Tag: California

Making it through: Surviving the Great Recession on opioids and vodka

Joseph Lyttleton

Chapter IV

[Note: The names, they are a-changin’.]

The most scenic route to San Francisco from Orange County is the 101: long stretches of coastal views and cool, dry air whipping through your windows. For our cross state move, Selene and I drove the 5 through the desert.

The trip started with a fight over a flimsy IKEA mattress that refused to stay strapped to the roof of her Jeep. Selene argued for dumping the thing, but I was determined to get that slab of hay to our new home even if I had to ride on top of it. Ultimately, we dumped it by a gas station dumpster just outside L.A.

So began Year 4.

This would be Selene’s first time living away from her parents.

Relocating every year bred routine: rent an apartment, explore the neighborhood, find a job. For Selene, though – joining me despite the vehement objections of her father (strangely immune to my charms) – this relocation upended her entire existence. In addition to her family, she was leaving behind a job, college, and her college boyfriend – her entire life up until that point – to be with me as I pursued my dream; a dream, mind you, without a raison d’être.

We’d gone in with two other couples for a lease in the unfashionable Portola neighborhood of southeast San Francisco. Though the predominantly Asian neighborhood is at a remove from the more celebrated and urban areas (or, at least, was back then), wherever you find yourself in the city’s 49 square miles, you’re never far from some activity.

We arrived under the red glow of the gloaming. Greeting us at the Jeep were Ann and Don, he an aspiring stand-up from Australia, and she the manager of a clothing boutique. Inside were Samantha and Glen, an earthy, vegan couple who, like Selene and myself, were brand new transplants to San Francisco. After first impressions, I expected to have more in common with Ann and Don, but they’d soon demolish that assumption.

With greetings out of the way, Selene and I unloaded our belongings and called it a night. In echoes of my first night in Philadelphia, all we had to sleep on was a pile of blankets.

Exhausted, Selene still couldn’t sleep. The alien surroundings mixed with a motorcycle engine revving belligerently beneath our window had her on edge. I offered to go out and say something to the cyclist, but Selene insisted I stay with her. I was her anchor to the familiar, and would be for some time. I had every intent of staying awake until Selene fell asleep, but eventually I dozed off. She never did.

Our first San Francisco morning, Selene was clearly operating on frayed nerves. I suggested a walk to familiarize her with the neighborhood so the strangeness might dissipate.

She appeared to have calmed some by the time we came across a discarded mattress a few blocks from our apartment. We hauled the find back to our place, and even though we didn’t have the right size bed frame, just having a real mattress to sleep on felt like a victory. Laying sheets down, we crawled into one another’s arms. For a moment, everything felt settled.

The moment was brief.

“Are you okay?” I already knew the answer. I could feel Selene crying into my chest, her body taut as a violin string.

“I can’t do this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t stay here.”

Since our arrival, her anxiety had only grown worse. I attempted to convince her to stay and give San Francisco a chance, to trust that in time she would acclimate. I knew well the unease of unfamiliar territory. My best efforts weren’t enough, though. Even as I begged her to reconsider, she gathered her things and headed to the Jeep.

Out on the street, I tried every last arrow in my quiver to change Selene’s mind. For an instant, I thought I might have succeeded when she slid back out of the driver’s seat. But it was only to give me a tearful, trembling goodbye.

Another woman driving away.

Selene didn’t answer her phone while on the road, so I called Kate, a mutual friend, and filled her in. Kate had worked with us at the bookstore in Costa Mesa and had been privy to every development in our romance from the beginning. Sometimes she seemed as invested in Selene and my relationship as we were.

Kate leapt into action. Throughout the next week, she worked on persuading Selene to give San Francisco another shot. Sometimes, Selene and I would talk by phone, but with 400 miles between us, it was up to Kate to act as our mediator.

Alone again, I had little else to do but wander San Francisco. One afternoon, having stepped into a bookstore, a title caught my eye: Stuff White People Like. Absentmindedly flipping through the pages of the book, one entry stuck out: “Difficult Breakups.” Touché, hipsters, touché. Under the circumstances, the humor was a bit lost on me.

Day by day, Kate chipped away at Selene’s doubts. Finally, Selene called and we discussed what it would take for her to feel comfortable in the city. I vowed to spend all day, every day with her until she felt at home. We would go to shows, take in the sights, have our bohemian, San Francisco romance.

