the bohemian rhapsody

You are a 20-something-year-old alone on a roadtrip up the western coast of the United States. You’ve started in the bay area and made your way down south to San Diego. There, you turned around and started making your way back up north towards Vancouver. You’ve passed LA, Santa Barbara, San Fransisco, and frankly, there’s not much else left to look forward to until Portland. You’ve heard of a few scattered places here and there, but other than than, there’s about 400 miles between you and the the next, even vaguely familiar place.

“What’s even there?” you wonder as you start your car’s long-traveled engine. This is a familiar feeling. You get in the car and start driving. Where, you don’t really know; all you know is that you want to take highway 1, and follow it north. Armed with this you find the highway and your mind begins to wander. You find that’s a common occupation, especially when you’re surrounded by idyllic landscapes.

You’ve really enjoyed the places that you’ve stayed so far, but that was the easy part. Everyone enjoys Los Angeles, San Diego, and Santa Barbara. The more challenging part comes when you must find places that aren’t so famous. That’s where the uncertainty creeps in. You’ve learned — as I have in my relative geographic ignorance — that a pretty good heuristic for deciding which places to stay in is if you’ve heard of the place prior. The only place I had heard of that I could see between Half Moon Bay and Portland was Bodega Bay.

You know, from that Hitchcock movie called the Birds?

Yea, so using that heuristic, you decide to stay at Bodega Bay.

But you should have asked me first; if you had, I would’ve given you the details of my experience.

Unfortunately, the heuristic breaks down. Or at least, a cautionary addendum must be tagged onto the bottom of the document indicating that if you’ve heard about it through movies, it does not count because that is a different story.

I would tell you that Bodega Bay is no more beautiful than any of the 600 miles before it, and furthermore, it has the feel of someone or something very much in decline. Trapped in an image of the past, it appears that Bodega Bay is gripping tightly onto the glory days. When it was famous for something, that which is now gravely lost. I tell you this because I do not want you to have the same depressing and terrifying experience that I did.

I found a hotel not exactly in Bodega Bay but in a smaller town 9 miles out. Upon arrival, it’s historic appearance had a charming effect, one of an anachronistic surprise. As if, it had been left behind in our modern world’s industrial boom. Usually, I find historic neighborhoods interesting and accommodating, but this was also the first experience I’ve had on this trip where I felt completely out of place.

I went to a restaurant on the water for dinner, and I was the youngest person there. I sat alone at the far end of the restaurant, fully cognizant yet brilliantly aloof of the elderly glances — as if I were some grand intruder on a well-kept nursing home hang out. Typically, I don’t mind spending time with older people, but usually, older people are more accepting.

This was supposed to be “the nice restaurant in town,” but I have no comparison for the atmosphere and style of food except to say that it was very much akin to that of a Marie Calendar’s restaurant — which I am proud to notice seems to be a dying food chain.

Though something impressionable did come from the experience. When you eat alone, you often find yourself eavesdropping on other conversations that people have. I overheard the couple in front of me talking about Burning Man, and how amazing yet unrefined it was. They wondered — as I have about many activities — “what kind of person goes to that?” They settled on the term “Rich Bohemian.”

To be completely honest, I don’t really know what a Bohemian is. I imagine those guys and girls — like the ones in Venice Beach — who spend their day zoned out on the street, comfy, engulfed in their portable pillow consisting of sarcastically well-kempt dreadlocks. Typically, they’re outfitted with several tattoos and body modifications. But those people usually aren’t rich, and it’s interesting that these people came up again. In Venice, one of the guys asked, “how can you live a life like that?”

I guess other people don’t understand them. That’s too bad though because I probably don’t, but I feel like I do. I’d rather be one of them than be a doctor “because my parents want me to be one.” Before I make the next statement, I’m going to look up “bohemian.”

def: “a person who has informal and unconventional social habits, especially an artist or writer.”

I’m a little more angry now than I was when I began writing the article because it’s absurd that people should have such a disapproval for “unconventional social habits.” Just because these people have the courage and passion to live the life they want to now and it’s different from your cookie-cutter façade of an identity, doesn’t give you the right to look down upon them.

Maybe it’s because “rich bohemian” is such a relatively accurate description of me that I find our marginalization so disturbing and pathetic, but I think bohemians are doing life right. When people talk about following passions, there’s a tacit asterisk associated with it. Typically (in the zeitgeist’s mind), following your passion is something that you do after you figure out the “more important things” like food and shelter. The problem with this mindset is that you find yourself dividing your life into pieces that you later try to fit together. That’d be like saying, “okay, I’m gonna bake something. I don’t know what though, but apples sound nice. Sugar too. Maybe a dash of baking powder. I’ll add some yeast too because my parents said that’s important. ” Then putting it in the oven for about 40 years.

When you take it out of the oven, you look at it kind of funny because it looks disgusting. You put yeast in with apples, sugar, and baking powder! You didn’t even remember to put flour in :-/. As you try — with much difficulty — to make sense of this abstract and bizarre creation, you begin to see something that kind of makes sense. “ahhhh yes, it’s a gluten-free apple fritter,” so that’s what you tell your friends:

yea, my life is an apple fritter

And they say

nice man, my life is a blueberry scone

You all kind of look at each other, too familiar with the guilt associated with stage 4 impostor syndrome because you know that your “apple fritter” is barely even edible — in fact, you had to stretch your imagination to see it on your baking pan. You suspect that their “blueberry scone” is barely even a scone, but you’ll never know. You can’t actually look into someone’s soul.

I suggest that we adopt a more holistic — yes, I’m apparently now a college admissions officer — approach to our lives. Don’t conceive of your life in stages that must happen in a logical order. Instead, create a fantasy or ideal life that you want to be living, and start doing what ever it is you need to do to make that happen right now. No excuses. I swear, if you watch Youtube or Netflix after reading this article, I’m going to cry. Don’t think that you need to find stability, then do what you love. Do what you love, and through that, find stability.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably not in grave danger of starving to death, so do what you must to let yourself fly. Only through relinquishing our attachment to mediocrity through homogeneity, will we rise above and create a meaningful and fulfilling life for ourselves. That is the Bohemian Rhapsody.

The biggest trouble with living like a bohemian is that you get lonely. As you do more and more that aligns with your ideal life, you’ll begin to deviate more and more from the behaviors that are typical of people with whom you associate. When you’re busy thinking about what will come out of the oven at the end of the 40 years, everyone else around you is thinking about what ingredient to add in next. And that’s painful. Maybe you should write a poem about it.