"You are brave, son, and I'm proud of you. But life is easier for cowards"

[quote: William Vollmann ; video: Bukowski's The Man With the Beautiful Eyes]

I'm getting used to these departures. Either I leave or they leave, and the map gradually becomes scattered pushpins, and circuitous routes of waiting debauchery and thrift-store couches across this makeshift homeland. Our generation, more than any other, is poised to make the wind our home.

My good friend Dale is in New York City now, going to school to be one of our finest journalists. I try to forget that it was nearly my next stop on this pilgrimage. That if I'd done things slightly different, the two us would be, right now, drunk on some nocturnal rooftop making promises at the wedge of moon we can make out between skyscrapers. Carving out some niche in the lurching mythology of that city fantastic. I suppose I simply have a different desert, a disparate mirage teasing me through the skips and the trudge.

I learned things from young Eisinger. I learned secrets about this city I now inhabit; I learned the value of art, and how you can make it the sole aegis of your life; I learned that the world belongs to those with a tolerance for risk; I learned that naivete is simply a lack of awareness and it can be remedied a thousand ways; I learned that in our weakness is where we hide what is vulnerable and beautiful in us; I learned that vision has no time for the world; I learned the stupidity of half-measures; relearned the wisdom of excess. I remembered that, like Kerouac, the only ones for me are the mad ones. And again my tribe is populated by those that might do anything, those that rebel by celebrating, by snickering at the controls. And I learned things about writing, Dale being perhaps the single most versed individual of my work, its strongest advocate and its most incisive critic. Every piece I cobble together has some fragment of him in it, and I daresay it always will.

Those still in the city of trees lament him leaving, to a point. Dale owned this place, as much as he wanted sometimes not to. But he's got something pretty major going on, and how could we possibly expect him to sit still? But he'll be missed: through him I met so many of the people that I now consider friends here and I had virtually all of the balls-out, cackling nights I've had in Boise. I'll miss occasionally waking up on his couch, I'll miss narrowly escaping intervention by the authorities, and flying around town on our bikes, the unpredictability and intellectual rigor of our conversations, I'll miss the various capers I probably shouldn't mention. Good times, bro. Hope to see you before long.