Meanwhile, Selene was remembering why she had gone with me in the first place: her boredom in Orange County, the lack of ambition she felt there, her desire to see more. She was primed to travel. Would she take the risk?

A week after I had helplessly watched her drive away, Selene returned.

It might have been the biggest mistake of her life.

September 2008

It’s hard to express just how disastrously those first months in San Francisco went for us, but consider: We moved to one of the priciest cities in the world at a moment in time that economists have identified as the nadir of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. So, not ideal.

Up until that point, it had never taken me more than a month to find work. In San Francisco, I went without employment until January of 2009. Selene had better luck, landing a gig with the San Francisco Symphony, selling tickets on commission. Bafflingly, the middle of a recession is not the best time to try to hawk tickets to the opera.

And then there was Ann and Don, the Platonic ideal of horrendous roommates. Don, the Australian comedian with an allergy to jokes, didn’t have a visa to work and so spent his days lounging on the couch in his underwear. He might have pulled off the charming layabout cliché if he weren’t such an unrepentant piece of shit. Verbally abusive towards Ann, he berated her for her cooking (though she worked all day, she made his dinner every night) and could be heard yelling at her behind their closed door almost daily.

Ann, who could be perplexingly chipper and assertive with the group, confided her grimmer truths to Samantha: she was pregnant and hoped to keep it, but Don was demanding she abort or he’d leave her. Having furthermore admitted a penchant for finding (nay, seeking) abusive relationships, there was little question which decision Ann would ultimately make. One weekend, the couple disappeared without announcement; when they returned, the matter was closed.

Samantha, Glen, Selene, and I resolved that they had to leave. Best case scenario, Don might be forced to return to Australia and would simply ditch Ann. Since they were persistently behind on the rent and owed Samantha and Glen money, their protestations garnered little sympathy. Still, Ann knew there was only one person responsible for their ousting: me.

Cornering me in the kitchen one afternoon, she unloaded, arguing that she and Don only fought because of my sinister presence. I, it turned out, was the real corrosive element in the household. More stunned than angry, my bemused expression must have rubbed her the wrong way because suddenly she reared back, snatched a spoon from the counter, and flung it at my face. Thankfully, her aim was as poor as her taste in men.

In the midst of that drama, Selene and I had our dwindling finances to worry about. We rarely went out. Instead of drinking cheap whiskey, I settled for cheaper vodka (sacrifices had to be made). We did manage a pleasant New Year’s Eve out when an elderly queer gentleman at the bar took a shining to me and bought us drinks all night in exchange for the occasional ass grab. Worth it.

As our poverty worsened, I grew convinced that my project would become a causality of the recession. The stress dissolved our bound like acid; Selene and I existed in a perpetual cycle of fighting and reconciliation.

In November, Samantha alerted me to a two-week medical study that paid $2,100. I promptly signed up. It was a drug trial. I was administered two different drugs: the first was a potent opioid, while the second was supposed to nullify the narcotic effects of the first in an effort to quell withdrawal symptoms. Either the drug worked or I was on a placebo, because the only effects I felt were constipation.

For the length of the study, I was sequestered on a single floor of the hospital, leaving Selene behind two months after promising to be by her side through everything. She was on her own, and she was fine.

Home sweet home

When I left the hospital – practically rich – Ann and Don were gone.

Shortly afterwards, we received news that Selene’s great-grandfather had passed. Driving down to Orange County to attend the funeral, we had no choice but to stay with her parents where I was not a popular guest. Still, aside for a few pointed remarks about my joblessness, her father was generally civil.

Preparing to leave, I carried our bags to the Jeep. With Selene in the house, her father stood on the driveway, drinking a beer.

“Must feel good to be the man for once,” he called out. We didn’t speak another word to each other.

(At this time, I was also dealing with excruciating pain: my wisdom teeth were coming in, but jobless and without insurance, I had to live with it.)

In December, a charming young woman named Nicki moved in with her kitten, ushering in a quiet, calm breath of fresh air. Our living dynamic was now peaceful. The five housemates spent many nights playing board games or watching movies together.

In January, I interviewed for a management position at the locally owned Books, Inc. I had interviewed for this exact same position when I first arrived in the city, but never received a call back. That was 2008; in the new year, the store manager hired me essentially on the spot. After five months adrift, we found land.

