The Firewood 013: The pizza rat race
This has nothing to do with Pizza Rat but I can never not give him a nod
Hello, friends.
It’s been a hot minute. I’ll get to that shortly.
And, a requisite trigger warning: this email is almost entirely a personal essay. There is very likely nothing relevant to your life in it, unless you too are a burned-out media industry drone or a digital nomad whose internal compass is currently spinning like a wind turbine. I hope you like it anyway, but if you aren’t one for self-indulgence, I won’t make you read on. (But if you want to donate to my fundraiser for the Climb For Heroes hike on November 13 before you close this email or browser window, THAT’S COOL TOO!)
I write here to you in strikingly similar circumstances to those I found myself in when I started this newsletter: quite literally hauling firewood. I’m in a rural pocket of central-ish Maine that my mother’s family has called home for the better part of a century. And September hits hard in these parts. Just a few days into meteorological autumn, the temperatures are already dropping into the low 50s at night, and the frequent evening rainstorms bring an ambiance that makes you want to walk out to an old red barn and pick up some crudely chopped beech and bring it back inside and stuff it into an old brick fireplace and light that baby up.
Luckily, here, I can do that.
The neighbors are on to it, too. The other night while walking to the barn to grab a few logs I paused for a moment and inhaled, and breathed in the distinct scent of burning wood. Where it came from, I don’t know. It could have been an outdoor fire pit surrounded by friends with cans of beer in hand, or a campfire where children watched their marshmallows melt into oozing alien creatures that dance and contort before the flames. Or perhaps it was indoors, a family nestled around what was once the burning heartbeat of an 18th-century farmhouse — back when keeping that flame alight was vital for warmth and survival — but where that hearth is now surrounded by carpets from Wayfair and a couch from West Elm, the fire ignited with firestarters ordered from Amazon, the kindling wadded-up paper bags from Hannaford’s. And, crucially, the necessary heat comes from the local utilities company. But the allure of the fire remains: as a gathering place, a source of light and hope and warmth.
A month ago I left Southern California, a place where these days when you’re talking about fire it means something very different. Let’s take that contrast into a metaphor, shall we: The things that you rely on, that you hold dear as a source of gathering and connection and community can also break you down, scorch and destroy all that’s around you, and if you aren’t careful they can kill you.
Yes, I am talking about the internet.
The fires I’ve been building in Maine are just for me. I’m here to try to get the hell away from too much technology, to read analog dead-tree books (as I hurl the less desirable remnants of other dead trees, choppy logs and outdated newspapers, onto an open flame), to sprawl alone on the couch as the flames crackle and the late-season crickets chirp outside the window. It’s damned weird to find analog solace in the phenomenon that’s been at the root of countless morality tales about the dangers of innovation and ambition — of Prometheus, of Icarus and the sun — or the strange hope present in the flames bursting from the underbellies of rockets shooting off the ground as thousands of us watch over a livestream in the hopes that some billionaire can reignite the wild-eyed dreams we had about worlds beyond our own. But fire. Holy shit. This planet we live on. These laws of physics and chemistry. The nonstop and sometimes fatal balance of hubris and humility. Holy shit. (NB: Recreational marijuana was legalized in Maine on May 2, 2018 and there are six dispensaries within a 15-minute drive of our house.)
Finding (or not finding) solid ground
The reason you haven’t heard from me in months has been that I feel like I’ve been struggling to find some footing. Any footing. And I’ve been flailing to the extent that anything creative has had to be ignored in the name of just staying afloat. Including this writing project. Many things about being completely rootless were empowering a year and a half ago, and some of them continue to be. But the thing they don’t tell you about being a “digital nomad” is that when something real-life takes a big turn into a new direction, you may wish you had more ground to stand on.
I thought I was sort of settling down in Los Angeles, but then I lived in four different apartments over the course of about six months and failed to find a perfect fit. Most notably, in May I moved from Venice Beach’s lively shores to the far quieter and more residential Silver Lake, which is on the other side of the city and may as well be over an international border. (That’s arguably what the 405 is, depending on who you ask.) I was shocked, for example, to see people drinking beer. In beer gardens. You know, carbs. The places I’d frequent in Venice tended to prefer organic charcoal vodka lemonades if you were feeling fancy and White Claws if you weren’t. It was a shock to see pale bodies wearing black leather jackets. There’s no beach in Silver Lake, and far more hills, but May and June were still a beautiful time of year to be on the east side; the jacaranda trees were just in bloom, adding a gorgeous purple fuzz to the tree-lined streets, and there were so many outlandish plants in gardens that I sometimes found myself walking around with a plant identification app, learning about the existence of things like crimson bottlebrush. (Which is very much not native to California.)
