It was a cold day in August 2018 when I boarded a plane to London, the first stop on a long, restless itinerary that’s taken me to the far corners of the map and back. That’s how I remember it, although looking up the weather report for the day tells me it was warm and sunny, not chilled and overcast. That’s memory for you. I also recall it was late when the plane took off, and there at least I’m correct. I double checked the ticket.

I started this blog the same day I started traveling. It hadn’t occurred to me I was becoming a travel writer although in retrospect I was, albeit one with a decidedly limited readership and nonexistent royalties. But as the hours I’ve sunk into it have grown, I’ve started to think more and more about what exactly it is I’m doing. If you’re working in a tradition, however inadvertent, it probably pays to learn something about it.

There’s a long history to travel writing. Viking sagas, after all, are mostly a particularly bloody version of Bilbo Baggins’ There and Back Again. And from that example you can note how deeply rooted the idea of travel is in our storytelling. It’s The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy and The Canterbury Tales. The hero’s journey of Joseph Campbell is predicated on it. The story starts when you take your first step away from home.

But travel writing, as a genre of its own, has fallen out of favor. My suspicion is that the world shrank too much to accommodate it; it may be arduous or annoying to visit Dubai or Bogata from New York City, but it’s no longer challenging. Anyone with a passport and $1,000 for flights can manage it. And there’s not an experience on Earth that hasn’t been photographed or instagrammed to death by now. Why read a book when a hour watching the Travel Channel will tell you what it’s like?

I began writing here because I promised, before I left, that I’d update friends on what it was like. It got a little out of hand. In total, I’ve written 348,932 words. Moby Dick is about 210,000 words. Gravity’s Rainbow is 310,000. As a ballpark estimate I’d guess I’ve averaged 500 words an hour, so that’s 700 hours of my life I’ve poured into this. Four months of a full time job.

Most of the entries are focused on what I’m doing and where I’m going, the mechanics of travel coupled with stray thoughts about the places I’m passing through. Sometimes I’ll digress about larps or food or politics, but mostly it’s travel. I’ve been leaning less on the travelogue and more on my experience as time goes on, because there are much better places to go for hotel recommendations and sight-seeing tips. That’s basically it, though. Call them memos from past me to future me: this is what I was doing, and what I thought about it. I’d like to imagine they’re for posterity, that someone might want to pick them up and flip through them, see what I thought of Morocco or Singapore. I doubt anyone will, though.

But about twice a year, I write a retrospective, like this one. These aren’t for future me. These aren’t even for you, not really, although I’m flattered you’re indulging me by reading them. These are for me, to keep me from getting too adrift. I sit down every six months and I try and talk about how I’m feeling, try and sum up everything I’ve learned and gone through, as a way to reanchor myself before I drift too far afield. It’s a time to say this is where I’ve been, and this is where I think I’m going. It lets me catch my breath before setting off again.

It’s been an eventful 2023 for me. That usually gives me some direction or motivation for the upcoming year, whether it’s promises to visit friends or suggestions to add to my itinerary. But I’ve had a particularly rough time of it. With everything that’s happened in the past three months, I’m as lost as I’ve ever been. For the first time, I have no idea where to go from here.

I just finished reading The Mushroom at the End of the World, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Ostensibly it’s about matsutake mushrooms, prized in Japanese cuisine and the focus of a complex web of foragers and traders. But Tsing uses the matsutake to draw attention to the way life survives in the wake of capitalist devastation.

Matsutake mushrooms cannot be domesticated. They grow best in forests jammed with mature lodgepole pine trees, but lodgepole pine trees are highly susceptible to fire. So if you have a logging industry which clears out all the ponderosa pine trees in the Pacific Northwest, and a forest management service preventing the fires — inadvertently enabling lodgepoles to replace them — fifty years later the logging industry collapses having run out of decent timber and the matsutake begins to flourish.

In similar ways, the harvest of matsutake resists commodification. It can’t be easily scaled up. Matsutake hides in the undergrowth; spotting it is like scanning a half-completed jigsaw puzzle for a missing piece. It takes a set of skills which are difficult to learn and difficult to teach. And gathering and selling matsutake is dependent on factors far out of the the control of the ones doing it, like the weather or the soil or how the harvest in China is doing. Some days the price you earn is twice what it was yesterday. Some days it’s half.