Then Nicki’s breathing problems began. We discovered moist, black mold growing in almost every room of the apartment. At first, we only noticed dark spots in the middle of the walls, but upon investigation, we uncovered thick sheets of growth behind our bookshelves and dressers. Our attempts to wipe it away were futile: the apartment was a lost cause.

Leaving behind our friends – comrades in arms, by this point – Selene and I moved to Outer Richmond, a short walk from the beach. We had been in San Francisco for six months.

After half a year of constant, roiling turmoil, our lives were stabilizing. The new apartment was clean and the new roommates were boring, but in a good way. Selene, adapted to her new life, worked as a bank teller. We could afford the occasional date night, usually Mexican food and margaritas at a corporate chain followed by a film at the indie cinema. We were making it work; we worked.

But there’s no such thing as status quo in my life.

Year 5 was on the horizon.

Keep reading: Chapter V – Chicago

The difference three months can make

Joseph Lyttleton2 Comments

Chapter III

[Reminder: Names are sometimes real, sometimes changed, sometimes made up because of whiskey.]

Three months changed my entire life.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

June, 2007

In the years immediately following 9/11, a confluence of political conservatism and social frivolity made California’s Orange County the darling of pop culture. With its green money, yellow beaches, and rainbow of white epidermis, the OC-

…the OC was everywhere. Regardless if media was glorifying or satirizing the place, all of it helped mythologize that immaculate corner of America.

Orange County’s cultural bubble had burst by the time I arrived in 2007. I don’t mean to say that the county wasn’t still wealthy – it was – but it no longer captured the ADD-ravaged attentions of the collective television audience. It had lost its aura of cool (or ironic cool), so it was the ideal place for me to move.

In fact, I moved there because of Amber. Like myself, Amber was inflicted with a compulsion to write. We had met the previous December in Los Angeles at what could loosely be described as a writers conference. Our mutual appreciation for, shall we say, spiritual matters had led to a fast friendship, and whether in LA or at meet-ups in NYC, we made swift work of a bottle.

In the waning months of my year in Philadelphia, I still hadn’t determined where I would move for Year 3. I was leaning towards Chicago, but that felt too easy since I had spent a considerable amount of time in the Windy City during my college years. Then, one evening, Amber mentioned that she needed a roommate to fill an extra room in her Costa Mesa apartment. That was that.

At 24, I was single, young (not that I knew it), and living in the land of milk and silicone.

 

Oh, and I had hair.

Our days were filled with beach lounging, eating sushi, and drinking; our nights spent clubbing, seeing comedy shows, and drinking. My alcohol intake soared, and with it came confidence. Not with women, to be clear; just with my self-estimation of artistic relevance. Now in my third year, 10 Cities/10 Years had taken shape. I envisioned the future, the path ahead: a decade documenting hard partying in America’s coolest cities.

If my alcohol consumption was at an all-time high, my art consumption was almost non-existent. Orange County was woefully lacking in anything resembling culture. Sprinkled near the beaches were an assortment of art galleries that I’d sometimes peak in, but they were invariably unimpressive showcases for some hobbyist painter’s gaudy beach porn. Live music, usually lifeblood for me, was hard to find; I attended one concert the entire time I lived in Costa Mesa, and that turned into a bit of a mess.

Amber and I took it upon ourselves to address this deficiency by holding poetry readings in our living room. Mostly, they were gatherings of writer friends, like Ivy, our resident mystic and one of the driving forces behind the initial writers conference. The get-togethers occasionally involved the reading of poetry, an unsightly event we are all better to forget, but sometimes we did more seemly things, like the evening I manically insisted every new arrival watch “2 Girls, 1 Cup.” I like to think I did my part for culture in the OC.

Oh, we had jobs, too. I worked as the music manager at a nearby Barnes & Noble (now shuttered), while Amber tended bar at a local gentleman’s club (also closed now). I learned quickly that, like almost every city in the southern half of the United States, Orange County’s public transportation was abysmal. With my apologies to Leo, good public transportation is all alike; every bad public transportation system is bad in its own way. For Costa Mesa, that meant meticulously clean buses that only arrived once every hour. Not that it mattered. Only the help took the bus.

