Every year, since my 23rd birthday, I share a blog post, summarizing the year and my experiences. It’s a personal retrospective I share in order to string a narrative through the year, and define and describe my life as it stands at the time. This is the fifth installment. 

Darkroom was just selected by Apple as one of the best apps on the App Store for 2015. It’s an indescribable honor to be featured alongside great products by a company I have admired and looked up to since I was a child.

When Matt and I started Darkroom, we wanted to model it after the Apple and Leica ethos. To us, that meant no gimmicks, and a profound respect to the user and their time using our product. It’s humbling to see that recognized today with Darkroom rated so highly and Apple recognizing it. Thank you for all your support throughout. I’m excited about Darkroom’s future. 

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Today is my 28th birthday. I’m on a Greek island where 6 weeks ago thousands of people were arriving daily. It was an overwhelming experience and we’re back here to profile the locals. It’s a village of dreams and fantasies, and I’m thankful to spend my birthday here among a fantastic array of friends and friendly faces. 

We have only a few days left on the project, and after 2 months on the road, I’m spent. Over the past few weeks, Sara and I have started seeing mental snapshots of what some of the pages in the book might look like and we’re unbearably excited about bringing it to life. This book will be the first step in a long march to capture and share this historic event. We’ve seen this crisis from many angles, and witnessed it first hand. 

The world is in a precarious place today, and a nuanced understanding of reality is important as we continue to shape our policies and opinions through our elected officials. An educated public is a fundamental component of a healthy democracy, and we hope to do our part in sharing what we’ve experienced and learned first hand. 

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When I left my job at Instagram, I wasn’t sure what I was leaving it to do, and at many points along the journey, I wasn’t sure whether or not I made the right decision. The decision to leave was made out of an inner conflict with where my life was headed. 

In San Francisco, what success was measured by and what I as a competitive person was competing with was pulling me down a road that felt foreign to me. Even today, when I try to more purely pursue my passions, it’s hard not to look over the Facebook fence and see what my friends in Silicon Valley are doing and not feel like I’m dragging my feet in the sand and falling behind. 

The same trait that made me successful in my time in the valley is also making it very hard for me to pull away, but what brought me to Silicon Valley is not what was keeping me there last year, so I had to face that reality. That much I knew. Where I go from here, I’m still figuring out.

It has taken a long time — Too long if I’m being honest with myself — but I’ve made a bit of progress. I’m still not where I want to be yet, but I’m working through it

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A lot has happened this year:

Released Darkroom – February
London Trip – February
Middle East Trip – May
Released Darkroom 2 – August
PNW road trip – July
Month in NYC – August
Displaced – October to December

…along with a lot of other little trips along the year. I’ve visited so many countries, met so many people, and wrote a lot of code. Like, a lot. I’ve gone on my first backpacking trip, and I started writing my first book.

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I feel more self aware than I ever have before, but I’m struggling to articulate it and actualize it. Sometimes it felt like I might be running away from something, but I feel good about how I’ve grown over the past year. I’m looking forward to a year of introspection and solidifying some big changes in 2016 as I crystalize Darkroom’s future and write Displaced’s first draft.

As 2015 comes to an end, I feel cautiously good. I feel like my relationship to the world is stronger and more mature. My thinking is still morphing, and I’m re-evaluating my emotional reactions and decision-making process. It’s taking time, but I’m slowly becoming more aware of the journey, and ultimately, that’s what helps me steer and push forward.

Thanks Sara Kerens for the photo.

I was ready to get out of Portland. It had be a few days and on the one hand, I was starting to feel a lot of the same anxiety and stress that caused me to leave SF in the first place. On the other hand, I felt like I may not get the chance to visit the Pacific Northwest with Sierra again, but I can fly and Uber around Portland whenever I want. Alright, we passed by the maps section at Powell’s Bookstore and I picked up a PNW map.

 

I remember from my last road trip through the Southwest that highways are to be avoided, and byways are where the fun is. I can’t go past 55mph comfortably anyway, and there’s usually less traffic. Byways usually wind through the country more, and have better views, and stopping to take photos is much more accessible. Plus, in a car as non-aerodynamic as a 1991 VW Vanagon, getting stuck behind a semi-truck makes the van shake like a salt shaker. Google maps is fine for avoiding highways, but tracing the white lines of the byways on a paper map and always having a full overview of the trip has a certain romantic quality to it.

 

After Powell’s, grabbing a beer flight at Bridgeport near Tom’s apartment, hunched over the map tracing my route north along the 101 to drive around Olympic National Park clockwise, David (Tom’s Personal Trainer. A tangent we don’t need to get into) showed up and shared stories his honeymoon in the Cascades and Rockies of Washington.

