WHAT R U LOOKING 4?

YO PENELOPE, SAVE ME!

— 1 .

DO U KNOW WHAT U WANT? —

. . . there’s a feeling that often comes over a young man: I am here for something GREAT; in the midst of all the animate debris we call humanity, I, unlike everyone else, am here for a SPECIAL purpose. . . . The young man is filled with ENTHUSIASM, in its most ancient significance: filled by God.

Only thing left to do: prove to the world how special U are. But how?

— HOW: provoker of DESPAIR. . . burbling with nothing to POP for; U: the pointless volcano. Maybe U take off, start walking. That’s what Sean does in The Walk Book (2026),

“what if I didn’t turn around when I got to the end of the day’s walk, what if I kept going, stayed tapped into that wakeful state, of seeing the world clearly and simply, of thinking and writing and speaking while face to face with the world, in direct contact with the wind and the sun and the snow and the road. . . what if I walked perennially into new spaces and just kept walking.”

Now the young man has an extravagant & lofty QUEST: — a way to prove to himself & the world how special he is; and maybe, thru unmediated contact with nature & humanity, he can learn something. . . a lesson he can bring back and TEACH.

As long as there have been men, there have been wanderers; the storyteller is the first wanderer who returned. Ulysses wandered for 10 years. But as G.K. Chesterton points out in Heretics (1905),

“the real Ulysses does not desire to wander at all. He desires to get back home. He displays his heroic and unconquerable qualities in resisting the misfortunes that baulk him; but that is all.”

Ulysses is a fully formed man; he knows EXACTLY what he wants: to get the fuck back home. The spirit of adventure doesn’t drive him forward because he already has a home! He knows what he’s looking for.

But by the time Dante puts Ulysses in hell, humans have developed a completely different relationship with eternity. The crucifixion’s romance cursed man with a nagging, palpitating glow: like Jesus, I am uniquely & irrevocably SINGULAR & vital to the structure of the universe. . . now Ulysses is off with fervor, to gain experience of the world, learn about man’s vices and their worth. —

Now we wander for transcendence. If I expose myself to nearly 30 miles a day of walking in the nemetic sun, annihilating my feet, accumulating sweat & sunburn like layers of sediment, commit to doing it ALONE, man against the road, fighting tedium & fatigue; maybe, at the end of the trial, like Dante, I will be eye to eye with the structure of eternity, or,

“Near the end of the unnamed country road I walk alone, I sit on a cement slab overlooking a creek, aside the carcass of a completely shattered snapping turtle. The range of shell shards is baffling. I get up and start moving the pieces together, to reconstruct it, conduct some makeshift burial. Till I’m interrupted by a pickup truck that comes flying around the bend, that I hadn’t seen coming, that honks as it passes, savagely crunching my arrangement.”

I’ll find out this material world is fucking hard. And I need some HELP.

— 2 .

ISN’T IT ANNOYING THAT WE NEED OTHER PPL? —

. . . there’s nothing more humiliating than asking for help, admitting we’re too weak to solve a problem on our own, that we are no lions, but terrified little turtles, tucked away in our shells, trembling. —

In Eddie Huang’s Come Undone (2026), Hubie is at a different crisis point than Sean the Walker. He’s almost 40 years old; he’s spent over a decade wandering, confirming his specialness in the world, but he’s still lost because he has no HOME,

“I had to get ahold of myself but was fully incapable. It’s moments like this, pissy drunk at eleven A.M. on a weekday, wandering the canyon, when it hits me that I worked my ass off just to become a full-grown baby man who has way too much time to stare at his emotional needs.”

Life’s initial crisis: being born into a family. Sometimes all subsequent crises are re-enactments of the first, trying to suture the harm that hurt U early, — which no lapse can balm. Chesterton says the family is the perfect institution simply because it is uncongenial,

“The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born. This is, indeed, the sublime and special romance of the family.”

