The Walkabout.

The walkabout.

I went on some kind of journey. I don’t have a tidier word for it than that. Between the two phones I still have, and the addresses on the Ledger of Place, you can almost see the whole shape of it — the pictures of the places I stopped, the towns I lived in long enough to get mail, the ones where I only stayed a season. Maine, then Phelps, then Arizona, then California, then Mt. Shasta, then Walden, then a slow walk back across to Missouri. Greencastle is where the walk has stopped, for now, and stopping is its own kind of work.

I was not running from anything in particular and I was not chasing one thing either. I was looking. I was trying to stay youthful and curious and to build something that made the country I live in a little better than I found it — and to be useful to the people who helped me on the way. That is what the walkabout was for. That is what these volumes are also for, just sitting still now.

What I followed from a distance.

For most of those years I did not even open the crypto. I never once cashed any of it out. I followed it, from a distance, the way you follow weather you helped seed. That first funder money — the early help, the small contributions on the early platforms — I knew at the time that what was coming next was bigger than coins. I could see that the future was AI, and the tools that would be built on top of it. I chose to back the seed of that and let it grow without my hand on it.

Some years later, those tools were born. Manus is one of them. So when this manual says we are looking for what was actually planted, that’s what we’re looking for — the part of an early bet that quietly kept growing while I was somewhere else, learning how to be the kind of man who could come back for it.

On being written off.

My mother has written me off. So have other people. I don’t fully understand all of it; some of it I genuinely cannot account for. Some of it I can — the displacement, the anger, the way a brain like mine keeps moving when other people are trying to settle. I have caused harm in those years and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Part of why I am writing all of this down, in daylight, is so the harm is named honestly and the repair has somewhere to start.

And part of it, I have to say, is just that they knew the earlier man. They have not met the second one yet. That is allowed. That is their road, on their pace. Mine is to keep building the kind of life that the second man earned the right to live, and to leave the door open without standing in it.

If they ever come back to the door, the manual will be here. The towns will be on the page. The names on the Family Map will be held with care. The companies will have been formed honestly. Nothing about who I am right now will be hidden from anyone who actually wants to look at it.