 

Ok then, I guess I’ll cut my trip short around Olympic NP and retrace David’s honeymoon. He pointed out a very thin and long lake east of Seattle called Lake Chelan with a small secluded boat-access-only town called Steheken on the norther shore. Apparently you can take a boat out to the hiking trails, and charter a flight back. Sounds right up my alley. I marked the path on the map. In the process, my eyes adjusted and I noticed that the map also listed all the public campgrounds in the PNW. Hallelujah! It’s been driving me nuts trying to find campgrounds, ones that have any first-come-first-served spots, and ones that are a reasonable distance away. The instant availability of the entire internet means I’m constantly researching the options trying to find the best one, wasting hours and getting frustrated in the process. You can’t comparison shop on a map. Cool.

 

Later that night, after doing a load of laundry, packing up, setting the alarm for 5:30 AM (I’m a little anxious about those first-come-first-serve spots), I started looking up hikes and things to do around Seattle. That’s when I started looking up photos of the hikes on Instagram (Thanks guys for Places search!) I started losing my mind in excitement. Washington’s mountains look so majestic, so large and numerous, so accessible and well documented, I was left in a bit of a state of shock. Jealous of Seattleites and longing for some deeper connection to the mountains, I decided to try solo backpacking for one night along one of the popular hikes. This is not an entirely straightforward proposition though, seeing as I have a major release coming up in 3 weeks that I’ve been slaving at for months, so having an active internet connection is important, and I’ve never done an individual backpacking trip before, so there’s that anxiety, but on a popular trail, in a popular area, for one night…I should be fine.

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It didn’t take long for me to get out of bed, still riding that wave of excitement. Quietly left Tom’s apartment and made my way to the van which was conveniently parked right outside a Safeway. A quick supply run later, I had an audiobook going, the engine running, and my tank half full. We’re on, baby!

 

Leaving Portland due west on the 30, I passed by a large forest on my left, and a river to my right. This being 6:30 AM, there wasn’t much traffic, so I was making good time. The road turned right, I crossed the bridge and was back on my way north.

 

It was surprising to me how quickly I was able to get outside Portland and find myself in the open country again. On either side of me, large factories, pillars of steam rising, and piles of timber lay as far as I can see. All along the drive north, timber seems to be the regional industry of note, and every pile makes me a little sad. I’ll have to read that Wikipedia page when I get some internet. Presumably, our sustainability and conservation history plays a role in ensuring we don’t wipe out the Redwoods, and as a city slicker like myself, I don’t know the first thing about the timber industry. It seems to employ most people in the little towns I drive through on the byways, and the subculture of wood carvings and trinkets line the outside of the rest stops and walls of the diners.

 

An hour or so into the drive, I pull over into a diner on the side of the road for some coffee and breakfast. The first thing you see when you walk in isn’t wood panelling with rustic bar stools. It’s a wall of gum and rolling hot dogs with a bored clerk in front of a wall of cigarettes. You see, this is a combination Gas Station and Diner. First one I’ve seen! Sure enough, the bar stools were attached to the side, I grabbed one, and my exquisitely mulleted waitress got me my menu and coffee and off I was doing my usual let’s-read-everything-twice-and-just-get-two-eggs-and-sausage routine. Next to me, two self-proclaimed regulars sat down and started chatting. It was actually really nice to see it, they were older, but they were heckling the waitress and she was heckling right back as if they were in a redneck Cheers revival. “…Wifi stopped working…called them, got some foreigner. Couldn’t understand a damned word she was sayin!” “Only in America.” Yeah. Only in America. 

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At some point, I crossed into Washington. I wasn’t sure when that happened, maybe when I crossed the bridge? It’s not totally clear to me. In any case, the byway was almost empty the entire drive, I got into my campsite, nobody was there, I went to pay, and discovered, much to my joy, that it was free! (Well, the pass I had to buy cost $30), but it was nice! Unfortunately, there’s no service here in the campsite, and I’ve been working for a few hours making filters.

 

Tomorrow I’m driving early to Olympic National Park, and hopefully going on a nice long hike. Hopefully I can catch some REM cycles despite the ATVs and gunshots nearby. What is it with gun ranges and ATVs and campgrounds here?

Of the hundreds of bike rides I’ve been on, one stands out above all others. It was my first attempt at riding out to Stinson Beach by way of Muir Beach along Highway 1. I didn’t have an internet connection, and I hadn’t checked the elevation map beforehand, so I didn’t know what lay ahead of me. At some point, I stopped, looked at the road ahead of me, and turned back. 

