Since I rented a car in Texas to drive Job and I back to New England a month ago to be with my mother, I have returned to the "normal" world full force and have been engulfed in it, participating in all it’s habits. My mother and father still live in the same house I grew up in. When I grew up, it was on a dead end dirt road surrounded by woods and across the road through the woods was the river. Me, my brother, and the rest of the kids in the neighborhood, had a network of trails. I took a trail to get to the dock. I took a trail out to the street to catch the school bus. I took trails to get to other trails, and, of course, I made new trails to take me places I’d never been before. What we lacked in material things we had in nature. The road is paved, now, with a culdesac at the end of it. All the woods are gone. Many of the trails I made have been turned into roads and driveways.Big houses with shinny new cars and S.U.V.’s parked in front of them have taken it's place. The river is still there, but it’s crowded with more and more docks and houses along the marsh. My mother and father don’t seem all that affected by it. Our gravel driveway is, also, now paved. Our rough-around-the-edges yard is now perfectly green. They even bought a new car a few years ago, their first, and then a truck shortly after, also their first. I feel like a stranger in an unfamiliar place. However, they are private "normal" people and this website is something I’ve chosen to do, not them. I started it almost like writing a message in a bottle for someone to find who may also be on a journey or maybe like a map nailed to a tree deep within a forest for someone to use who also decided to take the road less traveled. Now, that I’m back in "babylon with white picket fences" I’m not sure there’d be any sense to continue with this.

I can not point my finger at the world and say it is wrong for the way it operates because I’ve enjoyed the benefits of this world for the majority of my life. It was only as I was becoming a young adult did I stop participating in the things that a "normal" life expected of me. In learning how to live a better life for myself I’ve chosen to give up things like cars, cell phones, tv, money, etc. because I believe they distracted and deterred me from having a peaceful, simple life. I learnt that the key to living a peaceful life was minimizing your needs. As a result, overtime I realized we truly need less and less. This progression made me happier and happier. When I would return to places in the country I’d been to in previous years, people who knew me there would often comment on the change. At first it would surprise me because I didn’t know I was unhappy, but it, also, reassured me that I was on the right path.

I had planned on arriving in California right about now reconnecting with some good friends in LA to begin production on my next movie while still maintaining a simplistic lifestyle somewhere along the coast. The key to that would have been just like the key to walking across the country was. I choose what road I walk down, my preference being a quiet country road or even better a trail. But, for the first time in ten years I can not choose any road I want. This is where my mother is and I will not leave her. I suppose the choice is still mine I take full responsibility for it. What I will not take responsibility for is what has happened to this place and all the other places like it all across America where growth, commercialization and poor social skills are running ramped.

Late at night Job and I walk through the neighborhood and down to the dock where we paddle a canoe up the river to remote section of woods to sleep.