Hello from Tempe, AZ! Guess what? IT’S HOT HERE!

Yes, you’ve read that correctly: I’ve managed to poach a slightly inconsistent internet signal for God knows how brief or infrequent a time and I’ve decided to enlighten you all with the knowledge that it is hot in Arizona. Like, 115 hot, 90 at night hot. In this instant, I cannot fathom how human animals first decided to settle in a place this hot.

Whining aside, I’m well! Dad and I pulled into Arizona and its freakish time warp (I now write to you from the Pacific time zone) yesterday afternoon, and after some minor kerfuffle with the movers and some local traffic, my belongings, my father, and my self all rest under the same roof.

I can’t lie: actually getting to Arizona was difficult. Me moving here has been so abstract for so long, even through the 33 hours and nearly 2200 mile drive. Getting here was a real fact of how much my life will be different: this is a city, with tons of people and tons of road closings to confuse my GPS, and it all felt very overwhelming. I’m sure it will again, but tonight, Dad made chicken with diced tomatoes and we watched Pete & Pete on DVD. The apartment still smells too new to be mine, but as in all things, cooking (and family) helps.

The internet is too sketchy right now to post any more pictures, but I will when I can—we came through some truly incredible stuff in New Mexico and Arizona, and pictures of the apartment will follow once it’s presentable (well, as presentable as it will get, anyway).

My dear, dear friends, I write to you from another La Quinta (“La Quinta Otra,” as I’ve been calling it in my sad, stale Spanish) in El Paso, Texas. I feel like it’s appropriate to be ruminating on the idea of what that means: The Step.

Driving through the entire width of Texas looks a lot like I thought it would based entirely on popular culture: like a stunning rendering of the landscape from any given Roadrunner cartoon. Driving west from Dallas was fascinating—barren tracks of farms and oil rigs compressed by an unfathomable blue slowly starting to slope into rolling hills, prairies, and inexplicable mountains.

Between yesterday and today, after driving (well, riding shotgun—Dad still hasn’t given up the steering wheel, and I’m not complaining) about 14 hours through Texas, I feel like I’ve reached something just beyond articulation, something all wrapped up in spending a night in a place called The Step. I’ve gotten where I am one step at a time: there are no shortcuts in life, and just as each and every of the more than 1,500 miles of pavement on this trip traveled beneath the wheels of my Toyota Yaris, you’ve got to live every step.

6 more hours on the road and Dad and I will reach Tempe, where my new life starts. One more step. See you on the other side.

(Check out highlights from these last two days after the jump—click to bigafy!)

My cousin Nikki and me at Uncle Jim & Aunt Beth's! There is something truly magnificent about sitting around a kitchen table with family.

Road, mountain and blue. Over and over, so beautiful it became mundane.

Dad, at a rest area outside of Pecos, in the middle of Absolute No Where!

One day of travel down—a little over 12 hours in the Yaris and we’re officially a third of the way to Arizona. Check out some highlights from the trip after the jump.

As far as "taken from a moving car" pictures go, I thought this was a pretty good one of Atlanta.

Is it weird that I was surprised how hilly Alabama was?

Hey, look! We're in Mississippi! We were actually on our way into Louisiana, but we couldn't resist checking out the river.

The Mississippi River. All together now: dang.

Me and Dad, after 10 hours in a car, being happy to see some natural American splendor.

Wish I could be a little more articulate, but a late dinner, a beer and a hot shower wound up being the ingredients for a major coma. Love from a Louisiana La Quinta—tomorrow, we’ll start to break Texas into bite-sized pieces.

How quickly time flies: this time last week, I was revving up for Moving Day; now, I’m easing into my final day home with my family.

There’s a line from a Marilyn Hacker poem called “Nearly a Valediction” that I often come back to (read: accidentally plagiarize from) that perfectly sums up what I need during this gap period between my Old Life and my New Life: “trust / that what comes next comes after what came first.” Sometimes, when all of the touchstones of your life become uprooted, the only order that emerges is order, a peace that comes with chronology.

Well, here’s what came first: a few snapshots from my week at home.

Went to the beach with dad; beers, books, and sunshine were prominent themes.

More after the jump.

Did I ever really know the skies before moving to the south?

Met my Uncle Andy, Aunt Mo and family for dinner in Hilton Head. Met this brownie on my brother's plate. Mmmmm.

Now: what comes next. My dad and I will leave tomorrow and drive to Monroe, Louisana; Wednesday, we’ll travel to Dallas, where we’ll stop to spend some time with my Texas aunt and uncle; Thursday, we’ll wind up in El Paso (apparently, Texas is huuuuuge); and on Friday, I will meet Tempe, Arizona at last.

My goal is to keep up with you all through this blog (and my Twitter!) while I’m on the road, even if just with a few pictures from the vast middle of America we’ll be traversing. More pictures can be found on my brand spankin’ new flickr account (which is also linked on the sidebar to your left).

So keep an eye here, and think of me as Dad and I set out on our Most Excellent Adventure. In the meantime, I leave you with another poem because, well—I’m talking about hope, too:

where we are (for edward field)

i envy those
who live in two places:
new york, say, and london;
wales and spain;
l.a. and paris;
hawaii and switzerland.

there is always the anticipation
of the change, the chance that what is wrong
is the result of where you are. i have
always loved both the freshness of
arriving and the relief of leaving. with
two homes every move would be a homecoming.
i am not even considering the weather, hot
or cold, dry or wet: i am talking about hope.

—Gerald Locklin

Do you hear that? It’s the sound of me peeling myself off of my parents’ new couch to send you all a postcard from my briefly unemployed and deeply awesome existence.