Then there were the mundane things that managed to seem jarring, like squirrels. For one reason or another I strongly associate squirrels with the East Coast, and sure enough, the squirrels I would see in Silver Lake were members of a non-native species — the fox squirrel — which was introduced from parts east. The jacaranda came from Brazil. Some way, somehow, Los Angeles manages to remind you at every turn that it is not a real place, or at least not real in the sense of the word that we’re used to.
I was settling into tranquil, birdsong-filled mornings on the porch and urban nature walks through the neighborhood’s many secret staircases and weekend trips to Angeles National Forest, which was just half an hour’s drive away. Then I moved into a new role at work, and everything changed.
The pizza rat race
With apologies to my co-workers who are reading this (and I know you’re there! hello!) a year ago I didn’t think I’d be at my job for much longer. The advertising industry is not an easy business to be in as as woman in one’s late 30s (or older), and though I have loved my co-workers since day one, I had been subject to a creeping suspicion that the industry itself no longer had a place for me. As a woman in advertising, if you aren’t a hotshot in Louboutins and designer dresses (never a size bigger than 6, of course!) and on every 40-under-40 list by the time you hit That Age™, effortlessly able to sling back six vodka tonics with clients one night and then show up at SoulCycle the next morning, it’s easy to feel like you have no choice but to opt out. It’s easy to want to opt out. Personally, I couldn’t pretend to want that lifestyle. I like pizza and beer. I refuse to wear heels. I don’t work to inflate my resume; I work to try to make a difference for other people. Jesus, that’s freaking cheesy. Sorry.
Given that over a third of Americans are seriously considering leaving their jobs these days, I clearly wasn’t alone. We have been living in what has seemed like a world not just turned upside down, but turned upside down and continually tossed and shaken like a flipped-over snowglobe, with no time allowed in between to sit, and breathe, and watch the snowflakes quietly fall and rest and settle over the landscape of mountains or woods or city skyline sleeping underfoot. Last December, I packed my car full of stuff that was suited toward a permanent-work-from-home lifestyle, anticipating a nonzero chance that by the time the miasma of COVID lifted I’d be a full-time writer living in the woods.
Things didn’t quite work out that way. And I’m glad they didn’t, at least for now.
For a variety of reasons, I took on new work responsibilities in June. A lot of them. And this coincided with the fleeting eight-or-so weeks when COVID seemed to be over, and I started hopping on planes on a weekly basis. New York one week. Then Minneapolis. Then New York again. Then back to Los Angeles. I found myself scrambling to figure out how I’m supposed to dress for work events after months alternating between Birkenstocks and hiking boots. (What do people even wear anymore?) One weekend, driving back from one of those coveted unplugged days in Angeles National Forest with a friend, I found my voice had gone completely hoarse from all the added time in meetings.
But here’s the thing: I loved this change. And I still do. The role I stepped into was one where for the first time in too long, I felt my primary connections at my job to be human rather than digital. There was a renewed sense of purpose, of ownership, of service. I had new authority to make decisions at work to direct our resources toward new initiatives like corporate social responsibility and industrywide recognition for rising talent. In large part, I credit this to our merger with another advertising company mid-COVID, which brought on board new management from the Midwest that, I soon learned, brought a fundamental sense of kindness and humility to the workplace. Do you know what ad industry culture in New York could use? That. Just that.
But in spite of all this excitement, “re-entry” was already scaring the hell out of me (what if none of my friends want to hang out with me?) and then the pace of life seems to have gone from zero to plaid like one of those new Teslas. The result is that, after feeling like I was drifting toward a slower-paced life, suddenly things sped up. Neither my physical nor mental health was ready for it. Those “healthy habits” I thought I’d established in LA because, well, everyone has healthy habits in LA — they fell out the window. I became more addicted (as if I wasn’t already) to screens, to feeds, to apps, to push notifications. The footing I had been finding in the outdoors was no longer there. Instead of driving to Angeles National Forest first thing on a Saturday, I was sleeping until noon because my body demanded over nine hours of sleep a night, sometimes over ten. And even still, I was sleeping terribly. The wellness crowd would probably say I’d blown out my adrenal glands. They were probably right.