Today, after months of built-up angst about my increasing weight, I got up, put on my cycling outfit, loaded the mountain bike into the car, and drove out to Tennessee Trailhead for a ride in the mountains. The trail starts out flat on paved road, eventually forking off into dirt and winding its way up 800 ft. The weather was fairly gray and cloudy, but the fog added a beautiful surrealism to the green-covered smooth hills on either side. After two weeks in the Middle East, the air felt refreshingly clean and crisp, and the sound of the crashing waves made their way through Tennessee Valley. That all felt great. What didn’t feel great were my legs and my lungs.

After the first hill, I thought I just needed to take a breather. I was hunched over my handlebars trying to catch my breath.

On to the next turn.

I barely made it up when I looked up the trail, saw the third hill coming up and had to stop again to catch my breath. When I could barely lift my leg up to my pedal to clip in and keep going, I knew the time had come. I was barely 2 miles in, and it was a 20 mile ride, and it wasn’t going to get much easier. The last time I tried mountain biking, my rear brake was stuck pretty badly, and I had an excuse. This time, I couldn’t blame anything other than my lack of exercise and increasing weight.

I’m afraid I added a new ride to the list of ever-memorable failure rides today.

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Weight gain creeps up over time. I stopped being active over a year ago as I contemplated the decision to quit my job, spent a lot of time traveling, and started working on Darkroom.

I knew I had been gaining weight, but I wasn’t aware that I was losing muscle mass. A popped shirt button here and a slightly tighter fitting pair of pants there and you look back after a year noticing a meaningful difference. This trip was a sort of shock to my system because it caused a disruption to my routine. I couldn’t wear the same comfortable, broken-in pair of jeans and loose shirts anymore – I was going to a formal wedding. 

It’d been a while since I last wore my suit and dress shirts, and putting them on gave me a sense of how far I had strayed. 

For me — and I reckon a lot of people who lose a lot of weight — a constant fear had been that the weight loss was temporary. For three years I held either a downward or flat weight graph, and had been reaping the rewards, emotional, social, and physical. This weight gain over the past year is a terrifying reversal and has become a constant, ever-present source of anxiety and disappointment. 

My stubbornness against buying any clothes a size larger than what I used to comfortably wear before means I now walk around in uncomfortable new jeans, and I occasionally have to re-button a button in my shirt that popped off while I was sitting. It also means that I’m constantly walking around with a source of aggravation like an unscratchable itch. A constant reminder that I have let myself down and let go of an important part of my post-collegiate life. 

And if you know me at all, you know that I don’t take to personal failures lightly. 

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The benefits of health are huge. Not least of which is the added  self confidence and positivity. It’s hard to maintain an active and spontaneous dating life without self confidence in how one feels emotionally and physically. It’s hard to remain social when the added anxiety affects ones mood.

I’m making some short term changes to change the tide and get back to a happy place. I currently weigh 185-190b. At my lowest, I clocked 170lb. I suspect that with my lost muscle mass, my weight gain is closer to 30 pounds. At 175, I felt satisfied with my weight, physically and emotionally. At 170, I was ecstatic. I imagine my efforts at weight loss will help me regain a fair amount of muscle mass, so I’m setting my target at 175 for the next 2 months.

Towards that effort, I’m going foor the low-hanging fruit for these two months: 

• I’m reducing drinking to 1 night a week and 3 drinks maximum.
• I’m reducing my dinner to smaller meals instead of the main meal of the day and shifting those calories towards lunch.
• I’m starting a gym routine. I’m expecting to do a combination of running, weights, and yoga, along with weekend bike rides.
• As far as Diet goes, I’ve already reduced my pasta/bread/rice intake, so I’ll continue that, but I’ve been pretty bad about tortillas and chips, so those will go as well.

It’s not nice to be unhappy with your health and body, but what’s less nice is denying it or not doing anything about it.

It seems like the years follow a cycle of change and stability. Last year was relatively quiet. In 2013, not much happened apart from enjoying the ride. 2014 was different and can be broken down into three parts.

The year itself started as a continuation of the theme of 2013: Enjoying experiences and the joy of life. I took my parents on a trip to Hawaii and followed it with a winter full of skiing including a trip to Park City which turned out to be an incredible skiing experience with great people.

 

Part 1: Leaving Instagram

Early in the year, I wrote in my journal: 

I still feel scared. For years I've wanted to start my own company. I can't sit here for another 2 years and find myself looking back in regret.

