CHAPTER ONE

FOUND

I bought the cabin for $7,500 from a guy on Craigslist. He was a tugboat captain. His name was Tony.

Here's why:

I was in my midtwenties and experiencing what felt like a sort of quarter-life crisis. People all around me, people I thought were my friends, were going off and doing ridiculous things like getting careers and advanced degrees, husbands, wives, kids, dogs, and other accoutrements of the heavy-responsibility genre. They knew what Roths and IRAs and 401(k)s were, or at least they knew enough to know that wondering what those things were was something to be concerned about. And here I was, thinking that we had all agreed to get through college, or at least those years when one might go to college, and then just sort of hang out forever and eat pizza and watch The Simpsons. It had seemed like a good plan, but no one else was holding up their end of the bargain. I had no idea what I wanted.

I was living in Seattle, trying to be a writer. But it wasn't working out. I'd gone to college. At one point, there was a plan to become a doctor. Instead, I double majored in anthropology and history. It's hard to imagine an educational shift more perfectly suited to destroying a person's job prospects. After graduating, I wandered. I spent six months in Patagonia, a month in Colombia. Rarely did I receive mail for more than a year at the same address. I worked at random jobs—a bartender, a sandwich delivery person, a sushi busboy. Out of those wanderings and a social science education, I'd landed on a dream of becoming a gonzo journalist travel writer type person. Think Hunter S. Thompson meets Paul Theroux and Anthony Bourdain. I wanted to hunt down bizarre stories and wild characters, mostly because it seemed like a surefire way to fuel an endlessly intriguing day-to-day life. Apparently, however, those jobs are not easy to come by. Instead, I'd sit at my laptop and fire off story pitches to editors who couldn't have cared less. Jobs were few and far between. The pay was terrible. The reality was a constant, stressful, demoralizing struggle.

I started selling off parts of the writing dream for things like being able to afford rent, health care, and foods that didn't rhyme with Rop Tamen. I stopped chasing the underpaid cool magazine jobs and accepted the desk jockey marketing copy gigs. Years after leaving college with an intent to roam the earth telling the stories of beautiful lunatics, I was in an office creating email templates to sell advertising to plumbers and wondering how I'd ended up here.

It felt like a great secret that I was completely lost. The lack of direction and purpose were embarrassing, like a part of me was missing. When I looked around, it seemed that everyone else was getting on with things, stacking their cards, squirreling away, creating plans for five years, ten years, and beyond. My long-term plans ended at knowing when the leftover Chinese food would go bad.

At first, I really wanted to fix the problem. I wanted to find a new purpose and dive in with everything. But it wasn't happening, or I wasn't looking in the right place, or I was being too lazy about the whole thing. I had no idea. What I did know was that every passing week, month, and year that the aimlessness went on, I was more and more desperate.

Slowly, that desire to find a purpose festered into a simple desperation to at least appear like I had a purpose. If I couldn't find a cure, maybe I could at least find something that worked on the symptoms. I needed a distraction of responsibility, a smoke and mirrors show that I could hold up to the rest of the world while I feverishly figured out what in the hell I was doing.

I knew that there were a few gold-standard, proof-of-responsibility milestones that I could turn to. Things like grad school, marriage, kids, enlisting in the military, maybe. But the idea of going back to school seemed ludicrous, which made the idea of a new career seem pretty unlikely. Getting married was a bit too dependent on the cooperation of others, and having a kid was that same problem multiplied. The military, as far as I knew, still involved a lot of running around, so that was out.

At the time, the girl I was dating announced that she was looking to buy a house. It was an idea that seemed absurd to me, considering the closest I had ever come to qualifying for a mortgage was getting approved to finance a DVD player from Best Buy. Her confidence in tackling the task made me question how unbelievably out of my league she was.

CHAPTER ONE

FOUND

I bought the cabin for $7,500 from a guy on Craigslist. He was a tugboat captain. His name was Tony.

Here's why:

I was in my midtwenties and experiencing what felt like a sort of quarter-life crisis. People all around me, people I thought were my friends, were going off and doing ridiculous things like getting careers and advanced degrees, husbands, wives, kids, dogs, and other accoutrements of the heavy-responsibility genre. They knew what Roths and IRAs and 401(k)s were, or at least they knew enough to know that wondering what those things were was something to be concerned about. And here I was, thinking that we had all agreed to get through college, or at least those years when one might go to college, and then just sort of hang out forever and eat pizza and watch The Simpsons. It had seemed like a good plan, but no one else was holding up their end of the bargain. I had no idea what I wanted.

I was living in Seattle, trying to be a writer. But it wasn't working out. I'd gone to college. At one point, there was a plan to become a doctor. Instead, I double majored in anthropology and history. It's hard to imagine an educational shift more perfectly suited to destroying a person's job prospects. After graduating, I wandered. I spent six months in Patagonia, a month in Colombia. Rarely did I receive mail for more than a year at the same address. I worked at random jobs—a bartender, a sandwich delivery person, a sushi busboy. Out of those wanderings and a social science education, I'd landed on a dream of becoming a gonzo journalist travel writer type person. Think Hunter S. Thompson meets Paul Theroux and Anthony Bourdain. I wanted to hunt down bizarre stories and wild characters, mostly because it seemed like a surefire way to fuel an endlessly intriguing day-to-day life. Apparently, however, those jobs are not easy to come by. Instead, I'd sit at my laptop and fire off story pitches to editors who couldn't have cared less. Jobs were few and far between. The pay was terrible. The reality was a constant, stressful, demoralizing struggle.

I started selling off parts of the writing dream for things like being able to afford rent, health care, and foods that didn't rhyme with Rop Tamen. I stopped chasing the underpaid cool magazine jobs and accepted the desk jockey marketing copy gigs. Years after leaving college with an intent to roam the earth telling the stories of beautiful lunatics, I was in an office creating email templates to sell advertising to plumbers and wondering how I'd ended up here.

It felt like a great secret that I was completely lost. The lack of direction and purpose were embarrassing, like a part of me was missing. When I looked around, it seemed that everyone else was getting on with things, stacking their cards, squirreling away, creating plans for five years, ten years, and beyond. My long-term plans ended at knowing when the leftover Chinese food would go bad.

At first, I really wanted to fix the problem. I wanted to find a new purpose and dive in with everything. But it wasn't happening, or I wasn't looking in the right place, or I was being too lazy about the whole thing. I had no idea. What I did know was that every passing week, month, and year that the aimlessness went on, I was more and more desperate.

Slowly, that desire to find a purpose festered into a simple desperation to at least appear like I had a purpose. If I couldn't find a cure, maybe I could at least find something that worked on the symptoms. I needed a distraction of responsibility, a smoke and mirrors show that I could hold up to the rest of the world while I feverishly figured out what in the hell I was doing.

I knew that there were a few gold-standard, proof-of-responsibility milestones that I could turn to. Things like grad school, marriage, kids, enlisting in the military, maybe. But the idea of going back to school seemed ludicrous, which made the idea of a new career seem pretty unlikely. Getting married was a bit too dependent on the cooperation of others, and having a kid was that same problem multiplied. The military, as far as I knew, still involved a lot of running around, so that was out.

At the time, the girl I was dating announced that she was looking to buy a house. It was an idea that seemed absurd to me, considering the closest I had ever come to qualifying for a mortgage was getting approved to finance a DVD player from Best Buy. Her confidence in tackling the task made me question how unbelievably out of my league she was.