There’s some truth to be found in the places we’ve been, the things we’ve built. The Grand Coulee is a reminder of the magnitude of community buy-in. It was, along with similar projects of The New Deal and Works Progress Administration, a bit of a Hail Mary for the Roosevelt administration. Projects of this magnitude could hardly be considered viable today due to the crippling stinginess in Washington. We aren’t willing to invest in each other for the sake of national investment. Maybe it’s just as well.

Imagine how the Great Depression had destroyed the backbone of the upper class while raging dust bowls in the Midwest and Northwest had ravaged the middle class. Following years of teetering on what must have felt like the very end of American identity, a new vision emerged so preposterously large and elaborate that one couldn’t help believe in it. To believe in the Columbia Basin Project was to accept the fate of “now-or-never.” A certain direness is prevalent in the outlook for our world today. So too are we on the cusp of losing our identity, and not just our nationalistic pride, but as humankind on planet earth.

So that’s what humidity feels lile.

We’re hovering somewhere in the mid-90%’s here in Playa del Carmen, about 20 minutes from Cancun and it’s quite a wake up call for a spoiled Angeleno like me. Yesterday we jaunted out to Tulum and landed at El Paraiso resort. Despite some ominous looking clouds and a few sprinkles early in the day, we managed to pull together an incredibly relaxing day in the white sands. I don’t know when/if I’ll be able to upload my photos from my good camera throughout the trip, but here’s what the beach in Tulum looks like:

Tom and I caught a ride back to Playa del Carmen with two French girls and one local girl. When we got back, we all grabbed some Italian food and enjoyed a great meal with jokes shared in at least 4 languages.

En route to Mexico City with Tom. What lies ahead is what we are prepare to encounter. I’m traveling light. If it weren’t for my camera, I would have made it into 25 liters. The bags are a Tom Bihn Synapse 25 and the Red Oxx Gator. If I can venture near the indestructibleness of the bags I carry, I may survive this trip. It’ll be 4 days in the D.F., then onto Playa del Carmen, near Cancun. After 9 days of beach-ing, we’ll head to Cuba for another 9 days. This is the plan and the tickets are already booked, if not the accommodations.

The essentials are packed, as light as possibly, along with some digital luxuries:
• 3 pairs of socks
• 1 pair of Nikes
• 1 pair of Sanuks

• 1 pair of pants
• 1 pair of board shorts
• 3 pairs of underwear (2 ExOfficio, 1 Hanes)
• 1 light jacket
• 1 pair of detachable sleeves
• Canon SL-1 body
• 18-55mm kit lens
• 50mm f/1.8
• 2 extra batteries
• Flash drive
• Samsung Galaxy S3
• Travel USB converter
• Dr. Bronner’s
• Gold Bond
• Lavender oil
• Dodgers hat
• Water bottle
• Elk jerky
• Honey Stingers Organic Chews
• Playing cards
• Paracord
• Mini clamps
• Carabiners
• Flashlight
• Sunglasses

The journey has already begun in earnest. Since last Sunday, I have already driven over 2,500 miles. I expect by the end of the summer, I will have gone some 15,000 miles. I will have taken some 5,000 pictures and perhaps made the acquaintance of an equal number of unique human souls.

We will board our flight in Los Angeles, after a 3-day stop in Las Vegas. This was the one last chance to relax in the simple bliss of the world at our fingertips. Here, in a few steps we can travel from Paris to Rome, from a pirate ship to a knight’s castle. If one questions the irrelevance of time, one hasn’t spent three days in this glittering pot of wasted dreams and punchdrunk fantasy. The clocks on the wall may be accurate, if not irrelevant.

The buffet at Planet Hollywood turns from breakfast to lunch in one fluid motion. Our stomachs prepare to encounter another time of day with the quiet fortitude required to get its money’s worth. Smoked salmon turns to chicken cordon bleu and hash browns magically reform as french fries.

We escape Nevada with our wallets in tact and I prepare with quiet focus for the trip to Mexico City, Playa del Carmen and then onto Cuba.

We pack into the airport and grab a sandwich at the La Brea Bakery satellite in the Tom Bradley terminal. The famous locales of Los Angeles are transcendent of geographic space; you can eat Pink’s in Las Vegas (or Nathan’s, for that matter).

On the flight over, I’m sitting between a man in his mid-40’s and a young girl no older than 10 who seems endeared to me in a way somewhere between brother and schoolyard crush. She nudges me from sleep to play cards or tell me about the pool her family has in Guatemala.

The man is named Clay Gunn, from Chico, CA. Clay is heading down to Cancun to try and pick up a spot in the Mexican baseball league. A lifetime playing catcher, he’s moved up to the mound for the season. He tells me that for the past few seasons, he’s been swinging into Mexico halfway through the season as fatigue and injuries begin to shorten the roster. He’ll arrange a contract, a place to live, he’s sure of it. The man seems to know what he’s doing.

The vibe is good, the airline serves us a free drink, and then another before the ice has begun to melt. Clay had nearly missed his flight when he fell into conversation with a woman he could barely believe existed. He described that connection, the one that makes your head spin with possibilities and fights back against the belief that humanity is forsaken and we’ll never meet anyone worth sending our heart through the wringer again. Or that’s my interpretation. I promise to let Clay know about my time in Mexico City, to let him know whether or not it’s too dangerous to travel in, as he’s heard.