Coming into the new year, I began asking myself hard questions about where I wanted to be and what I wanted to get out of my time, and I wasn’t able to answer them within Facebook & Instagram. I had a great run of personal and career growth in my time there but it stopped, and my attempts at restarting it sputtered. Eventually, the opportunity cost of time became too great, and a choice of how I wanted to spend my time became necessary.

It wasn’t an easy decision, and took a few months of mental gymnastics, back and forth, questioning and re-validating assumptions. I’m sharing the following journal entry, also written in the early months of the year, to give you a sense of the internal struggle:

To describe the past week as a roller coaster ride would be doing a disservice to the thrill engineers of the industry. I go from the deepest, most gratifying sense of self satisfaction to a deep pit of fear, anxiety and distress. Right now I'm at the bottom. My stomach feels empty, my brain has been buzzing since 7 in the morning, unable to focus on anything but the single issue: What the hell am I thinking?

At this moment, I'm convinced I won't be able to persuade anyone to work with me. I'm convinced I won't be able to come up with a worthwhile idea. I'm convinced that even if I was wrong on the last two counts, I'll still come up short on execution. 

There are currently 3 things keeping me going: The knowledge that it logically makes sense to do it, the urging of my friends who have made similar moves, and the knowledge that failure, along with this self-doubt is as common as table salt.

From my viewpoint right now, I can't imagine that the money I'm leaving on the table would be more fulfilling for me than the lessons and stories that will ensue. I know in my heart that when I look back at this decision, I will be glad I did it, glad that I took this leap of faith into a dark abyss. And yet...

Is this what entrepreneurs refer to when they talk about the pit of despair? It certainly feels like it.

That feeling of despair hung over me for months. I share this not for pity or exhibitionism, but for two reasons: The first is purely documentarian and selfish; This is, after all, my own reflection on my year. The second is to share my personal experience with anyone who may be going through a similar experience. Knowledge that a struggle – privileged as it may be – is a shared experience, has always helped me push through. In hindsight, I can look back at that fear, and though it’s still there, I can say that it was the right decision to make.

Through this experience and others this year, I’ve resigned myself to a life of perpetual imposter syndrome. To this day, I feel the pang of anxiety as a technical conversation gets underway. Will this be the conversation that outs me as incompetent? No matter what I learn, what I accomplish, or how much I grow, it’s there, forcing me to question, re-evaluate, and challenge myself. In any endeavor, trivial as it may be, the better I become, the higher my standards, the lower my ability to meet them.

Those first few months of the year weighed so heavily on me, I stopped cycling, I stopped dieting, and I became afraid of downtime. I filled my weekends with skiing, bike rides, scuba lessons, motocross lessons, camping, and travel. I cherish those experiences now, but they were distractions. Increasingly, I spent time in Google Maps Engine plotting my road trip. I was off and running.

Part 2: Travel

In late June, I bought a 1991 VW van. A couple of trips to REI later, I had it packed and ready to go. I picked up Ben at 4 AM and we headed south. I didn’t know what to expect going in. I imagined a trip where I would spend a month of solitude in the mountains, but I chickened out, and invited friends. I ended up spending only half the trip on my own, and was glad I had friend with me for the other half. I met some great people on the trip, some of whose stories I shared on this blog already. 

Today, I yearn for the clarity of mind I had on the trip, and the simplicity of life it accompanied. The Southwest was a beautiful place to be in May, and a van turned out to be just what I needed at the time. I was forced to step out into the world in a way I had never done before, and I was forced to interact with people that didn’t come naturally to me. I grew up in Syria, where the class system was more formalized. Interactions with strangers was distant. In America, interaction with strangers is the norm, a part of daily life. It takes active effort for me to put my guard down, and living in a van was a forcing function. Bob, whom I met in Death Valley, stands out to me from my travels. His life offered a pure alternative to mine, and it was refreshing to see someone dedicate themselves so wholly to their love.

I also ended up reading quite a bit on the trip. 10 books in total, and those books helped frame some of my thoughts. Specifically, Man’s Search For Meaning, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and, yes: Eat Pray Love. These books helped me think back to why I do what I do for a living, and what motivates me to do it. I think I lost sight of that at some point, and it felt good to see it again. The day took on a routine that started with breakfast, reading, cleaning, planning, packing, driving, arriving, reading, cooking, campfire, and sleep. The routine freed up time and space for even more introspection.

I arrived back in San Francisco 4 weeks later with a clear head, a slower heartbeat, and a smile on my face.

