Post at last

Some thoughts I tried to publish elsewhere

There’s a new literary journal online that I’ve been trying to write for called CLUNY. I advise you all to check it out. I wanted to distill some message from Ploddington for a wider audience, but ultimately the editors believed it would be hard for my draft to resonate with those unfamiliar with the project. I think they were correct, so I’m posting it here. It was inspired by a tweet from Cluny’s founder Luke Burgis.

So here is the draft I sent. Lest it give the wrong impression, I’m in a pretty good headspace right now — interviewing for jobs and thinking about what’s next for Ploddington. Nevertheless, it is a real account of my feelings during and after my trips. Hopefully, you get something out of it.

Walking

A friend told me recently that his primary care physician—not herself a psychiatric professional—said that the body registers excitement and anxiety with similar physiological responses. Sometimes, she explained, when your fight-or-flight response is partially or fully activated, you can trick yourself into thinking you’re actually in a heightened state of awareness because you’re having a great time or anticipating something good.

At the time, I didn’t connect this story to myself or what I had been doing for the past few months. But now, I can’t stop thinking about it.

Over the summer, for reasons I couldn’t quite explain, I started taking long walks from my house every day. First six miles south along Richmond Highway—formerly Jefferson Davis Highway—then eight, then fifteen. It’s about twelve miles from where I live to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate. Sometimes I’d end my walks there, stepping into the cafeteria to look at the tourists and buy a five-dollar Powerade.

Eventually, enjoying the walks and wanting to continue in a more organized fashion, I decided to take some time off from my job and see how far south into Virginia I could get. By the time I actually planned and initiated my walk from Alexandria to Richmond, I had started a Substack, and some of my friends were following along. Walking all the way to Richmond—mostly along that same highway where I had done my daily sojourns—took about five days. Something about the experience was wonderful, and even after reaching Richmond, I wished I could just keep going.

That’s when I started to wonder: could this be something I do forever?

Of course, it’s hard to walk on highways—in some places illegal, and in all places dangerous. But if you talk to homeless people and look on Reddit, there’s some conventional wisdom. Walk against traffic. Wear bright clothes. Attach a flag to your pack so drivers can see you even if you’re at a lower elevation than their sightline. I liked the idea of crossing a significant portion of the country not through woods or on trails, but through towns and major cities.

The idea developed alongside fantasies of turning it into something bigger—maybe even a project with sponsors. I contacted various dollar store chains with the notion of walking from Maine to Texas, stopping at one of their retail outlets each day. The corporate reps were polite, and some even sounded temporarily interested, but I think the lawyers put it to bed. I started a TikTok account and bought a GoPro, trying to record interesting videos. None of these attempts to scale the project really worked, but I was enjoying this new hobby and felt healthier than I had in years.

Then, in September, my job ended unceremoniously. Suddenly, I had more time, more freedom, and a little bit of money saved up for a wider adventure. I picked up a number of books on walks across America, eventually becoming engrossed in Neil King Jr.’s American Ramble—a book documenting the now-deceased journalist’s journey on foot from his townhouse on Capitol Hill to Central Park. The book was equal parts inspiring and frustrating, capturing both the admirable and naïve qualities of King’s generation.

By mid-September, I had decided to do the same walk, tracing portions of King’s route but staying closer to the coast. By the last week of the month, I was ready to leave. In early October, I reached New York.

The whole thing felt beautiful—if not transformative. It was only upon my return to D.C. that trouble started to creep in.

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At the time, I thought of my walking project as an entirely healthy pursuit. I had finally developed an interest in exercise, and even if this was a dramatic escalation, well, I had always been a dramatic guy.

But in the weeks and months after my walk, I kept encountering references—in jokes, memes, and literature—that these sudden, extreme journeys, especially by foot or bicycle, are often the domain of men in crisis.

It wasn’t just my own experience that suggested something deeper was at play. In literature and pop culture, long solitary journeys often symbolize desperation. David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” describes a protagonist, Neal, who has spent years feeling like a fraud and ultimately dies by suicide. Before that, he mentions a long, arduous bike ride from Boston to Nova Scotia. It reads like an unconscious act of avoidance, an attempt to outrun despair. Or Harry in Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro, who spends his last days reflecting on a lifetime of regrets as he stares at the mountain’s peak. Or Ishmael in Moby Dick. These stories, real and fictional, suggest that dramatic physical undertakings often signal deep internal unrest.

Looking back, I think I had accidentally done what my friend's physician recommended. I took all the energy of disappointment and terror—of reaching middle age without much to show for myself—and threw it into a dramatic physical project that delayed an internal reckoning. But the reckoning came anyway.

Some people seemed to enjoy the writing I did on my walks. The final entry for my New York journey remains a sprawling, impenetrable draft on my computer, altered dozens of times. Throughout my journey, I compared my experience to American Ramble. In my final entry, I wanted to contrast King’s perspective with Megalopolis, a film I saw upon arriving in New York, which felt like yet another example of out-of-touch boomer world-building—animated by visions of an America that hasn’t existed for quite some time.

But the reason I can’t finish that entry is that my conclusions unraveled.

I had claimed that both Megalopolis and American Ramble were dreamscapes of the geriatric class—the people still controlling much of our money and politics. My walk, I wrote, was an effort to wake up out of that dream and forge my own vision.

But when I returned home, with no walks to occupy my mind, I realized something unsettling: in rejecting the worldview of my elders, I had no positive vision to replace it. There was no waking life more real or pressing than whatever dream I had been lost in. Just other dreams. No stable identity to hold onto for balance once I tried to abandon the one inherited from my elders.

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So here’s another story.

When I was 26, I interviewed for a position with a development NGO where I had previously interned. Assuming the conversation was a formality, I was unprepared for pointed questions about my motivations. Exhausted and unwilling to fake enthusiasm, I blurted out:

"I don’t really believe in international development, and I don’t know if I believe in anything—least of all the justness of peripheral limbs of American empire. I just think I can be good at this job."

The interviewer told me that at 26, this level of ambivalence was not acceptable—at least not to say out loud. I should know what I wanted and believed.

Now, at 38, I think I know even less.

But one consolation—at 26, I felt like a lone, confused soul in a world of adults who had it all figured out. Now, the dysfunction feels universal, the certainty of identity and purpose shattered for everyone. It’s good to have company.