Just watched a documentary on CBC about this Canadian guy living in Moscow, teaching english. He’s been there for the last 3 years and plans on never leaving. It got me really thinking again about leaving Vancouver. It’s a desire that’s been coming up for me a lot in the last year or so and has been increasing with time.
I don’t really know exactly where I want to go. The problem is not in that I can’t decide on where to go, just where to go first and how to work it so that I can make money wherever I may roam.
Here’s some places I want to go:
Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos. I could likely go to all these countries on the same trip. Might take about 4 months to explore them.
Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic. If i go back to Cuba, I will spend longer there and likely backpack around. I would fly in to Havana and hitchhike around. Hitch hiking is pretty easy and common in Cuba. My spanish would come back fast, but I wouldn’t want to actually settle in any of these countries. Just backpack.
Berlin. I want to live in Berlin for a while. A few years, likely. I want to look in to getting German citizenship though my mom to make living there easier. I can speak some German, so that would be a start. Berlin would also be a good basecamp for exploring the rest of Europe…
Rome, Prague, Amsterdam. I love the history, culture and architecture of these cities and I want to spend a while exploring each one.
**** **** ****
I haven’t felt good all day. I refered to it earlier as a “low-level mental toxicity” and that pretty accurately describes it. My mind has been reeling for the last couple days straight and I haven’t been able to shut it up. I has a few days in the early part of the week where it was just quiet… That blabbery voice stopped talking to me and I was able to just live in the moment and be positively appreciative of every moment. Now it’s on my again like a haunt. It is driving me nuts. Been obsessed with the desire to smoke all day today as well. I am inclined to link the desire to smoke with the conditioning to smoke. But then I had a different thought today – That smoking, like drinking, like drugs are all symptoms of the same problem. And that problem is me. I have a spiritual defficiency, so they tell me. I don’t know what else to call it, but I can definitely agree with the symptoms all being caused by the same thing. I am trying to self-medicate, trying to make myself feel okay. And it is not working. It rarely did, and when it did it was brief, like maybe for the first smoke of the day, or the first hoot of the pipe after sleeping for three days.
I so badly want relief again. Today is the 11th. Which means today marks 20 months without any alcohol or drug to alter the way I feel. That is pretty incredible for me to think about, and I am proud of that. I hope it is justified to be proud of that. It was fucking hard. Just like not smoking is fucking hard. But ya know, after 20 months without being able to escape from my head, I just want some fucking relief. And I am looking everywhere for it.