Then Ryan quit, and I had an unemployment companion. Luckily, the World Cup had just started, and we no longer had to struggle to fill our time. We both had an upcoming trip to Norway planned, and the downtime in between was spent playing pool, drinking beer, and watching soccer matches. In itself, that experience was a wonderful break from a lifelong obsession with productivity and work. 

3 weeks in however, a thought began to gnaw on me. What if my birthday blog post ended there? How would I feel about it? I decided that the story of the year ending in a bar would be disappointing. Ryan agreed, and in lieu of an actual idea, we decided to make a bet: We’d both commit to releasing an app to the app store by the release of iOS 8, and the one to make more money, wins. Clearly, neither of us released an app. However, the project that sprouted out of that bet is what keeps me busy today.

Back to travel.

We made the bet, and a week later, we picked up an Über to Oakland International Airport. 9 hours later, we landed in Oslo, and I’ll leave the recounting of what happened there to Ryan: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. Norway was the second-best trip of my life, second only to the van trip. The recall of what those hikes felt like sends me nostalgically back to the mountains and the grass and the snow and those ringing sheep.

A couple of weeks in Norway and Ryan headed back stateside, and I made my way to Amsterdam, Paris, then Detroit. Those last three destinations passed in a blur as I frantically worked on my project. It had been so long since I’d been so thoroughly engrossed at work, it was like rediscovering it all over again. The pride, the ownership, the challenge, and the rewards were intoxicating. I made it back to San Francisco with a working prototype. 

Part 3: Back to Work

Stay tuned.

Day One.

It’s hard to write given a deadline. All my writing has been driven by emotional spurts, pouring out in-the-moment, raw. So why am I sitting in the dark, cross legged in my friend’s apartment in New York City, wondering what to write about? Some context may be in order for the first installment of “15,000 Words”.

I’ve been feeling overwhelmed recently. In starting a company, my brain is on overdrive, from the moment I regain consciousness from sleep, till I lose it back to sleep. Mostly: engineering, design, and project management occupy the brain. However, more and more brain cycles are consumed by tangential thoughts, and insights are being gained without being articulated. What follows is my attempt to navigate this new environment.

I’ll be talking here about the industry, trends I see, and biases I observe. Some politics may find its way here, but it’ll (hopefully) be carefully treaded. I’ll talk about the process of starting a company, my challenges along the way, but I have yet to determine the level of detail to get into.

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So here I sit, having just spent an evening of sober karaoke (see my FB feed for that explanation) with a bunch of my ex-coworkers. This isn’t technically my first time in New York City: A couple of years ago I spent 4 days here for Electric Zoo, but half that time was spent on an isolated island, and the other half was spent wandering. Not quite enough time to say you’ve “been” to a place. This is the first time I spend a whole week here with a purpose.

The first indication that I’m in a different place, right off the airplane, was the diversity. San Francisco, or at least my exposure to it, is not a very diverse place compared to NYC. From the African lady who sold me my bottle of water to the Sikh Uber driver to the large group of Hassidic Jews in the arrivals terminal, this is not a place to be painted with a broad brush. One lady in particular stood out to me in the terminal. She was an older lady – I would place her in the 70s – was sitting next to a similarly older gentleman in a Yamaka. She had a tight black flapper hat on, bright red lipstick, and a black dress. She looked perfectly composed, and perfectly authentic, in a way no costumed-outfit can look.

In the cab, watching the city pass by, Manhattan’s skyline lit up in the distance, you begin to feel it. New York doesn’t feel like a place to settle to me, it feels like a place to fight. Like the driver told me: “I don’t like it here, I’m not comfortable. You can make a lot of money here, but you can’t be comfortable.” Those words rang true for me. You can feel it in the bricks here. This city was built on the backs of industrialists, tycoons, and political bosses. This place has a buzz. Nobody has time for your shit. I like that. The city feels like it’s posing a question to me: “What you got, punk?”

I think he had a thing for me. The fidgeting with the necklace, the puppy-eyed stares, the head nod to the side as he said “Oh you’re too funny.” I’d chock it up to cultural differences but I know quite a few Dutch people and they’re – well they are artsy types – but they like their Dutch women and their macho attitude. I was happy to indulge the Airport’s Tourist information clerk, and he was more than happy to indulge me with information, gently dropping hints like “Oh that’s where I live” and offering me tips on how to cross the river to that side of town. 

