The Road2Elsewhere Turns 200!
200 posts, that is! With links to my most popular columns! And drawings! What does it all mean? I! Don't! Know! But I'm having fun, at least. You, too? WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE
I WAS AT A CABIN IN COLORADO WITH TWO PUBLISHING-INDUSTRY FRIENDS, in 2019. Accent on the friend part, but these guys also knew their way around books and career-building, having done it themselves in big ways. Looking out of floor-to-ceiling windows, we enjoyed endless views of the continental divide, where the country split over the spine of the Rockies. Exactly the kind of place to contemplate your future, raise your sights, and swear you’ll attempt many difficult things or die trying.
But even with this view in front of me, my friends caught me looking backward, as I described my difficulty breaking away from what had always worked for me: Writing and editing for magazines, with ghostwriting projects on the side. It was a good living. They advised me to give it up.
“You need to introduce the idea of Moorebucks into your life,” my pal Jeremy said. “Pay yourself to do what you love, rather than what other people want you to do.”
Radical!
Dave followed up: “If you don’t do it now, when will you do it?”
Pushy!
A year later we were on the cusp of a pandemic, so the “die trying” bit was harder to ignore. Then the cannabis+health magazine I was editing went under. So, at long last, I started writing my own book, which grew into an illustrated memoir, which grew into an illustrated substack, which grew into cartooning and commentary gigs for the Colorado Sun and Front Range NPR.
I haven’t published the memoir, yet. Three agents are now reading it—the first station of the cross on the way to a published book. But had I not taken my friends’ advice to heart, and begun placing value on what I want to write, and what I want to draw, I’d be right where I was four years ago—doing exciting work, but not my work.
This substack has been essential to the progress I’ve made—both as a practice ground, and as a proof of concept. What the hell was I interested in? What the hell were you interested in? Now I know, sorta. Over the past three years, you’ve opened these posts a total of 156,334 times—oh, check that, it’s up to 156,347, now—and I’m amazed by and grateful for every last click and comment.
Thank you.
I’m sharing your greatest hits here, for the thousand or so subscribers who are relatively new to the Road2Elsewhere. And for auld lang syne, which literally means “old long since.” But it this case, they’re neither “old” nor “long since.” They’re the look forward I had been afraid to take, but my friends insisted on.
Thanks, friends.
Are you overdo for a look forward, as well?
Fifth Most Popular Post!
24 October 2022
Starry-eyed in Starry-Night Territory
Sick in Bordeaux, recovering (just like Van Gogh!) in Saint-Rémy, and high in Chamonix. Life is (mostly) good here in France.
IS THERE EVER a more wretched feeling that lying sweatily on the tile floor of a strange bathroom in a strange city, and awaiting the next wave of nausea to splash into Lake Toilet?
Mais non!
I was the victim of an under-heated petrie dish of pumpkin soup at an adorable restaurant in Bordeaux’s centre ville, and spent much of the night reliving dinner, in reverse. It’s the not-so-great pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
The next morning, still recovering, I settled in for a therapeutic sit in the main botanic garden in town.
As my stomach calmed, so did I, to simply take in the scene in front of me.
The town’s bicycle commuters had places to go, and refused even to stay in the frame of my drawing.
On another bench in the same park, I spotted this spindly little crabapple, with a few wan fruit dangling at the end of its gangly branches.
Well, I guess the birds have to eat, too.
Click here, for what happened after I stopped vomiting….
Fourth most popular post!
31 March 2022
R2E Excerpt #46*: The Rising Tide of Words Words Words
"I never travel without my diary," wrote Oscar Wilde. "One should always have something sensational to read on the train."
WHEN I WAS GROWING UP IN CONNECTICUT, speaking up led to a punch from a Murderer’s Row of older brothers. But after I’d decamped to England, words could propel me out the window and off on adventures, just like that other Peter (Pan). A croc with a clock—the enemy of my enemy—could be my playmate
On the ferry from France to Folkestone I floated on a rising tide of words words words: “I must enter into the intense feeling I had while riding the Tube this morning,” I wrote, “that I honestly feel like a writer, that it was just a matter of time and effort before I am recognized as one. I hope and trust that this is prophetic. After all, I am working on two books at once, am I not?”
Ah yes, my literary life—discernible in the distance, like Herbert Pocket’s Capital, in Great Expectations:
“When we gradually fell into keeping late hours and late company,” Charles Dickens wrote, “I noticed that [Herbert Pocket] looked about him with a desponding eye at breakfast time; that he began to look about him more hopefully at mid-day; that he drooped when he came into dinner; that he seemed to descry Capital in the distance rather clearly after dinner; that he all but realized Capital towards midnight; and that at about two o’clock in the morning he became so deeply despondent again as to talk of buying a rifle and going to America, with a general purpose of compelling buffaloes to make his fortune.”
