For my own records, this is where I have lived and when:

• 0–18: Nokesville, Virginia
• 18–18: Baltimore, Maryland
• 18–19: Bristow, Virginia
• 19–23: Baltimore, Maryland
• 23–25: Austin, Texas
• 25–27: Oakland, California
• 27–27: New Orleans, Louisiana (two months!!)
• 27–28: Manassas, Virginia (a month!!)
• 28–29: Portland, Oregon
• 29–??: Oakland, California

Man, it’s exhausting moving so much. Don’t do it. I’m serious: it sucks. You gotta go to where your buddies are and plant yourself into the god darn ground.

When I was 18, driving up to New York, I stopped to eat in Red Bank, New Jersey (lol), and I looked around I thought that I would move to a new city every two years, and oh lord, what a dumb dream that was. I somehow kind of did that! But the thing is: you get to a place, and you have to get a house and a crappy job for a while, and then you have to figure out where your post office and your grocery store is, and on and on. That and it takes like six god darn months to build your life out of nothing except coffin dust and nightmarish borderline poverty. So there’s a quarter of your time in a place right off the bat. Hell, that’s been my experience anyway.

I had me a cushy desk gig in Austin. I was a copywriter for an insanely boring biotech company right off the highway headed north. It took me exactly twelve minutes to get to work, and then I sat in a gloomily-lit cubicle (which was my own design—I had the maintenance dude remove the fluorescent bulbs from the ceiling), and I sat there and I drank a gallon of tea and water, and I felt rumpled and depressed, and I waited for the trickle of oatmeal-bland work to come my way. A year into the thing I told my coworkers I was moving to California. I remember this lady said: “What are you going to do there?” And I said: “Hell, I don’t know. Skulk around I guess??” I had no job lined up and I went there anyway. Lord was it a harrowing six months. But I made me a whole bunch of buddies and built a tiny li’l dumb empire out of nothing. My empire crumbled and I moved away. I then lived in absolute godawful empty misery for a little over three hundred and sixty-five days, and now I’m back to whatever my life is now.

As my friend Hugh “Huge Ackman” Jackman says in ‘The Prestige’ (2006): The world is simple. It’s miserable—solid all the way through. Yeah. Hain’t no way I’m forgetting that. How could I?? At least now I can afford to eat, and I got me some walking-around money, and I got my buddos. The sky is blue and I’m an insane idiot in Trashtown, USA. Hell, why not. For god’s sake, it’s sure ain’t Baltimore. Does that count for something??? I wonder.

I’m going to stop wondering right this very second!