Normally I’m cranky at Airports, but this was a pleasant flight. It was one of those two hour where-did-the-time-go flights. More of a commute between San Francisco and the South Bay than an international flight from Oslo to Amsterdam. I kept trying to find the cranky passport agent who’s going to give me shit about my Syrian past, but a right and a left after the tourist office had me standing on a train platform.

I’d been worried about explaining to the passport agent why I’m flying in alone, without a place to stay, without a plan of what to do or who to see, without even a reason for why I’m visiting other than “I thought it might be neat.” Luckily for me, there was no passport agent to explain anything to, and by the time I landed, the AirBnB I had requested right before my flight went through. I had to pick up the key from the host’s friend in Amstel, a station 20 minutes of public transportation away from the apartment. 

So here I am, standing in by the train platform, waiting for the train that the ticket machine assured me would get me to Amstel station, wondering why my train’s information on the information screen is greyed out, when everything else is in white and blue. 

“psssssshhh” The PSA system comes on, says a few sentences in Dutch, of which I pick up the name of my train, followed by an English translation gently and softly informing us that my train won’t be coming. Up I go to the train information kiosk. Central Station is where I need to go, then transfer to platform 4B. Very well then, back down I go to the same platform, waiting for the train. It arrives, I get in, fate held in the hands of an overworked information agent.

Waiting for the train, I was feeling anxious. I wasn’t feeling anxious about the delay or having to figure out how a new public transpiration system worked, I had no doubt I’ll get what I needed to get done worked out. I was feeling anxious because for the past two weeks I’d started working on a startup, and it has perpetually grown to consume me. Hiking in Norway, I was thinking of names, analyzing market placement, scrutinizing my value proposition, and reassessing my assumptions. 

Working on the Airplane, I was making the sort of progress that makes us programmers look closer to the movie representation than anything else: The kind of work in which you can visualize the entire picture of everything that needs to be done, knowing exactly which files to edit in which way, what code to write and what pictures to draw, and you have to go through the rather mundane process of writing it down in code. Working in that mode, an innocent bystander might see an extremely focused person, frowning their brows slightly as they type at an approximate speed of 90-100 words per minute, bobbing their feet up and down on their balls as the caffeine attempts to manifest its energy in physical motion. To interrupt that, say by an airplane landing, is to cause a disruption in the brain that’s a bit hard to explain to people who doesn’t work using their brain.

When a programmer is in their flow, they’re thinking not about what they’re doing – They’ve already thought about that minutes before – but they’re thinking about what needs to happen next. They’re also thinking about how the next task fits into a larger system that has to work together. In the head of a programmer working in their flow, a bystander wouldn’t see 1s and 0s streaming by nor would they see ifs elses and switches. Rather, they’d see boxes and arrows, systems constructing themselves and interlocking the teeth of gears together. To be snapped out of that is to introduce a dissonance between the necessity of physical existence and the many unsolved problems in the head.

So I was sitting in the train, anxious, waiting to get back to an internet connection and a power supply so I dump out the half-built system in my head. The train arrives, I find platform 4B, hop on the next train, and on to Amstel I go. By this time, I’m confronted with the reality of having not had a bite in about 10 hours. My host’s friend is waiting for me, I’m in a bit of a rush. Two stops into the ride, we arrive at Amstel, I get off, get on wifi, fire of a message to my host’s friend, and two minutes later I’m standing in the station alone again with my apartment-for-the-week’s key in my hand. Now I have to get to the actual apartment. 

The overly-friendly and interested information agent at the Airport had printed out instructions for me to take the 65 bus north. I go down, try to find the bus, and struggle to find a bus stop. I talk to a friendly young couple who pull out their iPhones and use it to give me an 8-step process of getting home.  Lacking in alternatives, I head back to the station, increasingly agitated and hungry, with no way to head home. On my way in, I find the 65 pull in. Apparently I had to go a few feet forward to find the sign. I ask the driver if he goes to my stop, and he shakes his head negatively, points up above the hill to his left, and says that’s where the northbound bus stop is. I look, see a 65 stopped there, and break into a sprint. I get there huffing and puffing, step into the bus, then, and only then, realize I have no bus ticket. Lacking in alternatives once again, I head back to the station.

Thankfully, there happened to be a lady in an orange vest walking around with an “i” on her back. I explain my predicament to her, at this point carrying a yogurt and a sandwich, eagerly awaiting the first quiet moment to gobble them down, and she points me to the bus ticket machine. First card doesn’t work. Second card doesn’t work. Ok, no train ticket for me. As a last resort, she points me towards the ATM. First try, the debit card finally works, and out comes 20€, my ticket home.