(Costa Mesa has been nicknamed Costa Mexico because, being slightly inland and more affordable, it houses much of the immigrant population that sustains the lifestyles of the rich and famous.)

I bought a bike.

It was stolen.

I bought another bike.

One day, as I rode to work and barreled down the sidewalk (Orange County bike lanes being a joke), I spotted a pretty young girl walking towards me. Not wanting to run her over, I deftly turned my tire to swerve around her. In my head, I saw myself soaring just past her, my hair waving behind me like Fabio. In reality, my front tire hit the lip of a jutting sidewalk slab and my momentum thrust me over the handlebars and hands-first onto the pavement. As I quivered in pain on the ground, scrapped and bleeding, the girl passed by me without a word. It was the most OC experience imaginable.

December, 2007

After six months of living together, Amber and I were still enjoying each others’ company, which, in my vast roommate experience, is a rare thing. In fact, we were almost inseparable, so we started talking about living together for a second year in a different city. Amber was a young, (generally) single woman with nothing holding her in place, so why not?

I had already set my eyes on San Francisco for Year 4, and as we discussed the possibility of moving together, we fed off one another’s excitement. In mid-December, we drove up for a Wednesday night in the City by the Bay. Our belief that San Fran would be bumping every night of the week, it turned out, was mistaken.

Of course, we could’ve planned our visit better. Renting a room central-ish to the city, we unloaded our stuff and started walking. As dusk fell, we strolled through our future home together and anticipated the wild, drunken stories that awaited. While we walked, a homeless man stopped us and asked for change. Amber replied…

I’m going to be honest here: She made a comment that, although not meant in jest, cracked me up in the moment. After joking about it for months afterwards, though, and with many years to embellish the memory, I can’t recall what she actually said. So, here are some options, pick your favorite:

  1. “Can you break a hundred?”
  2. “Could you take a debit card?”
  3. “No, but do you have a cigarette?”

We wandered on through the dwindling light until we came across a streetcar to nowhere. We hopped on, hoping it would take us to the night life, but as the city light receded behind us, we realized we were heading in the wrong direction. Debarking in the dark, we sought a taxi.

“Where to?” The cabbie asked.

“We’re looking for a dance club,” I told him

“Got it.” After fifteen minutes, we arrived at our destination: a strip club.

“Not that kind of dancing.” Amber and I discussed it amongst ourselves and surmised that if we wanted mid-week dancing in San Francisco, there was only one group we could count on: The Gays.

“Take us to a gay club,” we instructed.

“Got it.” He drove us across town and deposited us in front of a garishly painted building with a large black sign that read in bold, stenciled letters, “STUD.” Oh yes, this would do nicely. Not knowing what type of bacchanal to expect, we giddily threw open the door and entered into…

An empty bar. In the void stood Nick, a solitary bartender occupying himself with the polishing of glassware. One man sat at the bar, but it was readily apparent that he was less a patron than a down-on-his-luck chap being tolerated because no one else was around. Nick’s face immediately lit up when he saw us approaching.

Apologizing for the lack of festivities, gay or otherwise, Nick offered us a drink. After two hours of fruitless searching, we saddled up. With no one else in need of Nick’s services, the three of us chatted for hours. We told him of our plan to move to the city next year and Nick assured us that, despite the evidence of this evening, we would adore San Francisco. Upon request, he happily played music so Amber and I could dance on the vacant floor by ourselves.

For every drink Nick poured Amber, he tossed me one on the house. In Costa Mesa, Amber received free drinks all the time from bros in the bar. Frequently, I milked a couple gratis cocktails from the guys trying to usher me out of the way. In the Stud, the roles were reversed. I’ve set off my share of gaydars in my time, so I knew to turn into the slide. By the time we called it quits, I’d paid for one drink and we had a new friend waiting for us to move up. Nick hugged me warmly at the door.

(I never saw him again.)

The next day, Amber and I toured the city that would be our future home. In the light of day, there was no doubt that San Francisco was one of the most beautiful metropolises I’d ever visited. I was already picturing the possibilities.

An example of somewhere we didn’t visit in SF

There was just one hiccup in our plans: Though I’d been preparing for this move since I deplaned in June, Amber hadn’t been anticipating a relocation. 2008 was dawning, with five short months until my intended departure. So she asked: Was willing to delay my move through the summer to give her extra time to save funds?

