I peruse the list of what lies ahead for these future fellows. The list, as always, contains spectacular ambitions. Rachel Gross will examine ‘Mountain Hut Systems and the Meaning of Wilderness’ in Switzerland, Scotland, Finland, Chile, India, and Tanzania. William Hunt will explore ‘Notes from the Underground: Unearthing the Stories of the Subterranean’ in Netherlands, France, Russia, Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Australia. And then there is Juan Navarrete, pondering ‘The Cartoonist’s Pen is Mightier than The Sword: Exploring the Impact of Political Cartoons’ in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. How the world will reward the aspirations of these three, and the other Fellows, is of epic permutations. There will be good days, bad days, and very few if any boring ones.

Built into this is a Watson mandate. The travel funds expect a singular demand: to go now to a lake isle or a mountain blue, but bear no burden of what came before or comes after the Watson. And this may be the only moment in my life where I took such a perspective. I wasn’t paying debts. I wasn’t saving or planning for the future. I wasn’t taking classes toward a diploma that would get me a reliable job. It was a year like walking through an aged canyon valley, where my thoughts could not escape what was in front of me, and along its edges, the dreams of both past and future looked longingly inward watching me.

That year must come to an end, but the trip never really does. The mid-March anniversary regularly brings memories of the journey: what was accomplished, what shocked, and what was foiled. And as the years pass, the profundity of what transpired stands against what followed – in my particular case, in greater and greater contrast. For what a year of uninhibited travel gives you, it has little in common with what the years afterward give you, focused as they must be upon the building of a career and the slow muzzling of college debt even as it muzzles us. Certainly the first year afterward was a spiritual hangover.

On this, my five-year anniversary, I see between then and now, a greater and greater contrast. Of course it could be no other way. A return to normalcy cannot be appreciated with the same juices as those of an embarkation toward mystery and curiosity. Surely these last few years have been kind to me. I have moved within the United States several times, liked each place that I lived. I changed jobs mostly for the better each time. I now have some confidence in my abilities in the game of feeding oneself in this strange 21st century.

Isn’t all of that a truer test of mettle than the Watson? It has required responsibility, training, restraint. One could cynically reduce the world-rambling spirit to broken-speak in a foreign language, bus-schedules, and a patient mind. The virtues of a jack-of-all-trades. But I do not feel that way. Indeed, I cannot; the intensity of that year breathes with life, while those that followed continue to fold out of memory. Its vivid echo is unchallengeable as any faith. Even when that echo stands at odds with the effort to avoid becoming master-of-nothing.

Indeed I cannot abandon that faith any more than I can abandon what seems its nemesis – for the broader journey up to now has required some success in both. These four years that have followed, they have created the possibility of a reemergence. Only with them under the belt could I find myself looking out from the balconies of San Telmo again. And yet how the mind moves of a habit. I recognize now the beauty of that time in a new light. Not only was the fortune in the doing, but in my ability then to rise to it. I know now that it is not easy to rise in the morning and seize the day. Living well, like traveling, proceeds easiest with a curious combination of open-mindedness and purpose, anti-apathy. It is a verve that requires skill, with nebulous ingredients, and one that wanes if I allow it.

You have to leave to come back again, so it’s said. And in the coming back, I am amazed to see that I am not the traveler I was, and more amazed that that is ok. During a conversation with an Englishman who was also returning to Buenos Aires for the second time, we remarked that it’s nice to come to a place that is radically different from what we’re used to, and also doesn’t change quickly. I proposed that in such a situation, we have the truest mirror we could ever hold in front of us; the only explanation for why it feels different is that you have changed. You have grown stronger in ways, and weaker in others. And the illusion of a life predestined, linear – well that concept is washed suddenly away like smog from the city after days of heavy rain. And all about you is the smell of a fresh start.

I’m not sure how I’d missed this place, located, as they are, across from a favorite market of mine on Powell and Jackson (right where the cable car tracks bend uphill on their way to Pac Heights). It’s not an area of heavy foot traffic, which belies the fact that the shop is usually elbow-to-elbow in their tiny little shop. The place is named Quickly, a name which is only now failing to provide a smirk. They’re actually a huge operation, not just over the Bay Area but globally, which leads me to believe that I’m only scratching the surface of SF bubble tea operations. No doubt there’s all kinds of flak on the net about this being ‘corporate bubble tea’, which, since I’m in a strange mood today, leads me to a feeling of shameless candor, as I reckon I’ll probably move on to more worthy venues in the next few months. I’ll keep you updated.

For further trivia, Quickly’s been in the news of late for their connection with the Ed Jew extortion/mail-fraud scandal.

Along those lines, I’ve failed to mention this the last few months, but one perk of living here is that I’m very content to be reunited with easy access to White Rabbit candies - they’re all over the place here, though it does take a bit of hunting to find ones that are fresh and soft. My first encounter was on a road trip from college years ago, and for some reason I’ve never had much luck finding them outside of SF Chinatown.

… eight rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

– Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), 9-10.