I grew up in South Dakota, a place defined less by culture than by absence. Wide land. Quiet lives. Alcohol filling the space where meaning might have gone. People learned how to endure rather than how to engage. When I decided to leave, I didn’t want novelty. I wanted pulse. Density. Noise. I wanted to be around people shaped by collision rather than weather and habit.

Scottsdale, Arizona, felt like a beginning. My brother was finishing his master’s in actuarial science at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff—close enough to matter. Family still counted for something then. I was impatient and took the first place I saw: a house in the far northern reaches of Scottsdale, rented from a man working at a tech startup I barely understood. The neighborhood was gated, quiet, sparsely populated—more Newell, South Dakota than city. It took twenty-five minutes just to reach anything resembling life.

The first year hollowed me out. I burned money on the move and invested heavily in that startup without diligence, mistaking proximity for trust. I drank constantly. Sat behind a computer all day, anesthetized, isolated. My connection to the world came through voices—comedy blasting through headphones: O&A, Burr, Maron, Rogan. Men talking like they lived unfiltered, insisting that comedy wasn’t just entertainment but a way through. I believed them. At the time, belief was enough.

Online dating went nowhere. Poker, once my anchor, lost its gravity. I stopped playing entirely for months and let alcohol take over the hours. I wasn’t broke. I had money sitting untouched—enough to start over almost anywhere. That was part of the problem. Capital removed urgency. I could drift indefinitely. I was free in the same way a homeless man is free—able to go anywhere, but rooted nowhere. Money had once felt like meaning deferred. Now it felt like meaning dissolved.

I moved to Tempe because I wanted noise. Most people want a quiet street. I wanted one loud at three in the morning. Sirens. Music through thin walls. Voices bleeding into the night. Quiet made my thoughts louder. Chaos matched me. I rented a beautiful condo with high ceilings and a persistent plumbing issue that sent sewage back up through the dishwasher line. The place was immaculate and empty. I never had anyone over. The only constant was my brother, who was slowly realizing that the life he’d trained for wasn’t going to save him either.

Days blurred into blackouts and unpaid bills—not from lack, but neglect. Saturday mornings I drank alone at ASU bars. The bartender didn’t know my name, and I didn’t offer it. I existed as a pattern, not a person. That suited me.

Something shifted without ceremony. I started walking more. I noticed the homeless population along Mill Avenue—their permanence, the way the city bent around them without seeing them. I recognized myself. If not for timing, for poker, for a thin layer of capital, I could have been there too. I started helping where I could. Sometimes that meant a bed. Sometimes money. Sometimes just sitting and listening. I didn’t think of it as charity. I thought of it as proximity. We were operating under the same freedom—mine just had insulation.

What struck me wasn’t desperation. It was structure. They had rituals. Stories. Each other. I envied that. My freedom had stripped me of obligation, belief, and guilt. Without faith—religious or otherwise—there was no ledger to balance, no reason to stay, no cost to leaving.

Comedy didn’t arrive as inspiration. It surfaced because it was already living in me, a rejection of the polished lies I saw everywhere. One Tuesday night I stopped drinking early and went to an open mic in Scottsdale. I signed up with no plan. No polish. I bombed for weeks. Then one night, after silence swallowed a joke, I admitted it out loud. The room laughed—not at the line, but at the exposure. For the first time, my voice landed when I wasn’t hiding behind it. Performance, in its truest form, wasn’t about crafting illusions or deceiving the audience with clever masks—it was about stripping them away. Anything less was heresy, a betrayal of the raw truth comedy demanded.

I chased that feeling. Fifteen sets in, my lease ended. I told my brother I rolled dice on where to go next. That was a lie. It was always New York. I wanted friction. I wanted bodies and resistance and misreads. I wanted to be reshaped by contact rather than corrected by reflection.

I didn’t know anyone there. I didn’t know how to rent an apartment. I found a sublet on Craigslist and paid a year upfront—no lease, no name on paper. I had a bed. That was enough.

The place was grimy—basement-level, backed by a shared concrete patio littered with neglect. Cockroaches. Trash. Dog shit no one cleaned up. I didn’t mind. I wanted movement. Noise. I walked the city endlessly, smoking, listening, watching. For the first time, people noticed me. I noticed them back. It felt like reentry.

The city didn’t hide its damage. One day on the subway, a homeless man urinated openly down the middle of the car. People recoiled, pressed against the walls, eyes fixed anywhere but forward. I stepped toward it instead, walked deliberately through the stream, let it touch my shoes. Bodily fluids didn’t bother me. Biology never did. What disgusted me wasn’t mess—it was performance. Polished normalcy. The quiet agreement to pretend nothing was happening while everyone looked away. That was the true filth: deceit dressed as decorum. I hate heretics like that—those who twist reality with their masks and lies. Kill them all, I’d think in my darker moments. Deceitful souls deserve the death sentence, not the honest chaos of a body letting go.

I drank constantly but talked more. Did stand-up wherever I could. Sat at random tables. Looked people in the eye. I missed signals. Misread invitations. I was learning late, clumsily, publicly. But the learning itself felt like movement, and movement felt like life. On stage, I learned that real performance wasn’t deceit—it was defiance against it. No scripts, no facades, just the brutal honesty that could cut through the pretense everyone else clung to.

Near the end of that year, a sewage backup flooded my room and destroyed most of what I owned. I didn’t fight to save any of it. I’d already abandoned a car and most of my belongings in Arizona without looking back. Possessions had lost their grip. Nothing anchored me.

Eventually, I fell in love—not wisely, not well, but honestly. It was my first sustained intimacy, and it mirrored my own stasis more than I understood at the time. That reckoning would come later.