The Experience Project-Gonzo Blogging From Cozumel
Dubai · Hotel @nyware · Private Myth / Public Dream
The ElixirThe Space Between
I Myth You, Joseph Campbell: the story of how cruising became yoga, autobiography became work, and the invisible became real.
The Central Paradox
It Is the Space Between the Bars That Holds the Tiger
If you love your job, you will never work a day in your life. I decided to play it safe and never work another day in my life—that is to say, earn a living.
I became more concerned with how to live inside the space between: the interval between jobs, ports, plans, identities, and explanations.
That space is where the invisible becomes real.
The Space-Between Equation
Constraint + Attention to the Gap = Freedom Made VisibleWrite? Right!
Living First. Processing Later.
Proust decided he had done enough living by age thirty and spent the rest of his life processing that life in Remembrance of Things Past.
I found a different loophole in the system.
Start a blog—Hotel @nyware—and suddenly travel becomes research, experience becomes content, and autobiography becomes a job description.
I continued to freelance whenever the cash ran out. The difficult boss was me.
Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. I am Basho on a frequent-flyer pass, with complimentary mojo on takeoff—a one-man National Geographic on that everywhere trip.
The Divine Payroll
I Am Not a Businessman. I Am a Business, Man.
Self-employment was made harder because I had such a difficult boss. In the digital economy, information wants to be free.
They say that until you are paid for something you love doing, it is only a hobby.
I am on the Divine Payroll.
Homer's epic myths are public dreams. My dreams of cruising around the world were private myths—until I wrote them down.
The Zentrepeneur Equation
Travel + Story + Enough Freelance Cash = Work Without a WorkplaceLiterature in a Hurry
Going Out of My Mind to Come to My Senses
YOLO: stuck between Hotel California—check out any time but never leave—and the Hunter S. Thompson edge where standing back means taking too much room.
I fueled both worlds: living large on cruise ships, maxing out, and blogging about it.
Hours of boredom. Moments of hysteria. Every day I went out of my mind in order to come to my senses at sea.
Cruising became the IN to my sane: a private religion where the bulk of my soul and spirit had been invested.
The Long Version: Tourism, Hedonism, and Mindfulness
I know both sides because I am both sides.
First comes the fast and furious march called tourism: If It Is Tuesday, It Must Be Brussels.
Then comes the excess and hedonism of the bucket list: Nine Cruises I Had to Go On Before I Died.
A ship combines the silence of the cloister with the license of the brothel: live-and-examine days at sea, live-and-relax moments in port.
Mindfulness becomes the continuous attitude that turns those experiences into a larger narrative.
Acting As If
Life Happens for Me, Not to Me
My T.O.E.—Time on Earth—does not always read like a legible diary or even a coherent larger-than-life biography.
The best thing I can say is that I am acting as if: as if it had been my intention all along.
That thought evokes will. It lets me say life happens for me, not to me.
The adventure is its own payday, but it includes risk, unknown unknowns, Black Swans, mountaintops, valleys, and occasional service jobs of last resort.
My myth lets me know where I am at.
The moments when the story briefly looks intentional.
Open StoryThe costs, reversals, and years that resist a clean narrative.
Open ArchiveTime, money, and opportunity matter. So does the ability to improvise.
Capitalism is creative destruction. Deep Story is creative destruction too. It transforms the person telling it.
I Myth You, Joseph Campbell
Tell Your Own Story
Put the He/r in Hero. Do not rent your life. Own it. Live your dreams now, not your backup plan later.
Motion creates emotion, and emotion is the key to living the Hero's Journey now.
Money is not the root of all evil. Boredom is—a spiritual anorexia, the despairing refusal to be oneself.
The privilege of a lifetime is becoming who you are after letting go of the life you planned and accepting the one waiting for you.
An authority is someone who authors the collective story and tells us what is true.
When we author our own autobiography, we begin living more consciously and unfolding our own myth.
The Deep-Story Equation
Experience + Authorship + Meaning = A Myth You Can Live InsideMotion creates emotion and puts the Hero's Journey in the present tense.
Open StoryProust represents the life processed into form after the living has accumulated.
Public myths, journey-as-home, and the architecture that gives private experience a shape.
On Board
What Is My Yoga?
My yoga is being on cruise ships.
The practice is repetition: departure, horizon, port, return, reflection.
There are three types of people: those who are alive, those who are dead, and those who are at sea.
The On-Board Equation
Sea Time + Reflection + Repetition = A Practice, Not an Escape