Walking On Legs Instead Of With Thumbs

How walking leads us out of our heads and into stories.

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Now, on to the show.

1.

I’ve stopped and started this piece no less than three times. You should see my scratch notes. They’re ridiculous. How many ways are there to start a piece on walking? 

Let me start here: I live in two worlds. 

There’s a portal in my pocket, and I step through. Sometimes I land 6,701 miles east of Fayetteville, smack in the heart of a war zone. There, I watch a five-story building reduced to its constituent parts, and a mother carries her child over deconstructed concrete walls and twisted rebar. The photo has a hazy character to it—smoke and the dust of destruction. 

Through the portal, I step into a New York City courtroom where a porn star shares the salacious details of her alleged encounter with an alleged billionaire who’d allegedly paid good money to keep the American people from discovering his sexual appetites and his penchant for magazine spankings. She is a sympathetic witness, but only because the Defendant is not.

In another room, I find the rebirth of the age-old craze among the college set: war protests. The kids have created campus encampments, and outside their tents are a series of messages: Free Palestine; End the Genocide; All Eyes on Rafah. Some talking heads take to the microphone and call these encampments Organized terror groups financed by outside influences. I wonder about encampment tents, about the overseas, underpaid laborers who stitched the seams. I consider the voices of the politicians who look for conspiracies or magazine spankings instead of solutions. I pore over the reports, and still, I cannot find an innocent party, much less a correct one.

The pocket portal moves me from one dumpster fire to the next, and in it, everything smolders—politics, the economy, the streets of world cities, American college campuses. Who is right and who is wrong? I cannot say.

But this is one world. There is another.