Written by Gil Gildner
Some people say it’s all kind of fake.
I am always happy that there is a flip side. For every extreme there is another extreme. For every north there is a south, for every Polaroid there is an oil canvas, for every cassette there is a vinyl, for every flickering neon sign there is a massive, blood-red sunset. For every static country gas station stuck in a past decade, there is an airport teeming with the future and the progressive. For every empty existentialist there is an opposite realist, reveling in the joys of life and living.
I don’t think that one gets the full picture of what a desert is until you find yourself in Needles, California. If it’s not already a totally godforsaken land, it’s next on his list. July 2 is brutal on my car. The air conditioning struggles to keep up with the ruthless heat, and my forehead glistens with sweat. I head west directly into the setting sun, which lights up the splattered insects on the windshield with detestable ferocity.
Hot and sweating, I fill up my car at a Chevron and try to ignore the hot and stagnant diesel fumes. I step inside to pay and pull a chilled Mountain Dew from the refrigerator. The condensation coats my palms. I twist the safety seal as I step out into the cloudless Mojave, bathed in pure golden blistering sunlight. The crack of the lid is the best sound I have heard since I left home.
The first cold drink was just the way good things are.
Travel is a beautiful thing. It doesn’t even necessarily have to involve beautiful places or beautiful people or beautiful experiences. But it, in itself, is like putting a current through yourself. It’s like turning yourself into a walking talking electromagnet. Little iron shavings start sticking all over, and they never leave. Travel, swathed in time zones, darkness, endless driving, airports and rough landings, is the initiation into the lives of other humans. Other humans, not just like you, but awfully close.
What is existentialism? At its core, it says that these places aren’t there.
How disappointing. I wanted these places to be there.
What is travel, if it’s not to somewhere? What is somewhere, if it’s not a real place? What is literature if it’s not a real thing to read? What is philosophy if it’s not a real thing to ponder?
Existentialism is the thing of backwoods independent film festivals, of experimental short films that explore meaninglessness, emptiness, void, Nietzsche, apocalypse, lexical gaps, blackness, nothingness. Existentialism is the thing of persons not fully committed to reality. Existentialism, and all variants, are the true opiate of the masses.
I’ve had some of the best experiences of my life somewhere else. I’ve seen deranged shirtless fellows dancing on Sunset Boulevard. I’ve drank a bottled frappaccino at a remote rest stop in Oklahoma surrounded by chain-smoking truck drivers. I’ve heard the organ played in Kölner Dom. I’ve tested the max speed of my car on the empty flat stretches between here and Jonesboro. I’ve forgotten to wave down a Florentine bus at about midnight and then walked the damp streets for half an hour until a new one came by. I’ve stayed in the most miserable New Mexican motel room ever because it cost $33.
Those were all somewhere else
Don’t tell me these things aren’t real. I want them to be real. They are a part of the collective. They are as real as your eyes reading these words. They’re as real as these fingers typing these words.
Why wouldn’t you want them to be real? What proof have you of their falseness and dishonesty? Because, logically, everything that is not perfectly and truly real is a lie.
I’m happy there’s a flip side. Misery and discord are part of reality. The three-fingered, foulmouthed mechanic who jump-started my car and threw every word in his vocabulary at me has an opposite somewhere in the world; the bitter woman behind the counter at the DMV has an opposite; the animation instructor who cursed me out in his native French when I was five minutes late has an opposite. These opposites are the golden-hearted. These are the flip side. These are the serendipitous. These are the indescribables. These are the ones who argue philosophy, the ones who ridicule me fearlessly, the ones who get lost on I-440, the ones who get me through abnormal psychology, the ones who write their lives with pen, not pencil. Some humans are more human, and that’s an important goal in life: to find those and catalog them.
I put you in my database.
You’re a real person. I like it that way.