Tsing calls this condition precarity. Both the matsutake itself and the ad-hoc industry which has sprung up around it only exist in the spaces created by the collapse of capitalism. Their survival depends on a complex interconnected web of relationships, and any of a thousand different things could disrupt that web. It all lives at the edges, after industrial capitalism has moved on, and the interdependence of all those elements — the mushrooms, the soil, the trees, the foragers, the Japanese salaryman eager for a gift for their boss — makes it fragile.

Reading the book I realized I am now, suddenly, precarious. In September I had what many people would call a “near-death experience.” I suppose it qualifies; I could have died. I didn’t. Disappointingly, it never even crossed my mind that I might. There’s no real thrill to be had surviving something you expected to survive. I never lost consciousness. I was never even in a lot of pain. I feel like I had this apocalyptic life-changing experience and the life-changing bit happened when I was out of the room.

Modernity, particularly in the United States, goes to great lengths to create the illusion of independence. Tsing calls it alienation, and ties it to the capitalist idea that your workers should be as interchangeable as the machinery they’re working on. The logic of capitalism favors economies of scale, and individuals with quirks and idiosyncrasies don’t scale particularly well. Your success in most careers is going to depend on how adroitly you can wedge yourself into whatever box they’ve decided to fit you in.

In a lot of ways I’ve built a life that’s already on the edges of that. I don’t have a mortgage or a rental contract. I’m constantly shifting cities and countries. Having a heart attack has only reinforced how much I rely on the network of friends I’ve built up to live like this. I’ve been asking for more and more favors over the past few months. I need places I can crash for a few days, or help in making appointments, or rides to get around to various tests and checkups.

I kind of like skirting the edges of capitalism, picking and choosing what parts I indulge in and what parts I shun. But now that I’m newly precarious, I’m finding myself reevaluating all those trade offs. Would I be happier if I were moving a little slower? Maybe I’d be healthier if I were a little less stressed? A sedentary life still doesn’t hold much appeal for me. I’m not sure where I end up if a peripatetic one loses its charm as well.

My heart hurts. I can feel it sometimes, a low, dull lament like it’s mourning what we’ve both lost. I’m being melodramatic, but my heart is literally broken. We’ve both been diminished by the events of the past year. I used to be proud of my appetites, the way I always wanted to try more of everything, see more, stay up later than other people; now, it might kill me. I’m at a loss. I’ve cut back on everything. I’m living a sparse existence at the moment. I can either be a sybarite or an ascetic, but I don’t know how to split the difference.

As a child, your experience is one of creeping virtuosity. One week you can’t stand on your own, the next you can manage a few wobbling steps, the next you’re tearing towards the street with a parent chasing after you in horror. We learn to talk and read and write, and our grasp of the world expands exponentially each time. This continues as we become teenagers and again as adults. We become accustomed, year after year, of getting stronger and smarter and wiser.

I’m finding that’s all changed in middle-age. I don’t feel like I’ve peaked; I’m still learning and gaining mastery over more things every year. If anything, it seems to be accelerating. But for the first time that’s become completely detached from my physical health. My eyesight’s been in steady decline since I was in high school. I screwed up my right shoulder in college. Just a few years ago I had a knee go out. And now my heart aches, as it struggles with a hill or a flight of stairs.

I feel mentally like I’m sharper than I ever was, more canny and clever and discerning. Physically, though, it’s clear I’m rowing against the tide. I could certainly do more to stay fit; I’ve never been much for exercise. But I’m past the point where I can simply ignore my limitations, like the way I once stomped my way around Angkor Wat on a treacherous leg. A calculated détente is called for.

I’ve finally recovered enough from my heart attack that it no longer feels like a particularly enthusiastic sneeze could kill me. I mostly feel fine. I’m still trying to get back to someplace that feels normal for me. I had a veggie dog instead of salad last night, and a non-alcoholic IPA rather than seltzer, but it wasn’t the bourbon-spiked root beer float and queso I really wanted. It’s a balancing act. My health’s going to get worse, inevitably; even before my heart imploded I was getting a new pair of glasses every other year and downing a handful of pills for arthritis every week. I need a way to live that keeps me healthy as long as possible without draining everything that makes life worth living in the first place. It’s tricky to find.

I got to visit Antarctica this year. The only practical way to get there is by sea, and given the distances involved that means you have a lot of time to kill. Some people stood on the deck and looked for whales, some people socialized at the bar, I spent a lot of time solving jigsaw puzzles. The ship had laid in a large and varied supply of them, and there were a number of tables set up with puzzles at various stages of completion. People could sit down and fiddle at them for a bit, sometimes finishing one and packing it up and sometimes setting out a fresh one. I saw a husband and wife complete one of Niagara Falls and stow it away, only to have another couple unknowingly pull it back off the shelf and start on it afresh not more than thirty minutes later.