Moving Day was Monday, and it went as well as these things will go; which is to say, I only cried once, and was able to binge eat my supermarket brand sushi in the parking lot of the Harris Teeter in record time before sleepily driving the four hours home to South Carolina.

After the inevitable coma, I rose to realize that the lightness of my key chain (ceding my office keys and my apartment/mailbox keys has hilariously stripped me of my adulthood, you know?) is strangely symbolic: the only things I have the capacity to open right now is my car and my parents’ house.

Transitions are about getting from one place to another, and I could babble a bit about opportunities and opening doors, but why pontificate when I can tap Rilke for a far more eloquent moment:

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

—Ranier Maria Rilke in Letter Four, Letters to a Young Poet

Cliché though it is for me to be quoting Letters to a Young Poet at this particular moment in my life, what can I say? We are so young, my dear friends: let us live on into these questions. I plan on taking a couple of my own to the beach in the morning; I’ll let you know if I figure out anything important.

I think I have to agree with Pete, who sent this my way this morning: “Woody Harrelson was born for that role.” Trust.

So maybe the reboot isn’t quite as successful as I thought it would be: last day of work is tomorrow and Moving Day is Monday. I imagine this fallow period won’t extend much beyond that, as I delve back in to the soft bosom of South Carolina before driving west with my Dad.

Manifest Destiny! Westward expansion! Purple mountains majesty (wait, that’s probably not Arizona, is it?). Anyway, if you’re reading this, thank you for putting up with me during this transition period; a better blog will emerge on the other side, I promise.

Zombies are slow to move; so are blogging transitions. Although, it might just be that I’ve been watching this video on repeat for the last solid week (um, I’m not kidding):

If you’ll pardon me, I’m going to continue my quest to stand out above the crowd, even if I gotta shout out loud, ’til mine is the only face you see…gonna stand out ’til you notice me…

[Here's the full version of the song, which now has an embarrassingly high play count in my iTunes. Don't judge me.]

So remember how my blog died for a couple months and then I reanimated it using birthday magic? Hmm, what do we call something that dies and then sluggishly pulls itself back into a grim facsimile of life…

Zombie blog. Obviously.

Will Think for Food will be undergoing some major design and identity shifts in the next couple months, and while I’m trying to decide what it wants to be when it grows up, let’s have a zombie-fest!The walking dead, the infected, the “zed” word…however you’d like to put it, my blog will be celebrating the undead (of the brain-eating variety, not the blood-sucking variety) until further notice in all the literal and figurative ways I can devise.

So check out the new design, let me know what you think, and catch up on zombie ruminations from the days of yore. Set a course for (zombie) adventure!

Confession time: one of my biggest personal flaws, I think, is my overwhelming desire to be comfortable. Which is why, many moons ago, I bookmarked this Ward Six entry on “Being Comfortable” for potential blog fodder—it agitated me, to have something I fear holds me back from Writing Big outlined in such casual black and white (and on the INTERNET, for Gawd’s sake).

But I was Comfortable then—in February, when the entry was written, I was all applied to grad school (even hearing back from one or two), though my future seemed abstract and very far away; frankly, I was more excited about Dollhouse than getting my MFA (a fact that might still be true…will get back to you).

What bothered me about this idea of comfort acting as compliance and, therefore, laziness is two-fold: firstly, it perpetuates this annoying idea that writers, for whatever reason, must be impoverished, drunken layabouts sleeping on threadbare sheets in an empty room in order to write anything worth reading and secondly, the fact that comfort leads to laziness is utterly true.

Right? Annoying as it is, if we have everything we want, we don’t want for anything. And it’s okay to live like that for a while, but I realized, as I was thinking over what I wanted to write about today, I am smack dab in the middle of my decision NOT to live comfortably—because six months ago, I decided that as nice as reality TV after work was (ohhhh Millionaire MatchMaker, I will long for your blunt bangs and dead eyes in grad school), I wanted an adventure.

Well, mission accomplished: I’m giving myself an ulcer for worrying over this move, which is anything but comfortable. Haters, as they say, gon’ hate: the value of an MFA in creative writing will continue to be hotly debated and even I’ll admit that it’s questionable if heading back to an academic playpen can be anything BUT comfortable (oh, to be a student again!), but for now, this is me, cracking open my universe like a piñata with the fervent hope that something awesome will spill out.

Ultimately, I think I agree with the thought Ward Six ends on—that being aware of the idea that your brain gets proportionally softer the more you surround yourself in luxury is enough. In the meantime, I’m not going to worry too much; frankly, between packing, closing out all my N.C.-based accounts, and making increasingly desperate phone calls to moving companies, my pillowtop mattress is all I’ve got going for me.

P.S. I think I might be turning colors from eating too many carrots. The issue seems to be limited to my extremities; for now, consider this blog at Threat Level Orange.

What’s the opposite not being dead? Oh yeah—getting older. Today is my 24th birthday.

I’ve never been a big fan of New Years Eve; for me, birthdays offer a way more personal way of looking at your life and kicking its ass a little, stretching what doesn’t fit anymore and seeing what you can’t do to make some changes. Today, I’m saying it out loud: there’s nothing we can’t do, no change we can’t affect. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield—all that stuff, you know?

Maybe this renewed Gryffindor spirit is a result of getting ready for my Big Big Move: for those of you who don’t know, I’m heading out west in a scant 5 weeks to break me off a piece of some poetry MFA at Arizona State. Turning 24 here—in a place that has seen me grow from an idiot-child of an 18 into…well, whatever I am as I aim for what comes next—has special significance, I think. But that might just be the Sharpie fumes as I start packing up my life into a series of differently-sized cardboard boxes.

So, what I’m trying to say is—I’m back! With a renewed sense of self after all the Awful that was March and April, I am back, committed to more thoroughly inhabiting this life, while its still got the steam left to carry me.