After five years, the island had gotten small. Hawaii, that beautiful, green, and completely monotonous paradise, had become a cage. A quiet, respectable, and completely soul-crushing cage with a great view. The sunsets were just… sunsets. I’d seen them all. I was rotting in paradise, living paycheck to paycheck, a slave to an $1,100-a-month child support payment that felt like a goddamn anchor around my neck.
I’d seen a psychic, one of those spiritual bastards, a few times. The last time I went, he looked at me with his clear, annoying eyes and said, “Dude, your life is fucking great. Your aura is beautiful.” And then he paused. “But… how are you going to get from A to Z? How are you going to travel? How are you going to live?” He saw it. The beautiful, glowing engine, stuck in a goddamn car that was up on blocks.
I needed a reset. I needed my other ocean. Sedona.
So I flew in. I didn’t need to “focus” on meditation there; you just breathed the shit in. The quiet, the rocks, the birds… it all just triggered something deep, a quiet, beautiful, and completely necessary cleansing of the soul’s plumbing.
I saw my daughter down in Scottsdale, grabbed my camping gear, and a good, healthy bag of mushrooms, and I raced off to my secret little spot in the high desert. October. I should have known better.
I pulled in, and this beautiful, smiley camp lady, decked out in wool, she comes up to the truck. A real high-vibration “hello.” And then she looks at me. Looks at my goddamn Hawaiian flip-flops. My shorts. “Well,” she says, her smile a little too tight, “I hope you dressed for warmth. It’s going to get cold.”
I had a cotton sleeping bag, a thin blanket, and an air mattress. And the shrooms.
Fuck it.
I set up the tent, inflated the mattress, laid out my pathetic little bed. No firewood, of course. Just a bottle of wine and the bag of beautiful, ugly, and completely honest fungus. I sat in my folding chair, in my shorts and my flip-flops, and I ate them all. About three good hits.
I sat there, drinking my wine, watching the only other campers in the whole goddamn place, a beautiful, intelligent, and completely prepared couple in big, fluffy jackets, huddled around a fire, probably drinking hot coffee. And I just… waited. The mushrooms started to kick in, that slow, beautiful, and completely unnerving crawl. The stars came out. A clear, cold, magnificent sky. The silhouettes of the rocks, blacker than a politician’s heart. It was gorgeous.
And then I realized I was fucking freezing.
My ass was numb. My teeth were chattering. This wasn’t a spiritual journey; this was a goddamn survival test. The universe wasn’t going to talk to me out here; it was just going to let me die of hypothermia like a stupid, barefoot animal.
I scrambled into the tent, a shivering, burrito-wrapped mess. I put the blanket under the air mattress to stop the cold from the ground, and I wrapped myself in the sleeping bag, my mind just starting to race, the visuals kicking in, the wires in my brain starting to play their own beautiful, discordant music. I was warm enough. I was in that weird, beautiful, and completely lucid state between sleep and… somewhere else.
I was trying to find an answer. “What’s the destination? What’s the goddamn plan?” I’d been asking for a long time. And it was just… static. Frustrating as hell.
And then, around midnight, my bladder, that beautiful, insistent, and completely inconsiderate bastard, it spoke up. It was time to pee.
I crawled out of the tent. The temperature had dropped to a quiet, beautiful, and completely life-threatening level. The frost on the ground was so thick it looked like snow. My breath was a goddamn steam engine. I was in my skivvies, my Hawaiian flip-flops, and a t-shirt. There was no way in hell I was making the hike to the goddamn bathrooms.
I stumbled over to a tree by my truck, whipped out my little frozen pisser, and started watering the plant.
And then, with my dick in my hand and a stream of hot, honest piss steaming in the starlight, I looked up.
And the stars just… hit me. A truckload of beautiful, ugly, and completely terrifying truth.
They weren’t just lights. They were spinning. They were talking. They were whispering, a cold, clear, and completely honest language. And they were talking about me. About traveling. About leaving. About the fact that I was dying, slowly, quietly, and respectably, in a 9-to-5 cage, just to pay off a woman from a war that had ended fifteen years ago. About the jail time, the threats, the humiliation of a system that owned my ass.
They were whispering about the next fifteen years. What are you going to do? What are you going to do with the little bit of time you have left?
I don’t know how long I stood there. Two hours, maybe. Butt-naked, save for the skivvies. Frozen solid, but not shivering. Just… listening. My whole body a goddamn antenna, pulling in this strange, beautiful, and completely necessary broadcast from the void.
Something snapped me out of it. My leg hurt, maybe. I don’t know. I got back in the tent, my mind buzzing, crackling with the static of what I’d just heard. The whispers. You have to go. You have to leave. Save your money. Get out.
I woke up the next morning, and the first thing I did was drive to Walmart and buy a pair of goddamn pants.
And I pondered. I sat there in the cold, morning sun, and I thought about the whispers from the stars. About the life I was living, and the one I was supposed to be. And I cried. A quiet, ugly, and beautiful cry for the man who was stuck. It was time to move. Hawaii was a beautiful dream, but it was over. I had to go back to the mainland. I had to get a real job, a “capitalistic” 9-to-5 shithole, not because I wanted to, but because it was the only goddamn way to build the war chest I needed to really escape.
And that’s what I did. I sent my resume out. I took a job in Arizona. I moved. It felt like a step backward, but I knew it was the only path forward. I had to land there, in that new shithole, to understand the rest of the whispers.
The whispers hadn’t just told me to leave Hawaii. They had told me to prepare. To save money. To dream about traveling. To manifest the next, and final, act of my goddamn life.
I believe in that shit now. I believe in psychedelics, in that beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary rewiring of the brain. I believe the answers are inside you, that you are your own goddamn god. You just have to get quiet enough, or cold enough, or just plain stupid enough, to stand in the freezing dark with your dick in your hand and finally, after all these years, listen.
That one, beautiful, ugly, and completely insane night, freezing my ass off and talking to the stars, it changed everything. It set me on the path I’m on today.
And the path leads out.
