You once read that both the cheapest and the most expensive Portuguese meat comes from pigs. You’ve always wanted to taste the expensive meat, Pata Negra, a black pork from wild pigs that feed entirely on acorns. You probably never will. Well … maybe. You imagine that it tastes full of the brine of the best bacon, the creaminess of Hong Shao Rou, and the husky finish of a dark chocolate.

In the same book, you read about a philosopher that said the problem of not being able to let go is that you can’t pick up anything new. So maybe don’t hold out for the pork for so long.

The future is a strange and unpredictable place. You’d come to believe tomorrow would logically follow your experiences like one foot follows another. As you get older, it’ll become harder to know what from the past was real and what was fantasy. It all just seems like wearing out your sneakers walking in circles. For example, you’ll spend an entire afternoon trying to run down a word that you swear exists: nostalgia for something that never happened. Your adult head will become a cavernous space, impossible to entirely fill and impossible to go back and organize. I have it here somewhere, you’ll say, even if you’ve never had it at all. At times even countermelodies will just seem like echoes from something sung in another voice range.

You’ll want to believe that all of these fragments add up to some bigger story in some bigger world that’s actually going somewhere. But in reality any narrative is just a extrapolation of coincidence. And coincidence is, at best, the world just kind of winking at you, making sure that you know it’s paying attention even if it isn’t doing anything about it.

Some of your best childhood memories never happened, but the bad ones generally come made out of whole cloth. That’s fine, isn’t it? Does it matter if your Dad was a DJ or your Mom was a secret service agent? Does it matter that they divorced when you were too young to remember or that you can’t seem to picture them in the same room anymore? Maybe there wasn’t even a book about pork and philosophy. You have your memories and a lot of confusing ideas. They don’t all add up. They don’t exist independently. Their tangles make up the hammock that you sleep in.

Some days you’ll think about this a lot and really try to figure it out and really try to say something serious about it and other days you’ll just say, “Fuck it. I’ll sing some falderal about a kazoo.”

Home is wherever your head is. Welcome home. This is the bedroom and this is the kitchen and this is the garage roof. This is your grade school art class and this is the front seat of your Mom’s Ford Kuga and this is the front porch at dusk at the beginning of the summer. Now learn to stand firm in your own two shoes. The earth will always be shifting beneath you.