I get home, walk in, turn on the bedroom light, unpack my laptop, connect to the internet, and 4 hours later, at 2AM, I lie down on the bed, finally with the system transcribed into code, working, and my brain clear.

Three and a half weeks in, the routines became rituals, and the amount of decisions that need to be made slowly declined. Whereas my morning routines used to involve thirty minutes of phone time as soon as I woke up, followed by an automated shower, a trip to the local cafe for a latté and a pastry, then the drive to work, my new routine involves rushing out of the 30˚ sleeping bag into the 35˚ ambient temperature, popping open the stove and the pantry to get the oatmeal and the coffee prepared as soon as possible, using the heat from the stove to warm up the van and my Little Buddy (a brilliantly named propane-powered space heater I picked up early last week) to warm me up. 

It’s a good morning this way, I don’t mind the cold really, it’s the heat that kills me and agitates me. Usually by the time breakfast is done, the windows are fogged by the heat, the van is cozy, and I get to sit and enjoy breakfast along with my homegirl Fairuz. Pack the bed, do the dishes, brush my teeth, adjust the solar panel, and my reward is two-to-three of uninterrupted reading time in the one sunny spot between the trees.

So I wake up, perform the morning ritual which has become a starting marker on my day, get in the van, and head over to Convict Lake. I’d seen Gregg Boydston whom I’ve been following for a while on Instagram shared photos from there which made the place amazing. 

One the way, I pass through the town of Bishop. On the main street, I come across a Vanagon, parked at an angle towards the street. Cool! I get closer, and see a Vanagon pull out of the parking lot. Huh, that’s weird, you don’t see that many in one place. I get next to the place, and in front me, the clouds parted and the light shined like it had never shone before. The music radiated like it had never played before, and no less than fifteen Vanagons sat side by side, with a shop window open. A Vanagon Specialist.

Coming across a Vanagon specialist on a trip is like coming across a coffeeshop that has freshly ground Kenyan beans drip-poured after a month of drinking Folgers. It’s like finding an Aspirin when all you’ve been given are slaps on the face to make you focus your pain on another part of your body. It’s like coming across a specialist after 5 mechanics reach to the back of the bottom drawer trying to find something, anything, that would fit that weird hose your van has, regardless of origin or compatibility.

I pull in, my spirits riding high. I walk in, there’s nobody there. I look around, shit. Fox News is playing on the TV. At this point, my beard has grown over an inch, and I’ve gotten into the habit of twirling the end of my mustache as I drive, making me look like a Turkish Basha with an ear for downtempo electronic music, out camping. I wonder how this is going to go.

Five minutes of idle chatter with another waiting customer, the shop owner arrives and jumps right in: “What year is that? What’s going on?” “It’s a ’91, my headlight switch melted, I got a replacement, but I don’t have the connector. Can you help me out?” We chat, he doesn’t have the part, but he might be able to find it for me. We move on to talk about engines, I mention a Subaru engine conversion that people do to their vans which more than doubles the horsepower, but isn’t smog-legal in California. I joke that I just need to find a nice Arab smog certifier and chat with him about the homeland and as soon as I said those words his brain clicked into high gear, he stood up, got a smile on his face, excited about what’s to come.

“Are you a liberal?”

Huh, that came out of nowhere.

“Uhh, yeah, you could say that”

He takes this as a cue to jump into a 10 minute tirade on the hypocrisy of liberalism, how the other states that don’t have smog rules are sharing the air with us and how we’re creating an uneven playing field, how the Indians on the reservation next door charge the same price but pay less for gas, how abortion is immoral, how immigrants need to be stopped.

How he jumped from one conclusion to the other was amazing to me. I was more impressed than anything, I wanted to give him a pat and the back and congratulate him on TV well watched, but at the mention of immigration I perked up myself. I knew what was about to happen, it’s happened many times.

“If we closed down immigration I wouldn’t be here”

“Where did you come from?”

“Syria”

“Did you come here legally?”

“Yeah”

“See you did it right!”

“Do you realize how much time it takes and how much money it costs to come here legally? It took us fifteen years, and many thousands of dollars.”

At this point, the conversation usually turns to some variant of “If you’re too poor to come, you shouldn’t come”. My mention of Syria as my place of origin usually takes a couple of minutes to register and locate on the hazy, foggy mental map of the world, and then the mention of Islam comes. This is my favorite part.

“I’m not Muslim, I’m Catholic Christian.”

I love being Catholic. It’s not like being an Orthodox, a Protestant, or any other obscure offshoot. No. I’m fuckin Catholic, bro. The Pope is my homeboy, what you got on me? It’s like someone assuming you’re not driving an American car and you tell them it’s a Ford. It’s the most blunt of Christian beliefs. 

