Ghost To Ghost
Saturday • January 31st 2026 • 6:43:08 pm
they found you in that bus, ninety-three pounds of what was left after the potatoes and the squirrels ran out, and the papers called it tragedy, the television people shook their heads and said you were a fool, a privileged kid who didn't know which berries to eat—
but I think you knew exactly what you were doing when you set fire to the cash and watched the faces of dead presidents curl into ash.
you understood something that your father never would, that the whole bright California mess of it— the cars, the lies they called life, the clean shirts and quarterly reports— was excrement dressed up in a suit.
I'm writing this at 2 a.m. with a drink I probably shouldn't have and the radio playing something about asses and Lamborghinis and being a bad something-or-other, and I think about you out there in the Alaskan silence where the only music was river water and wind through spruce,
and I wonder who is the crazy one— you, eating seeds in a broken bus, or the 50 million people bobbing their heads to lyrics that teach them to be less than they are.
the schools did a number on us, kid. they sat us in rows and taught us to fill in bubbles with number 2 pencils and called it education, and the teachers who should have been setting fires in our minds were too tired from their second jobs to do anything but hand out worksheets and wait for the bell.
they taught us to memorize but never to think, to regurgitate but never to question, and when we got our grades we didn't know if we'd learned anything real or just performed the right tricks for the right treats like dogs in a circus we never asked to join.
and your parents, I read about them, the secrets, the other family, the way money was supposed to fix everything the way it never does—
you saw through it the way some of us see through it, the ones who grew up with holes in our shoes and holes in the stories they told us about working hard and getting ahead.
the poor know something the rich don't: that the whole game is rigged, that the ladders lead to rooms full of more ladders, that somewhere along the way we forgot what we were climbing toward.
they want us stupid. I don't mean this as conspiracy, I mean it as commerce.
a thinking man doesn't buy the truck he doesn't need, the beer that's killing his liver, the politicians who've never missed a meal telling him that poverty is a character flaw.
a thinking woman doesn't believe that her worth is in her waistline, that romance looks like the movies, that the right mascara will fix the emptiness they've been cultivating in her since she was five years old watching princesses wait for rescue.
the songs, the commercials, the shows— they're not entertainment, they're instructions: stay small, stay hungry, stay dumb, buy this.
I've known men who worked themselves into heart attacks at fifty-two, who never read a book that wasn't assigned, who died with money in the bank and nothing in the soul— and everyone said they lived a good life.
I've known women who raised children in fluorescent-lit cubicles, who came home too tired to think, who watched cooking shows instead of cooking, who watched travel shows instead of traveling, who lived through screens because the real thing had been priced out of reach.
and nobody calls that tragedy. nobody puts that on the evening news.
You read Thoreau and London and Tolstoy, you went to the woods because you refused to discover at the end that you had not lived, and some people say you were running away but I think you were running toward—
toward what a human being is underneath the job title, toward what a morning feels like when no one is selling you anything, toward the terrifying gorgeous question of what the hell we're doing here and whether any of it means a damn thing.
they say only certain people are capable of genius, that most of us are born to work and not to wonder, and that is the biggest lie they ever told—
every child asks why until we beat it out of them, every kid draws and sings until we grade it out of them, every young mind reaches for the stars until we schedule it out of them with homework and tests and the long slow lesson that curiosity is inefficient and dreams don't pay rent.
we are all born with fire. the schools are there to manage it. the jobs are there to harvest it. the songs are there to mock it. and by the time we're thirty most of us have forgotten we ever burned at all.
but you remembered. you walked into the wild with a bag of rice and a rifle and the whole crushing weight of everything fake finally off your shoulders.
and yes, you made mistakes. yes, the Stampede Trail swallowed you. yes, the river rose and cut you off and the body gave out before the spirit did.
but God, kid— you lived.
for 113 days, you lived more than most people do in 113 years of going through the motions.
and now they've made movies about you, and people take selfies with the bus, and your story has become another product to consume between commercials for trucks and beer—
but some of us know what you were really saying when you wrote that happiness is only real when shared, when you scribbled in the margins that you had lived a good life and died a happy man.
you were saying that the treasure isn't in the inauthentic prestige, that the answer isn't in the office, that somewhere out there past the billboards and the bullshit there is something true and worth walking toward, even if it kills you.
I'm still at this desk. it's almost 4 now. the drink is empty and the radio has moved on to another song about nothing, and outside my window the city hums with people getting ready for jobs they didn't choose in lives they didn't design running on fumes and coffee and the vague promise that it will all make sense someday.
and I think of you in the sleeping bag, writing your last words to whoever might find you,
and I want to tell the young ones: listen—
the television is lying. the commercials are lying. the songs are lying. the schools are lying. the politicians are lying. and they've been lying so long they don't even know anymore that the truth exists.
but it does. it's out there past the noise, past the sales pitch, past the fluorescent-lit prisons they call opportunity.
it's in books by dead Philosophers and walks through actual forests and conversations that last until morning and the terrifying freedom of asking what if everything they taught me was wrong?
You beautiful fool, you didn't die searching for something that doesn't exist. you died proving that it does—
that there's a self beneath the self they manufactured for us, that there's a world beneath the world they're selling us, that there's a life beneath the life of quiet desperation and it's worth everything, everything, to find it.
the sun is coming up now. I should sleep. but I keep thinking about you walking into that green nowhere, twenty-four years old, done with the lying, finally free.
and I write this for you, and for every kid who looked around at the circus and knew in their bones that this couldn't be all there is—
you're right. it isn't.