I’m on my way back from the shore when I make a mistake. I turn from 95 North, the road that will bring me easily home with my eyes closed, onto an exit, which brings me into the city of Philadelphia. The city I was smoothly bypassing I’m now driving directly into.

When you make a driving mistake, you react. How badly you have screwed up depends on the severity of the reaction. If you make a simple wrong turn in your town, you might do a good-natured forehead slap. Something that takes a few minutes to correct might warrant a “shit” or a “fuuuuck.” What I have done now, leaving the road that was conveniently bringing me home, as in it could have had a sign on it that said Damien’s Way Home, and turning into the city of Philadelphia, a city I am not familiar driving in, a city whose bowl of cooked spaghetti throng of highways would have made Patton turn around and go home and accept German occupation, a city where one wrong decision brings you to New Jersey, makes my gut to fall out and with it a series of seething remarks that question my abilities and intelligence.

Not only have I gone out of my way to up my level of stress and aggravation, but part of the upset is due to a bruise growing on my tender male ego. Men are supposed to be good at directions based on an internal navigation system. We’re supposed to know things about cars and know what all the things in our truck is for. We’re supposed to be able to open the hood and understand what we’re looking at.

But I don’t. I suppose my internal navigational system was left out of the congenital male gift basket I was supposed to get at birth. I also know nothing about electronics, could give less than a shit about expensive cars (like. Zero), and though I like putting things together here and there, I could go the rest of my life without touching a drill and die a happy man. These things I have come to accept about myself, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t frustration when one of these evident shortcomings is thrust in my face and causes me aggravation. Whether you are a man or a woman you can probably commiserate in some way.

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Pictured: The Green Front Inn. Not Pictured: The Ghost of the Cook.

It’s a Saturday on East Carson Street on the Southside of Pittsburgh. It’s hot and I am wearing a captain’s hat, a gift from my friend L. He was one on too. We are in a convertible that I couldn’t afford if I had a decade to save up for it and an extra kidney to sell on the black market. It’s then that we pass a place I know too well. The Green Front Inn.

“Oh my God,” I say. “I haven’t been there in more than a decade.”

“Well we’re going in now.” He pulls in front and parks, where the shiny red convertible is a sore thumb.

Pittsburgh is a city of neighborhoods. This was typically the only reference people would give when going out. “Where you going tonight?” “Southside” or “Shadyside” or “The Strip” was all that was said. This is also because a night out in Pittsburgh rarely included only one bar, but rather a mini-bar crawl often occurred, so a neighborhood was used as a blanket location.

The Green Front Inn was a job taken out of necessity. I was working an unpaid internship at a local magazine and I needed a paid job, if only because I had grown accustomed to eating food and sleeping indoors. And so four nights a week I stood behind the bar in this dive and wondered where everything had gone wrong. I’d loved bartending up to that point, but probably because I worked in a campus bar before that. It was filled with young, good looking people who wanted to have fun and often did so right there on the bar. The place before was positive and much of my time there was spent laughing and surrounded by people I really liked.

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When a key breaks off in your door, the universe closes its ears and forgives the torrent of vulgarities that vomit forth. It’s the same when you are confronted by a dangerous animal and when you spill anything hot in your crotch.

I only hope that my neighbors were as understanding yesterday when Burke informed me that she had broken a key in the downstairs lock. The word du moment was shit with a deluge of other phraseology whose creativity and complexity actually sort of developed a narrative of vulgarity.

I knelt down to look at the little teeth in the lock, and I moaned. I consulted Google and went for needle-nosed pliers, and then a pair of tweezers. I found that pushing my key into the other side of the lock made the chunk of the broken key jump forth a little. So I pushed my key in and then grappled with the little bit of metal, all the while reviewing the little speech in Czech that I would give any of my neighbors who happened to come by. It was 6 o’clock, people would still be coming in from work.

Even though the key was moving a drop, I wasn’t able to get any traction on it and therefore I made a series of frantic trips between my flat and the door. Bobby pin, needles, a drawing compass, a box cutter, a barrette. Ultimately nothing was working. My vulgarities subsided as I worked, though, and I was at least pleased that my brain had settled me down to deal with the task at hand. It seemed that I was equal parts my parents, my dad who despairs in the face of unexpected difficulty and my mom who’s evicted four children from her uterus and for whom unexpected difficulty is all expected.

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Rugby Formal: 203,940 years ago.

Perhaps it’s because I’m heading home for the month of August, but I have been getting rather nostalgic for the last few weeks. I know that nostalgia is more common for older people, you don’t hear about a lot of ten year olds wistfully reminiscing about the time they were four, but I didn’t realize how strong it would come on at times. And what would spur it. And that sometimes I’m nostalgic about stuff that never happened to me.