Nobody can deny: in some families, there is no sublimity: we cross from uncongenial into life-deforming. Hubie’s a fuckboy who struts around posturing, joking, acting like an asshole because deep down he feels like he’s the little boy who would run off to the Red Roof Inn with his mom to eat ice cream after his dad beat her up,

“I didn’t call the cops and I didn’t fight back and she never left him. . . My mom would get three scoops—pistachio, pecan praline, strawberry—on a banana split with fudge, caramel, wet walnuts, whipped cream, and a cherry on top. Mom was a real pretty bitch until she got fat eating ice cream when we ran away.

‘I don’t know why you keep going back, Mom.’

‘I have nowhere to go, Hubie. I stay here for you.’”

Hubie wants to find LOVE: which for him means HOME. What’s Ulysses without Penelope waiting for him? He’s a deadbeat sailor. Hubie hasn’t been able to find what he’s looking for his entire life because he can’t admit he’s WEAK.

The hardest thing in the world is to admit Ur weak when U’ve been weak, when U’ve been helpless,

“Humility is perpetually putting us back in the primal darkness. There all light is lightning, startling and instantaneous. It has been supposed that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by extending our ego to infinity, the truth is that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by reducing our ego to zero. Humility is the thing which is forever renewing the earth and the stars.”

But how do U have the strength to say: I am a worm, when U are, indeed, a worm?

— 3 .

WHAT DOES THE WANDERER LEARN? —

. . . it’s amazing how many people help Sean the Walker during his outrageous voyage; it becomes impossible for him to cling, anymore, to his reckless & heroic autonomy,

“Feeling like there’s something totally foolish and indulgent and obstinate about what I’m doing, what I’ve been doing—especially if I’m not even able to uphold the essential aspect of what I’m trying to do, of not needing anything, of showing one can move through the world not needing anything, with no money, with only your two feet, sleeping out. Something tragic and totally deflating about just how much I’m suddenly needing.”

Sean the Walker feels tragic & deflated because he’s not learning the lesson he thought he was gonna learn on the walk. He doesn’t confirm his inklings about his own remarkability: that he is the POINT of eternity; rather, he learns he is a branch of eternity; ineluctably connected to all the life & world around him: NEEDING, and reciprocating need.

He learns about CHARITY, and therefore learns how to write,

“Charity is a reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the soul. . . . And the novel is a creation of the mystical idea of charity.”

— Both Hubie & Sean are rescued by their Penelopes. Sean’s, who he left back home in Philly, happens to be on a road trip with her sister, and she picks him up in Colorado,

“I almost start crying when I see her. She’s crying. I don’t know why she’s crying. I ask her. ‘We passed you on the road earlier, and you just looked so. . . sad. Sitting there by the road.’”

Hubie’s Penelope, Janine, picks him up from the proverbial side of the road. — Why do we fall in love with the people we do,

“Science cannot analyse any man’s wish for a pork-chop, and say how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a haunting love of the beautiful. Man’s desire for a pork-chop remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for heaven.”

Women are not pork-chops, of course, because pork-chops can’t break U down and force U to grow up. Janine gets pregnant, and it leads to a medical emergency, and suddenly Hubie is forced to be different than he ever was,

“I understood the magnitude. There really wasn’t any time to be a narcissist obsessed with my own bullshit young-adult-male inner turmoil. Get it the fuck together, Hubie!”

Both The Walk Book and Come Undone end with mothers; a journey never ends until U return to the beginning. Sean ends with a calm moment of happiness: his new start, the beginning of true literature:

“I drink my coffee, and it’s just so still and calm, we can hear the seals barking a block away, they’re waking up too, and I look at her and laugh and she laughs, and it’s like nothing ever happened, I’ve traveled all this way for what, there’s nothing left to do but start reading again.”

Hubie, laughing too, makes a decision about his mother,

“I laughed like I always did—it was the only thing that ever got me through the life she gave me. I loved my mother. I always had. I just couldn’t have her in my life anymore.”

He can’t have his mother around because he’s gonna marry Janine (who is pregnant again) and cultivate his own HOME; and U can’t have a home without walls. . . .

Sean & Hubie grow up by getting out of their own fucking head, learning humility: which means recognizing other people are out here same as U. And doing the only reasonable thing there is for a man to do: devote Ur life to something irrational, maybe irresponsible. . . Love or Literature: and bring the romance of the journey, home.

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VAI BRASIL!!!!

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