Sure, I said. What difference could three months make?

June, 2008

In the interim months between our trip to San Francisco and the time I had originally intended to move, things between Amber and I changed. Mostly, I suppose, it was simply the passage of time. I made friends at work and had developed my own sort of life, while Amber dated and went out with friends from different circles. Our drifting apart was, at least partially, due to the inevitable entropy of existence.

With the summer approaching and the move less than three months away, I was keenly aware that Amber’s financial position seemed no different than it had been in December.

I can’t speak for her. There are dozens of reasons why a person may decide to stay instead of moving, most perfectly understandable. I suspect for Amber there were a number of reasons, including the simple fact that she had built a life in Southern California. She may have also concluded that while I had a specific (albeit esoteric) rationale for moving, she was just going on a whim.

In those final months together, Amber and I didn’t talk much. Our lives were on different tracks. I had fallen head first into a romance with a coworker and my plans for San Francisco were quickly – and dramatically – changing. Rooming with her had been the best living situation I could have hoped for, but that phase of my life – like so many before it, so many after – had to end.

I ruminate often on how much my life changed because of that one choice to stay an extra three months in Costa Mesa. If I had arrived in San Francisco in June instead of September – before the Great Recession had kicked into full gear – I quite possibly could have found work right away instead of being unemployed for five months. I would have lived with different roommates instead of an emotionally damaged woman and her abusive boyfriend. I wouldn’t have had to move halfway through the year because of mold eating away at every surface of the apartment.

Something might have kept me in San Francisco. Maybe I would’ve done the next six cities in a different order, or picked different cities altogether. A thousand divergent paths came into existence the moment I made that seemingly minor deviation.

I will never know the ways my life changed because of those three months.

What I do know is, I would’ve never fallen in love with Selene.

Keep reading: Chapter IV – San Francisco

A Year to Remember

Joseph Lyttleton

We are going to remember 2016.

We are going to remember it for what we lost. We are going to remember it for all that happened, and for all that we had hoped would happen, but did not. There will be times when the memories will come back to us in waves of pain and anger and utter dismay. We will not be able to forget.

And we should not.

I remember 2008.

I was living in Costa Mesa when January 1st, 2008 rolled around, rooming with a woman about my age, a bartender and a fellow writer. She had been invited to spend New Years Eve in San Diego with one of her regulars, and because we were close friends at the time, she got him to extend the invitation to me. It was, if memory serves (though it rarely does) my first time in a limo.

nye-limo-colors

It was also my first and only time getting V.I.P. bottle service in a club, which we followed up by bouncing from house party to house party with a limo driver who was more than game. It was an auspicious way to begin what would be one of the most transformative years of my life.

In retrospect, 2008 was the year that solidified 10 Cities/10 Years. While I had already made three moves by then, there was still a part of me in that third year that assumed something would come along to get me to stop somewhere. By 2009, I was committed to the project.

The first few months of 2008 weren’t all that remarkable – there was one pretty bad date – but springtime herald a seismic change in the form of a girl. It’s no exaggeration to say that meeting Chandra changed the direction of my life, though perhaps not as much as I changed hers, for better or worse.

Frankly, my life’s course was altered fairly easily in those days. Throughout the project, but most especially in those first four years, I was a leaf in the wind, boundless and subject to whims. Falling in love was both a tether and a weight, which in time would feel constricting, but at first simply felt like security, like a purpose.

When Chandra and I moved to San Francisco for my fourth year, we had only been dating three months, we were madly in love, and a global financial collapse was looming. I’m almost certain there’s no connection.

2008 was the year I couldn’t find work. 2008 was the year that I spent two weeks in a hospital for a medical study just to pay rent. 2008 was the year my hair started falling out. I’m almost certain there’s a connection.

 

waiting-for-the-bus-wash

In November of 2008, Barack Obama won the presidency of the United States of America, and for the first time in my life, I felt pride in my country.

It wasn’t that I had ever hated America or felt ashamed of the nation of my birth. Up until that point, I had been largely disengaged both socially and politically other than being a fan of Jon Stewart. When Bush won in 2000, I shrugged. When he won in 2004, I was surprised and disappointed, but largely blasé about the results. 2008 was the first time the results of an election moved me.

I had tears in my eyes. Most of San Francisco did, too.

