Introduction: The Nomad Chronicle

I call myself the Existential Nomad because home has never been a place, and it has certainly never been a single idea. Home is a box, and ideology is too often a cage. My life has been a series of departures, a chronicle written on the blurry edges of a society tearing itself apart. This book is a collection of my reports from that edge, a journey through the places I’ve been and the person they’ve forged. Starting tomorrow and over the next three weeks, you dear reader, will experience, if you wish, the first three installments of “The Nomad Chronicle”.

It started, as it often does, with a grand escape from a pre-packaged suburban future. At seventeen, running away feels more like an adventure than a failure, and my adventure began with a one-way bus ticket west. I was chasing a sound—the melodic, soul-crushing despair of Seattle's grunge scene that had rearranged my DNA through a worn-out cassette tape. What I found was a city that broke me down and rebuilt me. In the damp chill of a youth hostel, surrounded by the world's lost children, I learned the crushing weight of loneliness. But I also found salvation in the dark, sweaty clubs where bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden performed nightly exorcisms. That city taught me that sometimes, the only rational response to the world is to scream.

You can cross a country, but you can’t outrun yourself. I left Seattle thinking a change of scenery might change the script, but Boston was just a new stage for an old story. There, I went chasing the ghost of a father, hoping for connection, and instead found a slammed door and the quiet, final words, "It's time for you to go". Cast out, I found a different kind of belonging. My days were penance, swinging a sledgehammer in a cloud of plaster dust, tearing things down because I didn’t know how to build anything. My nights belonged to the brutal, working-class rage of the hardcore punk scene and a new family forged in the filth and fury of a punk rock flophouse. In those dark, deafening clubs, surrounded by the angry and the lost, I found a place I belonged.

My craft is leftist gonzo journalism, which is to say, I don't pretend to be an objective observer. Objectivity is the biggest lie the powerful ever sold the powerless. I am a participant. My notebook is stained with the coffee of late-night strategy sessions, the condensation from cheap beer, and the visceral residue of tear gas. I write what I see, what I feel, and what the ghosts of history whisper in the quiet moments. My political lens is unapologetically leftist, but my core philosophy is the knowledge that nothing is binary. This is where my work lives—in the tension between conviction and nuance.

If my life is a map, then New Orleans is the place my soul was born, lived, and reborn. It’s the only city that has ever truly felt like home, a force of nature that lived inside me. I came to it first as a wide-eyed kid on an impulse, and it taught me hard lessons of survival through knifepoint robberies and a surreal, hallucinogenic flood that washed away everything I owned. I fled in defeat, but the city never left me. Years later, I returned not as a kid running from something, but as a chef with a purpose, ready to contribute to its culinary heartbeat. I found a life measured in the rhythm of second-line parades, pots of red beans and rice, and massive crawfish boils that steamed into the humid night sky. That city, with its humid embrace and resilient spirit, taught me what it meant to belong.

This chronicle is a search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless world, one story at a time. It is not a space for easy answers, for clean heroes and villains, or for the kind of moral certainty that rots the soul. It’s an exploration of the beautiful, absurd struggle.

Welcome to the trip.

Don't expect a map.