In the last week a Harry Potter movie made me reminisce about the summer I was reading those books in my parents’ house. The later (darker) Harry Potter movies made me nostalgic for the earlier, lighter ones. News from home about a friend who’s health is deteriorating sent me down a rabbit hole of nostalgia centered around summers growing up, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by the community pool, learning how to throw a curve ball until the late evening dark finally settled in, playing Dungeons and Dragons on the neighbor’s porch when it rained.

But that’s not all. Last week I was nostalgic for the spring, when school was winding down and my summer holiday was still ahead of me. And a picture of two twentysomething girls blowing bubbles in a field on Spotify’s “young and free” category made me nostalgic for things I hadn’t ever experienced. Because, I know this will come as a shock, I was never a young girl in the summertime. Man, it was out of hand.

The problem with nostalgia is that it’s a siren sitting on the edge of a rock-lined coast luring you into harmless indulgence. Nostalgia has a way of editing out all of the bad memories and leaving the good ones that suggest that life was simpler, happier, and more fun.

And it’s largely bull.

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The Angry Vltava

Burke and I are on a train, the commuter kind, about 80 meters long, meant to reach the remote towns in the hills and mountains and valleys. It’s the first day of a four day weekend and we are headed on a three day rafting trip. The train is a zoo; the Czechs are laughing, shouting, drinking. Bottles of Jack Daniels are guzzled at directly. Shots of Božkov rum are passed across the aisle. The term Ty Vole is no longer a mild expletive, but rather a comma, a period, parenthesis, and everyone’s name. To observe the Czechs on the way to canoeing, camping, cycling, or hiking is to see an ebullient people on the way to their natural habitat.

We sit in a corner of the mayhem and make last minute notations on things to pick up at the local shop (bottle of water, a protein bar, cheese) and we do my favorite travel activity (plan) while discussing my favorite travel topic (time). Let’s plan to get in the water at 2, we’ll stop along the way for a beer or two and then get to the pension at 5 or 6. We’ll walk around Rožmberk tomorrow and the castle and then get in the water at about noon tomorrow. Meanwhile, some of the more severely intoxicated blink through glazed red eyes and miss aim with their drinks. I ring my palms and crack my toe knuckles, and voice concern for them (they’re getting in a canoe?!) but a pang of self-awareness tells me that I am really voicing concern for myself (I am getting in a canoe?!).

I enjoy the outdoors. Theoretically. I think nature is beautiful and serene. However, I typically enjoy them from afar or within a stone’s throw of a building and a police station. I walk through city parks and look at the river before stepping into the pub it’s running along. I like looking at the trees from my balcony while grilling a hotdog. So when I agreed to go up the Vltava River in a two person raft, my brain celebrated that duality by leaping in celebration and then sitting down on a rock to worry.

For the first few weeks before the trip, we talked about our adventure in honeyed, excited language, the way I do when reminiscing about something that’s both perfect and hasn’t happened yet. I suppose that’s how I deal with nature in the future. In this pre-hypothetical-reminiscent period before the trip, I imagined myself gliding up the river in a canoe, the sagacious squint of a Lenape studying the river conditions ahead. This is much related to how I’ve envisioned my summer writing schedule when getting up at six and having three hours of writing and my workout done by lunch sounds like the Ernest Hemingway method of doing a morning’s work. The reality is far less pristine.

We are in the raft for about four minutes before it flips the first time. This is while shooting a weir, or, rather, some approximation of that collocation that didn’t quite pan out. We are pushed and bullied by the rapids and, were it not for a couple of the other recently deboated, would ave lost our belongings to the river. As it is, I only lose my ring. A little down river we nurse our lumped shins and we get back into a suddenly wobbly, unreliable, and unstable raft.

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If you were to ask me “When you’re 40, what do you want to be doing and where?” I would have probably not have specifically said “I’d like to be living in Europe somewhere, writing books, teaching at a university, and drinking my weight in cinnamon-flavored liqueurs.” But it would be something along those lines.

I am very happy with my position in life. I have a wonderful job teaching at a university, I have great intelligent and interesting friends, and I have a variety of hobbies and pastimes. I have a side hustle that’s becoming more of a paid job.

But I did not get here by “traditional means.” I didn’t fly through college, get into an MA program, and dive directly into the profession of my choice. I had some idea of what I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure exactly what hat was, so I spent years behind bars, working in bookshops, farms, and freelancing articles about mudflap production and well depth. I taught at a language school, spent years as the bottom totem, and learned the field. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

I think about these things when students ask me for advice on what to do next. They’re 22ish, and about to graduate university. And they want to know, what now? While I won’t dissuade anyone from doing what they want, I make a few suggestions below of what to do in the two years after you graduate.