As Chandra, our roommates, and I sat in our living room watching the results come in, we could hear the celebrations in the street. But at the same time, I also vividly recall that indescribable mix of feelings as we realized that, while we had just elected our first African American president – I had voted for a black president – California had simultaneously passed Prop 8, the statewide ban on Same Sex Marriage.

Now I see that moment as a warning, a metaphor for the next 8 years of American history. Each victory for justice, every step towards progress would be met with an equal force of opposition, a step backwards.

The next few years would bring gains and losses in equal measure, often because of choices I made that year. 2008 remains a notable highpoint for 10 Cities/10 Years, but not because it was my happiest year – far from it. In fact, that year included some of the lowest lows of the entire decade, including near homelessness. But surviving 2008 made me conclude that I had to finish the project. It gave me resolve.

Similarly, 2016, a year of extreme lows (with a few peaks), has helped me realize that what I need in my life more than anything is travel. I adore New York City, have thoroughly enjoyed living in Brooklyn, but I haven’t found my final home. Maybe I never will.

Everything about this moment in history feels uncertain, and 2017 looms ahead of us like a dark forest. If someone claims to know what the future holds, expect the tithe buckets, because one way or another, they’re coming for your money.

I hope in 2024 I can look back on this year with the same clarity that I now see 2008. I hope when eight years have passed, I recognize this moment as the point where I made the decision that shaped my life going forward. I hope I’m still traveling.

And, above all else, I hope in 8 years, I can feel proud of my country again.

 

The Road Trip Begins

Joseph Lyttleton

Sunday morning, at 9:30, we embarked.

The drive from Brooklyn to Long Beach requires roughly 42 hours. We are giving ourselves between 4 and 5 days to make it, meaning an average of 8 to 10 hours a day.

We drove for nearly 13 hours yesterday, in 6 different states: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana.

Today, we are driving roughly 7 hours to Lawrence, Kansas where I will meet up with most of my family, some of whom for the 1st time in 2 years. No cats will be present.

And then Tuesday we’ll make our way south through New Mexico (the meth is better there than in Missouri).

I’ll update when and if I can.

Cheers,

~L

the Road is Life

The 3rd Road Trip: New York City to Los Angeles

Joseph Lyttleton1 Comment

The end approaches.

I can’t think of any better way to bring 10 Cities/10 Years to a finish than with a cross-country road trip. To that end, I will spend the last week of August driving from New York City to Los Angeles, pretty much as extensive and representative a drive as one could attempt through this nation.

It will be my 3rd such cross-country road trip in 2 years, which includes my move from New Orleans to Boston for year 9, and a trek from Phoenix to Boston with my roommate to kick off 2014. The 3rd and final Keroucian™ endeavor will find my ex-roommate and I, once again, traversing the expanse of America via stick shift. Whereas last time we crossed through the South, this time we’re cutting straight through the Midwest.

Just knowing the trip is less than 2 weeks away is making me restless.

If I have 1 regret for this trip, it’s that I won’t have an opportunity to hit any new states this time around, but since we have a limited time frame and I’ve visited 40 of the 50, it’s not much of a concern.

Because, ultimately, all I care about is the drive. I had the epiphany the last time I was staring down the long stretch of the road that there is no life I crave more than the one experienced at 80 mph (except, perhaps, for the one experienced at 90, 100, 120…). I haven’t owned a car in more than a decade for the simple reason that city living at its truest has no need for it. The best cities provide you access to all its wonders without needing a driver’s license.

However, as much as I love city living – and there’s no equivocating, I do love it – it is still a pleasure to escape it on occasion. The automobile is, for my money, one of the greatest human inventions. I don’t believe there is anywhere on this planet* that I would be content to stay forever. The road is… well, you know the rest.

Our cross-country trek begins on the 23rd, stopping in various locations (including Lawrence) and we’ll be seeing some friends and family along the way. We have a basic route mapped out, but as any traveler will tell you, the best trips are those with the least plans. We’ll make it up as we go. Life, man.

(And then I’ll return to Brooklyn to celebrate the completion of an utterly silly decade.)

I. Can. Not. Wait.

Wish us luck!

*If the opportunity to be one of the first travelers to Mars presented itself, you can bet your ass I would leave everything and everyone behind to make the journey.