Entry #1

As this is my first entry on my new (and now, ONLY) blog, I'll try to make it "mean" something.

Early this week, I took everything I could carry -- including my puppy, King Leonidas (Lee, for short) -- and moved across country to Santa Fe, NM. I could get into all the reasons why, but the big one is I need a change, a *real* change. And I figured, I'm 24 years old and there will only be so many times in my life when I will get to do this -- just pick up and change my life at the drop of a hat. So far, it's been kind of difficult. I'm not used to being *so* alone. I've met a few people here and there, but mostly, it's just been me at the house with the puppy reading and listening to music. I don't mind not having a TV yet. I don't mind that it's very quiet out here. But sometimes, I get the urge to call one of my friends back in Virginia or DC and see if they want to grad dinner or catch a movie and I realize I can't do that anymore.

But don't get me wrong. I haven't disliked it out here by any means. The first night here, in fact, I went out with my landlord's brother Rowan and his girlfriend and their mutual friends to the Cowgirl, a local drinking hole which offered one of the best margaritas I'd ever had. And then we went bowling -- where Katie (Rowan's girlfriend) and I truly sucked but had an awesome time playing so poorly.

And don't even get me started on the sunrise and sunset out here. It's truly amazing. I won't even continue describing it now. I'll just have to bring myself to take a picture and post it because that will at least partially give it credit for how awe-inspiring it is.

Also, the food has been great. There's an organic market walking distance from my house. There's a mountainous trail behind my house where Lee and I go walking daily. I met a girl named Michelle on craigslist and we went and hung out in Albuquerque to see a show the other night. Plus, today I went out to the downtown area (the Plaza) where they were having a fiesta and I got to see what seemed like hundreds of Native American merchants. I also found a fantastic rare booksellers called Nicholas Potter's and I fell in love. The owner (Mr. Potter himself) was a very amiable man who had a quite a bit to say about the subject of Jack Kerouac, which of course made me immensely happy. Oh, and on my way home, I literally ate the best burrito I had ever eaten in my life. And it was only 3 bucks.

So things have been good, but I'm definitely a little home sick. I don't miss DC itself but I do miss the people I met there. It's great not having to trip over a homeless person every two feet, but it's sad that I can't go out for margs after work with Laney. Not missing the smog and the litter, but I do miss hanging out at Yvonne & Joe's house. Glad that there's pretty much no traffic and noise pollution here, but I can't believe I won't get to hang out with Morgan and Will on the weekends anymore.

Changes must happen -- this is what I'd wanted, to not be so comfortable in my safe Northern Virginian box. This is better, this is a challenge. I will succeed. I will be happy. And even if I figure out, somewhere down the road, that this isn't what I want... well, then I'll pick up and find some place new, and eventually I will find that place to call home.

Anyway, while I was thinking about this tonight and feeling inspired to write in a way I haven't felt like doing in a long time, I decided to read my book of RFK speeches. (I carry it with me everywhere now.) And again, I stumbled upon his speech on the "Mindlesss Menace of Violence" and it never ceases to get me choked up. So what you will about the Kennedys -- they were not perfect by any means -- but Bobby and Jack had the ability to inspire and move people with their words like few other leaders of our time. This makes me think that perhaps journalism is really the way to go for me... I can't imagine being a politician, after all... and I think that maybe if I work to be the type of figure like Edward R. Murrow and the like, I could make a difference. But I'd have to finally get off my ass and DO something. I can't just talk about doing things, talk about change, talk about civil liberties and human rights, talk about suffering, talk about seeing the world.... I have to DO it. I think taking this first leap -- the leap towards New Mexico -- is the first important step. I just have to remember not to get too comfortable and to realize that I'm out here for a reason. To learn, to grow, to change. And I feel like, as a human being, it would be damaging -- even insulting -- to the universe to be OK with apathy, to be OK with mediocrity, to sit back and relax as the world unravels or even as it stands still. Nothing will ever improve that way and I think maybe it's our responsibility as people to always want to improve ourselves and the world around us. Well, I won't just accept things the way they are and pretend it can't be better and maybe, as a writer I can help to inspire others to want to make change happen as well.

And on that note, I will post the speech that started me on this path of forward-thinking:

City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio
April 5, 1968

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."
Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.
Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.