Magic Helpers Down Under (please read "Woodstock 3/3" first)

                I was in first grade when I first became fascinated with the land down under.  We were doing a unit on Australia because the teacher’s assistant had been there once.  We were learning all about kangaroos, dingoes, wombats, wallabies, coral reef and the enormous outback.  As a child I was drawn to anything weird, and especially animals, so Australia was a perfect fit.  Sometime around then the Disney movie Rescuers Down Under came out, and I decided that Australia was my favorite foreign country.  Any time we made lists as kids where we had to answer questions about our favorite things, I always listed Australia as my favorite country because it seemed so fun and mysterious, and everyone had amazing accents.

                It’s been twenty years since then, and even though my passport is filled with stamps from countries in the western Pacific, I have never been to Australia, not even during my five month living experience in New Zealand.

                I was even all prepared to go in my mind and on paper.  In spring of 2004 I attended the saddest funeral of my life.  It was the saddest because he was the youngest.  I wrote about it in “Forever Young”.  Billy was my sister’s best friend, and he touched many lives.  He also studied abroad.  Reading his essay about Ireland at his wake convinced me to overcome my own hesitations about studying in Australia and finally do it.  I went back to the abroad office at my school and filled out an application for Wollongong University.

                I never did go to Wollongong.  Too many people swayed my unbiased opinion toward New Zealand in between my getting the idea and having to hand in the final paperwork, a period that lasted all summer.  Strangely enough, I remember going to a party that summer and seeing an old classmate named Mike.  He was Billy’s best guy friend, and he had decided to study abroad in Australia the same semester that I was going to New Zealand.  When we were fifteen and I was just getting into the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mike, Billy and all of the soccer guys actually went to their show in Albany and had great stories of drinking from a beer tap by the stage for free and standing near the lead singer’s girlfriend.  I wasn’t really friends with Mike, but we had some interesting connections in high school.  I was ranked 4^th in the class and he was 5^th.  We had to work together to play a pair of Chinese gamblers in the school play Anything Goes when we were sixteen.  And in AP History class we had to work together on a debate team with one other student in the most unfair debate assignment of our lives: the subject was slavery and who had it the hardest, and we had been assigned the roles of white slave owners and to argue that slavery was the hardest on us because of all the responsibility, pressure and work involved.  The teacher picked us because we were the best debaters.  We lost the debate, but everyone agreed we had put up the best fight.  By the way, if you’re ever wondering why the world is screwed up the way it is and why justice gets skewed so often, it’s because intelligent people are offering the best argument to the highest bidder.  On a lighter note, my other connection with Mike is that apparently he kissed my exchange sister Linda one time when she was living with us.  Good for him.

                Even stranger, my great friend Jack had been kicking around the idea of studying abroad himself, but his engineering advisor had all but forbidden him based on his grades.  Jack wasn’t really an engineer anyway, and had been working more with film at the time and trying to switch over to a related independent major.  I didn’t live with Jack that year (junior year), so I didn’t see him all the time.  You can imagine my surprise when I found out at a party on the last day of classes that Jack had just been accepted to go to Wollongong University in Australia.  I hadn’t told him about that.  He said he might visit me in New Zealand if the opportunity presented itself.  It did.

                Halfway through our stay I got an e-mail from Jack saying that he was coming to New Zealand for his fall break, but that he wasn’t sure if he would make it all the way down to Dunedin, the town where I was living on the South Island.  He said that if he did come, it would be on a Sunday three weeks away.  I didn’t hear from him again… until that Sunday.  Let’s just say that New Zealand’s drinking age of 18 was giving me a whole new sort of education that I’d only dabbled in previously, so I was still asleep that afternoon.  I even remember waking up at 1 pm and thinking, “Oh yeah!  Jack might come today!  That would be crazy!” and then going back to sleep.  Two hours later I got a knock on my bedroom door.  Jack was standing there grinning like a full-fledged Aborigine, his long curly brown hair hanging down past his shoulders and his bushy black beard  leaving almost no room for the Outback frontier.  We hung out for a day before he flew back to Australia.  He’d been hitchhiking a lot around New Zealand because it’s not only legal there, but encouraged.  He had tried it out first in Australia and said it was the most freeing feeling of his life, and that I should try it sometime.  I sincerely doubted that that would ever happen.