But I had no prospect of compelling buffaloes to make my living for me, back in America.
Accordingly, my brain was throwing off sparks like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow-shed. I would fly into trembling bursts of invention and intention, late into the night. After one of these supernovas, I exploded down the hallway to bang on my Irish friend Seamus’s door, in our dorm in Paris.
Click here to find out what I said to my friend Seamus!
Third most popular post!
14 March 2022
Road to Elsewhere Excerpt #45*: Why Did I Leave Paris?
And other bad ideas, explained. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE
I LOVED EVERYTHING ABOUT PARIS—the language, the fragrant Metro, the vin du table, and my appealingly freckly French teacher.
Au revoir to all that.
In pursuit of what?
I was embracing change, for its own sake, even though I’d already effected a wholesale transformation by crossing the Atlantic ocean and living in French. In eight weeks I learned to drink coffee (cheaper than tea, in Paris cafes), fell in love a few times (Diamant, et al, but also countless Metro crushes and art-gallery intrigues),
and absorbed enough French to sass waiters right back.
I was drunk with France in every way possible.
Click here to discover me under the influence…of France.
Second most popular post!
24 March 2022
The Girl with a Pearl Nose Ring
With all due apologies to Johannes Vermeer. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE
IF YOU’RE ANY KIND OF ART NERD, you’re aware of the brouhaha stirred up by the Mauritshuis Gallery in The Hague, after it loaned out Johannes Vermeer’s “The Girl with a Pearl Earring.” Forget for the moment that she traveled only about thirty miles to join the big Vermeer blowout at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
People were outraged—OUTRAGED—when the Mauritshuis’ directors (who obviously have a sense of humor, unlike some people) encouraged artists to submit to an exhibition called “My Girl with a Pearl,” to vamp with the visual idea of “girl + pearl earring.”
This is one girl—the whiners shrieked—who nobody is allowed to play with!
In solidarity with my fellow wiseass artists, I say: To hell with that!
And she does stoke the imagination.
I mean, why not…
THE GIRL WITH THE PEARL NOSE RING?
For more of the girl with the pearl something or other, click here!
DRUMROLL, PLEASE!
MY #1 MOST POPULAR POST! (16,000 clicks and counting!)
31 January 2023
Vincent & Me
There's more to Van Gogh than meets the eye. Or the ear, for that matter. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE
WHEN I WAS BANGING AROUND IN FRANCE last October I kept on running into Vincent Van Gogh.
He glared at me over a crowd at the Musee D’Orsay in Paris…
…and haunted me in the little village of St. Remy-de-Provence, where he was institutionalized in 1889.
I even spent an entire day (and nine miles!) on an art-appreciation death march from Pontoise to Auvers-sur-Oise, in hot pursuit of the painter. It really shouldn’t have been hard to catch him, because that’s where he was buried.
With his intense stare meeting mine everywhere I went, it was almost as if he were trying to send me a message. No, multiple messages—about all the ways he’d been misunderstood, misrepresented, and maligned during his lifetime, and even during his highly profitable afterlife.
Here’s what I learned: Everything I thought I knew about Vincent was wrong! Including…
He never cut off his ear. Even if you’re completely bonkers, it’s really hard to cut off your own body part. Just try it! No, don’t!
But the alternative theory makes more sense: He and his artist pal Paul Gauguin (an expert swordsman) were fencing, and—oops!—Gauguin lopped the listener.
FYI, that was also my most controversial drawing ever, as many viewers didn’t get that it was a visual pun on a famous James Thurber cartoon, instead of outright theft.
Oh well, sometimes humor is hard to get.
For more Van Gogh-related outrage, click here.
So, what have I learned from 200 posts in 789 days? Absolutely nothing, aside from the fact that I love to do write and illustrate for my growing crowd of discerning readers. That’s probably enough.
Was it good for you, too?
See you further along the Road2Elsewhere!
Pathetic plea for more shares…
and comments…
and subscribers, here…
and here! At a discount!
Happy to be Mr. Pushy and to have contributed in some small way! Keep up the amazing work—you're an inspiration!
200 posts is quite a feat, Peter! Enjoying catching up with your greatest hits - "The Girl With Earl 'The Pearl' Monroe" hits my sweet spot, silliness + high art + random sports stuff...