Out of the Closet

On a bike ride one day after school in the late nineties, I came across a binder of CDs that had fallen out of someone’s car. Inside there were albums by Pearl Jam, Blind Melon, Candlebox, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden, among others—the music that would form the soundtrack to my high school years, and which I still love. I was profoundly awestricken, then, to find myself standing in the very recording booth in a Seattle recording studio where all of those iconic records were recorded. In the very place where Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell, and so many others had belted out the soundtrack to my life, I now stood completely adulterating the image of this sacred place with ill-executed accents of Latin Americans, Asians, Turks, and Sheena.
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Remy’s Story

One year ago, we found out that Sheena was pregnant. There was one February day when we decided that we’d done what we wanted to do in this phase of life, so we might as well start trying to reproduce ourselves. I looked forward to what would surely be several months of trial and error, but one enchanting evening later Sheena was in a motherly way.
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How We Got Here

When I was twelve years old, while sleeping on the floor of my dad’s living room, I had a dream that caused me to fall irrationally in love with Seattle. I had never been to Seattle, and had only a vague idea of its whereabouts (America). In the dream, and in recalling it afterward, I felt a complete sense of liberation. I was a fully autonomous and independent twelve-year-old without a care in the world, and I freely roamed the streets with a gang of other twelve-year-olds amid the deep snows of the Seattle winter. This demonstrates how little I knew about Seattle. In my dream, Seattle had been in the midst of an arctic winter, and I, along with my cohort of street kids, were whisked about the city on its efficient public transit system. This assumption of public transit furthermore demonstrates how little I knew of Seattle.
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The End of the Road

After 927 days, 45,822 miles, 34 countries, five continents, and countless hours spent watching our very own real life documentary unfold through the big screen of Nacho’s windshield, we arrived right back where we started. When it comes to good decisions that we make in life, this will certainly go down as one of the better ones. But all good things must come to an end. We set out to drive around the world, and when we pulled up in the same driveway that we left almost three years ago, we had thereby accomplished our goal.
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The Immigrant

The fact that Barna lives in Baltimore is a pretty big deal.

The first door we tried was the wrong door, and a Pakistani woman wearing a bright green sari answered. She didn’t speak English, but invited us in for tea so that we could wait for her husband to come home, as he would certainly be able to help us. This is the kind of hospitality that we came to know in South Asia, and being in Baltimore made it stand out even more. In America we’re skeptical of door knockers, a deep seeded reflex that is a result of generations of door knocking Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Girl Scouts, and Avon ladies.
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Dixon’s Isle

Way back in the far off distant beginning, I wrote about the day that I quit my job. After I had broken the news that I would be leaving to the CEO of my company, he invited me to lunch and did his best to convince me not to go, and in the end suggested I see a shrink. For the sake of simplicity, in that story I opted not to mention that the company’s former CEO was also at lunch with us that day. Thus, it was both the former and current CEOs teaming up to try to convince me not to quit my perfectly good job to move into my van and drive around the world. But something funny happened at lunch that day.
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Farther

On a snowy day nearly three years ago I shat my last shit in my own house. Soon thereafter we crossed the border into Mexico and I saw a cinderblock shanty on the side of an embankment. It had a broken down truck next to it and there were various rusty signs in Spanish around it littering the roadside. I thought to myself, I have shat my last shit in my own house, and I’ve stepped out of my comfort zone for the next three years, and there will be nothing I can do about that. Our driftwood raft had lost sight of land, and one day, inshallah, we would find land again.
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