Essay trashed version

The common thread between me and any "scene" I have partook in has been people who are restless, self-reliant, well traveled and are mainly self-taught on any skill they have inherited.

In my "adult" years travel, music and literature have all dictated moves I have made in my life.

At a very early age I began to grasp onto the stories of musicians and artists. I searched for obscure films and writings to validate that there was a world out side of the one I knew, I became obsessed with the lives of artist and others who had forced new ways of living for themselves often in spite of comfort or notoriety.

When growing up in Durham, NC my friends slowly began to drop out of high school and leave town. A collection of group houses had opened up that were made up of traveling kids that came and went, the occupants of these houses seemed to all be temporary, they were in crusted in dirt, seemed self reliant and fearless of expectations. They were my age but of a different breed, they had traveled, worked, seen things, experience highs and lows and my face was just pressed up against the glass. Out of a wide circle of friends I was one of the few who finished high school, I went to a film school in Winston-Salem, NC for a year but the stories I heard from my traveling friends made my peers screenplays seem pale and shallow. I had to leave to go travel.

When I first encountered this young traveling culture they seemed to embody all I was looking for. They did things often blindly and were obviously naive but they seemed fearless and accepted failure. Their life style guaranteed obscurity, discomfort but also was exciting, their lives were built on experience and constant movement and escape from the mundane. Suddenly the characters in the books, the musicians were all real and with will power and endurence everything was attainable. Of course it was not all this simple but for my young naive mind everything had just been rewritten.

I spent a summer hopping trains after leaving college, I was impressed at how much the community overlapped. We had gotten our hands on guides that had been compiled by other travelers that held infinite helpful information. Starting as broadly as where the trains go, to places to stay and where to find free food to where a plank of wood had been placed to help cross a creak. I was amazed, here I was apart of a community that existed with structure and thrived on its own world. These became the same reasons I left this community. It was too isolated, too cut off from society and like the community I left for it, I began to find it too isolating and overly controlled by a ideaology that was not my own.

I wanted to continue in the direction but I didn't want to get lost in a scene that held to many standards, I felt it was counter productive to the independetence it hinted at and too much was done in spite. I had my problems with society but I was not ready to turn away from it completely.

When I returned home I searched out other parts of D.I.Y.( do it your self) culture eventually I fell in with a wherehouse space in Winston-Salem, Nc. It was a small town but in this building held a art gallery, art studios, a music venue, a bakery and a coffee shop/bar. The people involved have put the space together from scratch and learned how to do things along the way through a process of trial and error. It was a community of people who had done things their own way but it was still about the greater community as well. I got involved with playing and recording music, starting a bike co-op and showing films. Though I have not lived there for a few years the space still has established a standard of hard work and a fearlessness of learning. Though I have not held onto much of the astetic of the more extreme train hopping community I have continues to travel off the cusp and the knowledge that if you want to go travel a lack of funds need not be a handicap. I have also continued to read literature through all of these phases and now that I’m older and some of my restlessness has eased I would like to spend more of my time writing my own stories and devoting more time to the medium that had inspired me to began what I would call my education witch was started in travel.