The flight lands without much excitement, and we deplane. Wiggle our way through customs, but first a bathroom break. I meet back up with Tom and he tells me that an older gentleman passed out at the bottom of the elevator and had already been whisked away by paramedics.

We enter Mexico proper as the sun sets, exchange some money and grab a cab from the airport to our hostel, Mundo Joven Catedral. It’s a well-maintained spot in Zocalo, the City Center, replete with rooftop bar, overpriced café and fully functional wifi. A 20-minute cab ride, a short check-in and we settle in for the long road ahead.

For those of you who have been kept abreast of the blessed managerie that my life has become, and for others on the outskirts of the chaotic endeavors I’ve become accustomed to, I say HELLO!

It seems normal to write in a blog an apology for being busy. Truly, there’s no need to apologize. I’ve been keeping lists (thank you Wunderlist), staying organized and keeping an incredible amount of things on my plate. The amazing thing about saying YES is the never ending heaps that continue to pile up in front of me.

Just right now, looking about my computer desktop, there are:

• 5 windows of flights from Cancun to LA. I can close those as I’ve already booked it. That’s me getting back from Cuba in mid-July, just in time for Lightning in a Bottle
• Some content I was collating from last year’s Toyota Racing Dream Build Challenge
• A half-written list that would be good for McSweeney’s called “If Last.fm Actually Tracked EVERYTHING That I Hear”
• Some css for a project that needs to get done quickly
• A list of stupid celebrity band names that I keep hearing (“Com Truise, Kill Smith, Trill Murray…and so on and so forth)
• Then there’s the Browser windows… a pinterest board of things for traveling with, three accounts worth of Google Calendars, duffle bags to buy, sandals to buy, lasers that look fun, graduate programs…

Anyway, there’s a lot going on, you can tell. It’s a blessing, not a curse. And truly, it’s been a blessed year, and it’s only going to get better. It’s incredibly how much of synchronicity happens out of hard work. It pays off big time. The run-down on things I’ve been up to lately:

• Working full-time at Gardner Automotive Communications, where I run the day-to-day business of social media strategy, web and graphic design, among many other things. I also blog a bit on our new website.
• Teaching at University Synagogue up in LA for my second year. This year, I had a class of 6th graders for Jewish Studies where our curriculum revolved around Prophets, Israel, Values and the History of Jews in America. I also had a class of 8th-9th graders once a week that I taught 3 different sections: Being Jewish on the Internet, Jewish Music, and Yiddish Culture. I also squeezed out an occasional song session for the school.
• Working at and going to festivals. We kicked it off with this year’s Lucidity Festival in Santa Ynez, our second year. It was incredible, there are so many stories and lessons I have learned from this truly inspiring community that I couldn’t begin to write them here. Short story is that I help put together the ticketing and gate procedures and manage logistics of getting people in and situated. Then I made it out to Coachella for Weekend 2. For Memorial Day, I just wrapped it up volunteering as an artist liaison at Strawberry, which was my first time actually working at my home festival.
• I’m also consulting on some other projects, including almost a year and a half working with marketing and branding over at Brainard Strategy.

Woah. It’s hard to get all of that down in ink.

So what next? Well, I moved home from Los Angeles to Huntington Beach at the end of March to shore up some loose ends before the journey continues. I’ve decided to carefully wrap up some of my current business for the time being and take a bit of a walkabout for the summer as I explore some options including graduate schools. Here’s a quick run-down of my current itinerary:

• June 9-21: LA->Colorado->LA. I’ll be volunteering with the Sonic Bloom festival in Georgetown, Colorado.
• June 21-July 9: LA->Mexico City->Playa Del Carmen->Cuba->LA. I’ll be exploring, taking lots of pictures, and delivering donations to the Jewish community in Cuba
• July 11-15: Volunteering with the Lightning in a Bottle festival in Temecula, California. My mom is coming to this too!
• July 16-August 6: LA->Bay Area->Oregon->Washington->Vancouver, BC: Sauntering my way up to British Columbia. Visiting friends, getting into trouble, probably drinking a lot of microbrews.
• August 7-12: Shambhala Music Festival in British Columbia. I’m just attending this one, since I can’t volunteer (darn Canadian work visas)!
• August 20somethingth: Burning Man. Bye, bye, birginity.

Once that leg of the journey is up, I’ll be making my way through the South to check out some cool town and some cool grad schools and visit some cool friends that I miss very very much. Tentative idea of that trip is:

• Tuscon, AZ (visiting Alex & Aliza?!) but really I’d rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona
• Austin, TX (checking out UT)
• New Orleans, LA (checking out Tulane)
• Nashville, TN (checking out Vanderbilt)
• Knoxville, TN (visiting Rick & Shelby!)
• Durham, NC (checking out Duke)
• Asheville, NC (visiting Avi & Liat!)
• Maybe if I’m not broke by this point, I can swing up to New England and back across the mid-west. There is a good chance I will be broke by this point, though.