                My next memory of Australia takes me back to Brooklyn.  I moved there in 2006 after finishing college, with dreams of writing strange philosophical stories that would open people’s minds to the magic all around them, a seed that began germinating during my first living abroad adventure.  I moved to the border of Williamsburg and Bushwick in August of 2006, having traveled about ten blocks from Ten Eyck Avenue, where I lived the first five weeks of my NYC journey.  I was living with an architecture student, a girl who had been roommates with my musician friend Rob and his band member Josh.  Rob had been trying to make it in the city with his band Grand Habit.  They actually had some great success, and TV on the Radio called them their favorite band at one point.  Unfortunately the brothers who comprised the core of the group couldn’t stop fighting, and Josh moved back upstate to Easton, about five minutes from my hometown.  He’d been playing in bands with Rob since the beginning of high school, although I’d only met him twice.  The day before I moved to NYC I had to stop at his family’s home a five minute drive from my parents’ home and collect some back rent money he owed Rob and this girl.  We talked about trying to make it as an artist, and he gave me lots of advice about the trials and tribulations to expect when trying to support yourself at the same time you’re trying to find yourself an audience as an artist.  The next day I got on a train, met Rob at Penn Station, and moved into Josh’s old room.  By the way, Josh is Josh Carter, of the band Phantagram.  They’re pretty damn successful now.  Josh has even played live with one my heroes, Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, at Bonnaroo 2012, and on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.  I’m very happy for him.  His music is still melancholy, but with Grand Habit he wrote just about the saddest damn songs I’ve ever heard in my life, even if they were beautiful.  I hope he continues to triumph.   

              Meanwhile, this girl and I got evicted unexpectedly, Rob had to move back upstate, and I found myself living alone with this person I’d met just the week before.  That’s a whole other story, and I already wrote the rough draft of a novel that was partly about it, but I don’t feel like it’s relevant to go into any deeper.  The long and short of it is that we got along really well at first, and then didn’t get along at all, and then kind of got along, and then got in a huge fight, and then we kind of got along as she decided to move out and I decided I could afford my own apartment.  We weren’t in a sexual relationship, just a housing relationship, and I learned a lot from our relationship.  We were both young and made mistakes due to that fact and the added pressure of living with someone of the opposite sex.  She had an on-again off-again boyfriend, which sometimes made things less tense and sometimes more.  I wish her well, because we did have fun and share a strong connection for a while, and she gave me tons of excellent music I never would have known about.  To quote Forrest Gump, “That’s all I have to say about that.”  Except that she lives in Australia now.

                Between my demanding white-collar job and my up-and-down living situation, I was frustrated a lot that first year in New York, but I was able to save my sanity thanks to yet another brilliant coincidence.  Billy’s friend Mike from my hometown, who had studied in Australia, found me on Facebook one day and reported that he had also moved to Bushwick in August, and not only that, but he deduced from my address on my page that we lived only one block away from each other.  We went to a New York Mets game later that week, the first time we ever really hung out, and had a great time getting to know each other.  It turned out that although they each had separate significant others, he was also living platonically with a woman, except he knew her pretty well.  It made me feel less weird, in any case.  We never became buddy-buddy, but we checked in from time to time to hang out and catch up, and he was definitely there for me a few times when things we really bad at my place and I needed a comfortable place to be.  When I moved from Bushwick to Astoria, he helped me carry my furniture down three flights of stairs.

The other Brooklyn connection to Australia was Jack, who came to visit at the end of the year after teaching English in China for a year.  We threw a welcome back party for him in my apartment, and I remember having to tell him that he couldn’t take a nap on the sidewalk at night because Bushwick isn’t China.

                It was a long time before Australia crept back into my consciousness, and when it did, it was with full force.  I was teaching English in Japan, and found myself living in an international dorm-type situation at an English school which recruited native-speakers from all different countries.  We had plenty of Americans, but also English, Irish, Canadians and an Australian girl.  The Australian girl, Meg, connected me to the kindergarten job that sponsored me for a working visa, provided most of my income, and gave me untold amounts of joy (if you ever want to feel like a hero, even if you’re not sure you deserve it in any way, you can always teach little Japanese kids your language, and they will rescue your soul).  The job also gave me some excellent Australian co-workers who became excellent friends.

