"More than love, money, more than fame, give me truth."

I guess that's how I feel-but a lot of people will give me shit for dropping a quote that you are likely to find on every fifth cup of tea you try to drink. Quoting Henry David Thoreau at this late stage in the game with any pretensions to sincerity seems to be intentionally sadistic, setting yourself up for failure-like arranging a banquet, a sort of bonding event for cynical people, where you set out a bucket of baseballs and voluntarily strip, bare your pale perishable flesh to cold and cruelty and beg for a pelting.

Nonetheless, I love the guy. His words inspire like no other's. I can't really make sense of much in my own personal deluded universe without referencing all of his bullshit and lies-none of my illusions seem coherent without him. Thoreau is the thread that unifies so much of my life, stitches my world together, a tattered tapestry of transcendentalism. He ruined my life by first giving me a grand, glorious, extravagant idea of what it, life, could be-is. I have sought for a long time to overthrow him, to transcend Thoreau himself, transcend the sweet sound of his sickly and self-serving rhetoric, emanating from his seat of personal insecurity heroically endured in isolation beside Walden Pond. Seduced by his luscious life-affirming propaganda, I immediately signed up for war the first time I heard his words, joined a long-term and problematic battle.

I don't remember where I was when 9-11 happened. I was 14, it was morning. I might have been masturbating in the shower before school. But I know exactly where I was sitting in high school junior year when Thoreau got me: "Do we ride on the train, or does the train ride on us?" Damn did that grab; the bastard hooked me from the get go. What a sexy question-it has more levels of complexity than there are rows of energy drinks at 7-11, there's no concentration of caffeine anywhere to recreate the explosion of curiosity in my brain.

Of course, though, the answer is simple. The train rides on us. And now it's a constant battle: Every time I turn on my laptop or bust out my cell phone, I tremble as I dial, certain some satellite is going to come tumbling out of the sky and decapitate me. Do I ride on Thoreau's words or do they ride on me?

Thankfully I'm not the only kid who got burned by this glib New England asshole. I've got friends he's fucked too. We've been fucked together by him at the same time. My buddy Kyle and I went hitchhiking last summer. We had a few books in our back pockets: Hemingway and his flask, Kerouac and his stupid rucksack, and, chiefly, Thoreau-Thoreau and his affirmation, finally, of the clich és that were our birthright as Southern California suburban bores. This trip was to be the definitive surmounting of the home that forever stifled us with poisoned approval. Hitherto, obviously, we'd always been dead, never taken a true draught of oxygen; the blue light we shared in the living room on the couch with our parents at night watching the Discovery Channel was the only light in our lives.

With Thoreau and friends in our back pockets and the conviction that we were secure against the possibility of coming to the end of our lives and discovering we hadn't lived, we stuck our thumbs out and managed to hitchhike from Pacific Beach in San Diego, up the coast along Highway 1 to San Francisco in three days. Goddamn I felt fucking alive! We were camping on the beach below the cliffs in San Simean drinking Jim Beam watching a stork silhouetted in reflected starlight wade out into the waves, returning like us, to that oceanic feeling we'd almost forgotten when we spied another fire up the beach: other traveler kids, sad-eyed precocious wanderers, a tribe of defeated nomads-herdless, but hopeful-yet hardened through a constant drifting across a continent, wise by a big bagfull of experience. They effortlessly drained off a limitless store of devastating stories of drugs, sex and death under freeways and on rail cars. They were the real deal. We were posers with cell phones who called our moms to tell them we were safe each night. We thought Thoreau burned us-goddamn! The beauty of the tragedy in their eyes, the apex of one human's forsaking of another, Thoreau's evil schemes engraved in the premature wrinkles criss-crossing their faces. These kids too craved only reality, driven to the utmost extremes to live deeply.

It's a burden always carrying Walden around in your back pocket. Thoreau instilled in me desires radically and tragically at odds with all discernible reality, articulating perfectly every shy whisper my heart, from its own heart, ever gave vague utterance to. Humiliatingly, I admit, my young life so far has been shaped by phrases written on the backs of tea packets-but what can I do about it? Stop buying cheap tea? "How many a man has dated a new era of his life from the reading of a book?" And how many a man in reading Thoreau has assumed the tedious battle to drench reality, to crowd out all the clutter, the deluge of distractions, and seek a position of eternal repose in the lap of the world that is perfected right there in front of them?

Thoreau made me old school. I am no post-modernist, I don't dance-I sit there and assert a hierarchy. Some things are more valuable than others. For example, truth. So don't call me and ask me to watch Spiderman 4 with you-it's a distraction I cannot afford. But what has happened to me? Have I not become a spider of sorts, hidden under the cellar steps thumbing so many effete pages penned by an outmoded dinosaur? It's true, I need to transcend Thoreau, transcend this war-"To front only the essential facts of life." What the fuck is he even talking about? That is what matters, "essential facts"-what the hell is an essential fact? All I know is the president is a black guy and it ain't anymore the case that Pluto is a planet. All I know is I got places to go, people to see, and my old friend Princess Adelaide just updated her Facebook status and she still has the whooping cough.

I was thinking of Thoreau when I made the mistake of majoring in philosophy. Imagining it true that "we crave only reality," I thought the study of philosophy would be a consistent means of tickling my metaphysical bone to orgasm. But this didn't quite work out, so I became a committed sperm donor my freshman year in college down there on Center and Milvia. I figured it was an intelligent decision. I wouldn't have to waste my precious time dawdling with some trivial low-paying honest job-I'd be able to concentrate on essentials, free from the fake shit "which distracts our minds from serious things," while still making a few bills. I saw Thoreau smiling somewhere when I wore the same jeans and shoes for a year and had only two shirts-"no man ever stood lower by my estimation for having a patch in his clothes." For years I resisted making quesadillas in microwaves and friends on MySpace, agreeing that they were "an improved means to an unimproved end." I stopped eating meat because it is "a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal." But shit, now I'm anemic and I don't have any friends, and I never got any girls because they said I looked "grody" and I got this philosophy degree that you'll see in action if, in a few years, you happen down the right San Francisco alley where a man reads Nietzsche aloud to no one on a nest of cardboard behind a dumpster. And, on top of all this, now there is a small army of kids who share my genes running around Disneyland, pissing their pants in car seats, and sitting Indian-style sounding out words on the carpet of the kindergarten classroom. Let's hope they don't figure it out.