Before you say that these are unreasonable, let me just say – no, they’re not. These years are the freest you will probably ever be again. Therefore I suggest that you take these two years to be less pragmatic than might seem reasonable. The suggestions I make could help you become more interesting, explore your interests, learn about yourself and the world. Also, you never know what path it will send you down in life. Plus, a forty hour a week job or grad school will always be there waiting for you when you come back. So don’t be in such an almighty rush to get there.

Work in a Service Industry  

For some years in my mid-twenties I worked in a bookstore and as a waiter and bartender. In the first place, a service industry or retail job involves very few out of work concerns. You go to work, you do the work, you leave work. Additionally, you will probably meet a lot of likeminded people in these jobs. These are young people who are just starting off, so it’s a wonderful place to make more friends and expand your horizons.

Moreover, you will learn some lessons and skills both in the practical and life categories. It was in a bookstore that I was introduced to writers way off my college reading list and musicians out of the genres I’d explored. These things filled gaps in my worldly education and prompted a lifelong love of finding new writers and music.

Bartending was a paid-for education in how to multitask, work hard, the importance of patience, and an in depth knowledge about how a restaurant works. After bartending Saturday nights before Pitt basketball games, the world’s work held no fear!

Service industry jobs expose you to a corner of the workforce that you might not otherwise know about, and, trust me, having that knowledge makes you a more empathetic, self-aware adult.

Read Forty Books

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I could do this

This year’s travel is light. A three day canoeing trip in July, New York City in early August, and Langhorne, PA. I am looking forward to a relaxing summer of writing, reading, and gaining weight. However, as I’m not doing much in the way of adventure travel, I am naturally spending hours looking at destinations I’d like to visit. Researching trips I can’t go on for a year is the sort of a sadistic self-torture my thirteen year old (read: twenty-nine) self used to enjoy while looking at Playboy (read: Granny Fanny).

In any event, here are five trips that I want to take now, but can’t. Yes, the research for this post was a thing of beauty.

The Trans-Siberian Railway

There’s nothing about this that I don’t love, but I’ll sum it up: An epic train journey across Russia, Mongolia, and China. These are three countries I have long wanted to visit and this would allow me to see them all in one blast. And my favorite way to travel is by train. I would pass the winding hours between stops writing and reading and rocking back and forth. And, according to sources, get ordered around by the stern provodnitsas, the (evidently) dominatrix-like cabin orderlies.

Just a few of the things that this trip would feature are Moscow, Lake Ural, Beijing, Mongolia, the Steppe, Lake Baikal, Siberia, and Irkutsk (the Paris of Siberia). Along the way I want to hawk for a fur cap, buy smoked fish, and take in the insanely beautiful scenery. Oh, plus, Russian vodka for breakfast. Yes, please.

Fishing in Alaska

Most of the things I thought I knew about Alaska I learned from Northern Exposure. These things were eventually offset by the film The Edge and Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. I am so attracted to the idea of a five day fly fishing trip in the wilds of Alaska, the vastness of the country, the wildlife. For most people, it’s a once in a lifetime experience. The prospect is as exciting as it is terrifying.

Oh, I have done my share of the outdoors, kayaking, camping, a ton of fishing. My cousin and I spent a month camping and fishing in the vast back countries of the Sawtooth Mountains, Olympic National Park, and Montana’s Glacier Park. It was one of the most wonderful summers of my entire life.

And one of the scariest.

I am not a Marlboro Man and I admit freely that I spent a lot of that time terrified. It was a hell of a shock to throw a city slicker into the wilderness, more than ten miles from another human. There’s a lot happening in the great outdoors. Deep black storm clouds are a hell of a lot more daunting when you’re watching it from your tent in the mountains and not your flat in Prague 4. A pile of steaming bear shit is a genuine source of terror. And to get lost in Montana’s back country could mean that you end up as a (hopefully) search and rescue.

There’s just as much not happening. The daily sounds I’d grown so accustomed to – cars, bickering neighbors, trains, television – were gone, and in the overwhelming quiet I found that my head was a scary place. But that fear and anxiety gave me a lot of insight and the rigors of camping and having to catch food (or you ate oatmeal or white rice for the ninth straight day) forced that city slicker to work hard and get things done. And I loved it. Oh, it goes without saying that that Alaskan fishing trip would be guided. And maybe catered.

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