                I’m thinking mostly of James and Nelson.  I met James on my first day of work.  I had interviewed the day before, been hired (and shaved my beard of six years immediately upon request), and then sent out to teach immediately with barely any training at all.  I had a Japanese assistant to translate all of my instructions to the children, but I didn’t even know the routine yet, and I was going to have to do it in front of classes of students and teachers for twenty minutes a piece about six times in a row with no breaks.  So I had to learn all of the little hand motions for the ABC’s, songs, corresponding dance moves, games, introductory and concluding procedures in the back seat of the car during the 30 minute ride to the school.  They assigned two teacher/assistant pairs to each car, so there was another Westerner named James in the front seat, and he was from Australia.  Everybody was really good-natured about my situation and very helpful, and thanks to James lending his experience, I quickly memorized the “hello song” and all the associated animal motions for the ABC’s.  James and I had a great time discussing everything in the world every Thursday morning on the way to work, and making fun of ourselves for having such fun yet silly jobs.  He was also an experienced solo world traveler.  I think we had to dress up as Santa Clauses once, and give presents to all of the kids.

                Soon after I met James I had to substitute for a full-day class of four-year old’s at the “Whole Day” kindergarten, and that’s where I met another great Australian, Nelson.  He’d just had a baby with his Japanese girlfriend, and he was two years younger than I was, so he was dealing with a lot of stress at the time.  It also turned out that he had been best friends with James since they were little kids.  He invited me out for drinks one weekend, and I had barely been out at all at that point.  It was great to trade travel stories with an experienced adventurer, and also gave me a newly found appreciation for my freedom after hearing how unexpectedly it could slip away.  We had been to a lot of the same concerts and traveled in exotic places, and experienced many similar thrills in this life.  In fact, now that I think about it, he had experienced way more than I had, although I had a longer list of solo traveling adventures.  The big thing that stood out in all of his stories was his “mates”, a term I’ve heard just about every Australian I’ve ever met use with utmost sincerity and no fear of cynical reply.  Many Australians have large groups of friends who mean the world to them, a form of camaraderie I’ve experienced in my own way, but still leaves me somewhat in awe.  I found out much more about it during Nelson’s belated bachelor party a few months later.  The Chili Peppers would have been proud of us.  Actually, they make music, and we were just being wild idiots, but still, the spirit was there, and everyone had a good time without causing anyone any trouble.

                After a few more months James had to leave his contract early, which was a big deal and he was missed.  I saw Nelson for the last time on my last day of work.  He invited me out for drinks, and met me at the train station to lead me to the bar.  There wasn’t much time left for me to hang out because the trains stopped soon after midnight, and I didn’t want to spend all of the money I’d been saving to drive around America on a $60 cab ride.  So Nelson led the way by sprinting to the bar, always full of energy and enthusiasm, and I followed suit.  At the end of the night I had to sprint back, and I slipped through the train doors right as the last one was getting ready to go.

                After that I drove around America and ended up in northern California.  I worked at a winery thanks to this guy Ian, who was best friends with Mike in high school.  We knew each other but didn’t really like each other, but thanks to my new friendship with Mike I figured it was worth checking in on Ian for the first time since high school ten years ago.  He also knew Billy, although not as well as Mike.  He lived and worked in Sonoma County.  We ended up getting along fine, and he offered to hook me up with a temporary wine harvest job at the vineyard where he is now assistant winemaker.  I had a great time, made lots of money, and got to work with a cool Australian dude named Mike, who had excellent taste in music.  And a guy named Evan, who's from Wisconsin but lives and works at a vineyard in Australia now.

                I’m not sure what the distinct theme is here, since I'm writing as I go with this daily project and figure out the lessons along the way.  But now that I think about it, there's one shameless Australian cultural reference I can make to sum it all up, and it’s not Crocodile Dundee or The Simpsons.

                It’s the most successful computer animated movie of my youth, Finding Nemo, which I saw because my friend Skyler suggested we all go see it.  It's about everyone: a small curious fish goes an on adventure alone through the unclear waters of the world.  But if you're brave and listen to the right people you meet on the way with increased reason and intuition, you can have a lot of fun and go places you never would have dared on your own.  Sure, there will be lots of crazy unfair mistakes and stupid mistakes on your own part because you're new and that's actually what you're supposed to go through to do whatever it is you do.  The movie itself is in the ocean around Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.  Nemo meets the most unexpected angels to help him find his way home, and learns a lot about trust, persistence and courage in the complete unknown.  And he only makes it to each step along the way (they never really stop, do they?) because other fish (and completely awesome laid back turtles) swim with him every day.

                I might not be as cute and innocent as Nemo, and I doubt you are either, but we're all finding our home here in the universe.  Every day, even if we think we define it as a specific place, our home grows and unites with everything we cease to fear.

"Don't know where I'm going

Don't know where it's flowing

But I know it's finding you"

-"Finding You", The Go-Between's from Oceans Apart