The tree in the storm
Here’s what I ultimately learned: when you are living as a digital nomad, you are living in a life of constant micro-change — tonight I’m in Wyoming! tomorrow, Idaho! — in a way that is not always amenable to macro-change. I couldn’t reconcile this renewed fast-paced lifestyle with the need to find a new sublet every month. (Although, props to the guy in Santa Monica who let me park my Jeep full of everything I took on this road trip in his garage for a week for free because I was in between housing situations.) Corporate life may be a life in motion, but think about the things we expect go along with it: the quiet, neat house or apartment to return to, the co-workers waiting for you back at the office, the conference room whose whiteboard still contains the scribbles from before that trip to Milwaukee. Home. An anchorage. A port in a storm.
There is a lot of thinking out there, geared particularly toward millennials and elder Gen-Z, that extreme adaptability and a lack of affinity for physical ownership are the way forward. It’s in many ways, I think, a backlash to so many aspects of midcentury American life that ended up biting us in the collective ass. Does having an idea of “home” mean a grueling, soulless career in order to have the kind of money for a downpayment on a house? Do our jobs have to be intolerable 9-to-5s in office parks off interstate exits, built in the ‘90s as a sort of grim consolation to a car-centric future?
There is freedom and exhilaration in 21st-century independence — that pulsing grid of broadband, that Airbnb reservation in the middle of nowhere, that perfectly-framed Instagram shot of your camper van in front of gorgeous rock formations that were the result of thousands of years of painstaking, intense erosion from rivers or glaciers at a pace so slow that the human mind can barely conceive of it. In an instant, your phone camera captures such a tiny part of the story that no amount of likes could underscore what really lies beneath. But there is also the stress of “where next?” and how that weighs on everything else in your life. There is the isolation from the people you love — assuming you are lucky enough to have people that you love and who love you back, but that you are not lucky enough to be able to take them along with you. There is the feeling, however metaphorical, that you do not have ground to stand on. That you do not have roots that will allow you to sway and bend, rather than break or fly away, when a storm comes.
I may have started on this journey wanting to soon be an itinerant writer who did little else but drive and write and stare at rock formations. But I learned, to my surprise, that I find solace in solid ground. I also found that the moment anything got stressful, for whatever reason, my ability to write and stare at rock formations became greatly diminished. So, Maine is a temporary reset. And then, for a few months (at least), I’ll be back in my hometown. The kind of place where various members of my family can knock on my door and ask me if I want to go to the local dive bar for a beer or if I can come help move a piece of furniture. It will, for a time, annoy the living daylights out of me. (I am someone who likes being left alone.) But I will adjust, knowing that I am blessed — and I mean truly blessed, not hashtag-blessed — to have a support system of loving people around me and a place that I can call home, freeing space in my mind and heart for adventure and creativity after months of needing that space to just fill with the air that would keep me afloat. To inflate my life raft.
My point with this newsletter, and with this chapter of my life, has been to rediscover my connection with the outdoors and the natural world. Contrary to what I had imagined, an itinerant “digital nomad” life was not helping me establish that connection. And I want to put that out there. I don’t know if it’ll resonate with any of you, but if it does, and this resonates with you somehow, then I know this dumb self-indulgent essay won’t have been in vain. Give a shout if you ever want to talk about it.
And, happy September. We’re now in meteorological spooky season. Please observe accordingly.
Stay wild,
Caro
PS: For those who have been following along on Instagram, I have been doing two Six Pack of Peaks hiking challenges this summer and fall. I’m at 5/6 in the SoCal challenge and will be completing it with the Climb for Heroes hike in November, and am currently 2/6 in New England. It would’ve been three this weekend but my rule these days is no solo hiking above 4000 feet in the Northeast if there’s any rain in the forecast.
I’ve really liked this dual hiking challenge, as well as the friendly and supportive community that you have access to when you sign up. Most of the 2021 challenges are ongoing until the end of the calendar year (New England, notably, is not) and registration for some of the 2022 challenges starts at the beginning of October. Check it out, especially if you are in a new place and want to make some connections both to the outdoors around you and some fellow humans who love it.
heartfelt and thought provoking, got me thinking about my own dopamine addiction to notifications and how hard it is to go back to analog reading. Fellow Montrealer (and ebook platform provider) Hugh McGuire wrote an essay in 2015 that resonates with me: https://hughmcguire.medium.com/why-can-t-we-read-anymore-503c38c131fe, as does this from NYT from earlier this year: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/opinion/michael-goldhaber-internet.html
There’s just so much here I can relate to! Fires - I’m from Australia. The wonder of the crimson (or other coloured) bottlebrushes - I’m from Australia. What do people wear? How do we travel? I’ve forgotten. Why is 40+ considered ‘old’ for a woman? Are you kidding me?! The allure of sitting & staring at a contained fire, sans screens, breathing fresh air. Giving the middle finger to a life built on other’s expectations… thanks for the journey through all of these ideas & thoughts.