in wouldn’t allow visitors for the time being. Thus, I had nowhere to stay and they advised me to postpone the trip.
Reluctantly, I moved the ticket back three months, to Monday, July 6th. The day I wrote the first draft of this essay.
I consoled myself that I loved spring in Japan. Plus, for the first time since I was 25 in 1998, I wouldn’t be working a full-time job. This meant I would have time to not only enjoy the spring weather, I would have a long block of time off to do some personal development, follow the news of the weird world and take my daily bicycle adventures whenever I wanted to. In addition, I could dedicate more effort to my twice-weekly podcast, where I could share my thoughts about the news of the day and my experiences.
All that time, I thought, “Sure, there’ll be a break in the action in the summer with the warmer weather. July and August will be fine.”
We all know that didn’t turn out to be the case. Not only didn’t COVID-19 hibernate, it increased its reach. It certainly was never any two weeks to flatten the curve. And the thing is, much as I was trying to convince myself that things would calm down enough for me to take my trip, I think I knew they wouldn’t. Why?
Well, first, every few years I’ve returned to the U.S. since 2004, I’ve seen a country that is increasingly unhealthy. The most obvious sign of this is the rise in obesity, but I also notice it in the way family and friends talk more and more about various health issues and the pharmaceutical drugs they were using to combat them. Last, I notice it in the physical structures of the land; more and more buildings look dilapidated and many roads seem to have more potholes. In short, America is an ailing country.
In addition, it’s a country where many people lack health care and for those that do have coverage, the quality of that coverage is very dependent on one’s economic status. Thus a virus, which has no notion of class, is going to wreak havoc on such a country.
So yes, I’m sure I was in denial in pursuit of my dream, a very American thing to do if you ask me. Regardless, I forgive myself.
Forgiving the Japanese government has been a bit harder.
How the Japanese Government Made My Decision Easier But Made Me Mad (For a While)
In early April, the Japanese government made a rule: If you are not Japanese, if you leave the country, you can not come back in. They were the only G7 nation that had such a rule.
(Please note: If you were Japanese, then you were allowed to come back in.)
I was very angry about this at times, especially in mid-June, as my arbitrary deadline to decide — June 22 — approached. It got so bad that I began to feel extreme rage at every Japanese person I saw. This is not like me; I am a people person and have a lot of love and respect for the Japanese. But there it was.
To properly understand the why of the decision, it’s important to understand that, in general, Japanese people are trained to see the world as Japanese and everyone else.
My father’s friend who lived here and loved it for several years told me in summer 2004, “You can never become fully Japanese. That’s why I left.”
I never wanted to become fully Japanese. That said, I feel like I’ve put enough into this country to be able to travel the same as a Japanese person. I married a Japanese native, have given almost two decades of my life teaching English to Japanese people, bought a house, pay taxes and am raising two kids who are Japanese nationals.
Despite that all, the Japanese government, in essence, said: Sorry, Bryan, you can go to the U.S. to pursue your dream, but you can not come back.
It felt less like “sorry” and more like “fuck you.”
By the end of June, though, I realized that if I held onto my bitterness over the government’s decision, it was only going to make my day-to-day life, and the lives of those around me, worse. So while I still think their policy was a bad one, I decided that I needed to let go of my resentment.
Thus, as I finished the first draft of this essay on the day I would have been flying to the U.S. in early July 2020, I felt good that I was still here. Yeah, the whole experience was hard, but I learned a lot. Being out of work all that time gave me more time to process my feelings. It made me reflect that our modern culture too quickly tries to soothe our pain with various distractions so that we can remain obedient worker bees, slaves to the System. It doesn’t let us sit with the things that hurt us long enough for us to process and learn from them.
By the end of 2020, I realized that that historic year was one where my travels were inward bound rather than outward bound. I had to focus on dealing with remaining issues of addiction (which I wrote about here) and I also began to dive deeply into topics that have long interested me: notably that ancient study of the cycles of time and how they impact the human experience, astrology. I began to view 2020 as an opportunity to really focus on my writing while being somewhere safe (for now?), with my family, as I witnessed that historic year unfold.
It wasn’t easy, that’s for sure. But I have a feeling I had it a lot easier than many others did. I have a feeling most of us won’t look back to 2020 and think, “Yeah, I’d like to re-live that year again!”
Still, looking back on it from the end of 2021, I feel gratitude toward 2020 for all it put me through. I learned a lot. I learned that sometimes our intuitions about when something will happen aren’t exact, despite a pretty darn good track record. But that doesn’t mean the intuition was wrong. Perhaps it was simply premature.
Conclusion
And that’s the tale. I know it was a long one and I appreciate you reading it. But I think since you did, you can recognize how much I put into this dream.
And despite being at peace not going in 2020, I’ll likely always have a part of me that feels I should have gone. A part that asks if I should have thrown caution to the wind and entered the fray, headed to my native Washington state, gone to Capitol Hill in Seattle to see for myself what was happening there and then write and podcast about it.
Instead, though, I witnessed those events through the eyes of others. Over the summer of 2020, I followed one such independent reporter named Omari Salisbury. He did a great job of covering CHOP. I’ve lost track of him since but may have to check back in, see what he’s focused on now.
I bring this up because one of the increasing understandings I have about where we seem to be headed is that we really are going to be in a more collaborative world. This means if I want to write a scathing article about Colin Powell after getting motivated by a video by a favorite YouTuber, maybe it’s a better use of my time to promote his video with a brief comment and write something else?
It means a lot more than that, but hey, since this article is all about my dream, I figured I’d end with a dream for a better world, a world where rather than being always in competition with each other just so we can survive, we support each other so we can all thrive.
And that feels great: A guy can kill a big dream, but that doesn’t mean he has to stop dreaming. And maybe, just maybe, the next thing I dream up will be the one that I fulfill. Who’s to say?
Before I let you go, I’d like to ask you: What do you think, is this dream of mine still something I should bring to fruition? I feel like it can be done and I feel like I still want to do it in a presidential election year. That will keep it connected to the Steinbeck book but also it will tie into my roots as a political science major. Plus, since the book is about whether Americans can still love each other despite their differences, really, whether the American experiment should or will continue, I think going in a year when the country is more divided than ever is the most appropriate plan.
But what do you think? Would you read this book if I wrote it? Please let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading! You can support me simply by sharing my stuff, by linking to me on Twitter, by checking out my old blog, by listening to my podcast, The B&P Realm Podcast, or by reading my 2015 novel, “The Teacher and the Tree Man.” You can also find that book in full here, or you can find it broken down into four shorter books (book 1, book 2, book 3 and book 4).