He gets confused at the introduction of nuance and realism into the stark black & white vision of the world, and the conversation ends with:

“I’ll tell you the best argument against abortion.” – Somehow we were back on this topic – “I was adopted, if I had been aborted, I wouldn’t be here working on your van”. Point actually well made, I wanted to give him a hug for deciding to specialize in Vanagons. 

I don’t want to give off the wrong impression. The commentary in that section of the story is not how I felt, it was how I reacted in my head. In truth, I side much more heavily on the liberal end of the spectrum, but I believe in nuance. Nothing in the world is black & white, and people are neither strictly right nor wrong, especially in these areas of debate and belief. I also don’t think arguing with someone on these topics is worthwhile. We’d be arguing at the leaf nodes of the logic tree, not the root, where we disagree. It doesn’t matter what you think about Obamacare, abortion, religion, immigration. I want to have a conversation about human nature, what our tendencies are, how you prioritize and weigh factors in your life. That’s the difference, not right or wrong, just different priorities.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to work on my van and I didn’t have time to wait. Slightly dismayed but more amused, I continued up the eastern foothill of the Eastern Sierras, showing my van Sierra the backside of her namesake. “You think this is cool,” I told her, “Just wait till you see what’s on the other side of the peak!”

Weird things happen to objects when you name them. Ever seen bestowing my van with a name, I’ve felt a kinship toward it. Yes she has a temperament, and yes she’s needy, but I can’t help spoiling her. She has trouble up the hills. You see, she’s only got 90 horsepower, and coming up a mountain pass, she’ll pull a hearty thirty, and on a downhill, she’ll pull a lively seventy. The problem with going thirty uphill though, is that the heat starts overpowering the wind’s ability to cool the engine, and the heat starts to scare me, after what happened in Death Valley. So I scratch her in her favorite spot, that little patch of soft metal right above the driver’s side window but below the windowsill, and I comfort her. I open up the heater on full blast, and I start: “You can do it, baby, just two more turns, you can see the peak, there it is, see that sign? Come on, Come on – HEY PASS ME MAN I DON’T HAVE A TURNAROUND! – it’s ok baby, it’s not your fault, it’s coming up, it’s coming up! HEY! Summit, 7,800 feet! YOU DID IT!”

I arrive, spending the whole trip looking for some dispersed camping in the many national forests around that area to no avail. I find a campground sign near convict lake, turn into it, find a spot, take a swig of whiskey after finding out it’s $25 per night (relatively, even a nice spot on this trip would’ve cost me $15, most were free). I find a spot, park, open the door, and immediately I hear “Hello neighbor!”. I look around through to trees to find the campground host on a chair outside her RV waving. I head over, wanting to know about some of the hikes and the area around. She’s new, but she has maps and packets which she lends me to read over. Her name is Christy, and there’s a guy there, shirtless, bald, muscular, with shorts and a pair of skater shoes on. His name is Jay. He was from London.

I ask them where I can go to get a good steak and some fresh Asparagus, then he silently goes in and fetches me a pork steak and some asparagus. Huh, how awfully kind! “How much do you want for it?” “Nothing mate, just enjoy!” “How about a trade?” “I’ll tell you what, you get the beer, and I’ll grill the steak.” Sound good to me! Off I went with them, slightly disappointed by him putting on a shirt. Suddenly we looked less like an Arab and a Skinhead walking together and looked more like an Arab and a punk English man walking together, much less poetic. 

Anyway, we walk over, some idle chatter later, the steaks are done, we eat, we drink, we feel good, and then they mention Chemtrails while I was dozing off a bit. “Chemtrails? What are those?” Jay and Christy proceed to explain the conspiracy theory to me, I’ll leave the explanation as an exercise to the reader. Out of this conversation follow a few more conspiracy theories: Capitalism, Religion, Society, TV. I’m fascinated by this topic of conversation and want it to keep going on. I’ve never met anyone who believed in those theories, and I wanted to find out more, but the beer was working its way and I lost focus. We started feeding the chipmunks. 

I woke up the next day, said goodbye to Jay and Christy, and took Sierra up towards Tahoe. One mountain pass later which Sierra championed, we descended into the casinos of the California-Nevada border in southern Lake Tahoe. Through the casinos were $35 campgrounds, tall thick pines, clear blue lakes, 5pm rush hour traffic, overpriced rent, overcrowded brunch, and home. Home sweet home.