Jigsaw puzzles are as close as I get to meditation. They keep enough of my conscious mind occupied that I can effectively think about nothing while doing them. It’s easy for me to lose hours slowly piecing them together. There’s value in that; one of the cornerstones of surviving a heart attack is avoiding stress, and it’s hard to get all that worked up about how unreasonably difficult it is to reconstruct a cardboard picture of a waterfall.

At the same time, I can’t overlook the futility of the thing. Maybe it’s more rewarding than rolling a rock to the top of a hill, but it’s no more productive. Medical crises are very good at highlighting exactly how relatively little time we have while we’re here. You can expect to lose 10% of your life expectancy to a severe heart attack. That’s about eight years I lost overnight. It takes about ten hours to solve a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. If I had an extra eight years to live, I could spend it solving 4,700 jigsaw puzzles. But I don’t have an extra eight years, and I’m suddenly very aware of every hour I spend solving them. It’s an hour I’m not learning a foreign language, or building a website, or writing this blog, or designing a larp.

Look, I’m under no illusion that anything I do is going to outlast me for long. Everything I’ve written online will disappear as soon as the domain registration runs out. I don’t have any children to leave an inheritance to. I’ll be remembered, fondly I hope, by a number of friends. But they’ll think about me less and less as time goes on, and eventually they too will pass into the great beyond, to be forgotten in turn.

I’m perfectly okay with all of that. I don’t feel any great need to be remembered, let alone have my name inscribed on a building somewhere. But nearly dying has got me thinking more about what will remain when I’m gone. The world is a different place for my having moved through it. It might be nice to leave something behind. I’ve spent most of the last five years not worrying about any of that; I was just focused on being in the world. I may finally be ready to think a little more broadly.

Today is Antarctica Day, December 1^st, celebrating the day the Antarctic Treaty was signed. In 1959 the twelve nations involved in research on the continent agreed to preserve it. They banned all territorial claims, commercial development, and military activity. It was renegotiated in 1992, adding oil exploration to the list of prohibited activities, with 33 nations joining. I’ve always taken comfort in that, that we managed to set aside a landmass larger than Europe just before it started being exploited in earnest.

Antarctica was was the last continent I hadn’t visited, the final piece of that particular puzzle. I know it’s foolish to think about life like that, as a series of checklists to work your way through, but it’s nearly impossible not to. We track our time by calendars and seasons and birthdays, by holidays we’ve taken and holidays we’re anticipating.

I’ve been traveling for five years. I’ve visited 63 countries, if you count oddities like Antarctica. I’ve flown and sailed and caught trains and taxis and sometimes walked when I couldn’t find another option. Even a global pandemic managed to stall me without stopping me. At some point you have to ask, how much is enough? I’m a big believer in kismet, and it feels like the universe is lining up — five years, cardiac arrest, Antarctic expedition — to suggest it’s time to stop, set everything down, change my life yet again. And I get that, I really do. The simple fact is I can’t keep going the way I used to. Something’s got to give, and I’d prefer it not be the other half of my heart.

Somewhere in the middle of all this travel I applied for Portuguese residency, and even the glacial pace of their bureaucracy has its limits. It’s due quite soon. I’ve found myself at odd hours paging through real estate listings, considering the merits of the city vs. the countryside, wondering what it would take to remodel a kitchen to my specific tastes. That’s certainly the sensible choice. But then, I’ve always been a contrarian. There’s still so much out there to see. Travel is harder than it used to be, now that I have to worry much more about medications and access to healthy food and not letting my heart race. It’s far from impossible, though. If nothing else, there’s always a cruise I can catch.

Antarctica is beautiful and austere and majestic when the sun is out, when you can see the deep crystalline blues of the icebergs in the harbor and the deep snows covering the islands of the peninsula. But I think I like it best when the winds pick up and snow starts falling such that you can barely make out the shoreline; for all the ferocity of the winds there’s a calm there, too. The continent’s peaceful without humans. And that’s what I wanted, when I first set out. A vast, uncharted world to explore. In many ways I find myself starting over: slower, sadder, wiser, but no less hopeful for all I’ve been through. It’ll be different this time. I don’t have to reinvent myself from scratch, just make some adjustments. I don’t know how yet but I’m feeling my way through, same as I was five years ago. Let’s see where I end up this time.

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