I'm a bit of a gypsy. I live everywhere; I live out of a bag.
Yet nightly pitch my moving tent, a day's march nearer home.
I don't have a permanent place where I live. I'm in Atlanta about six or seven months out of the year. I gave up on my place in New York. I don't have a place in L.A., but sometimes when I go there for the hiatus, I stay in temporary housing. It's all over the place, and I don't know where I live!
I spent my thirties living out of boxes and moving every six months to a year. It was my cloud period: I just wandered like a cloud for ten years, following the food supply. I was a hunter, gatherer, an academic migrant.
A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is a deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out.
I'm never anywhere for more than three weeks.
In America and Europe, the nomadism is of trade and curiosity.
There's a book called 'The Baron in the Trees.' A friend got that for me because I was kind of a tree-dwelling nomad for a bit. I kind of associate myself with the book.
My "home" is a controversial topic. I don't exactly have one. I live all over the world.
Most vagabonds i knowed don't ever want to find the culprit that remains the object of their long relentless quest. The obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending, the pursuit you see and never the arrest" - Tom Waits "Foreign Affairs
I am a gypsy, basically.
But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the nonexistent horizon, and his empire is an intangible one, for his domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit.
When you meet someone, a friend, who's living out on the road, or living semi-homeless, or leading their life in a radically different way, it makes you think about your own life in a really critical way and feel completely disoriented.
I'm an air-conditioned gypsy.
I'm not a vagrant... I'm a hobo. Big difference.
When I was little, I attended five different elementary schools. My parents are very restless people, which is probably where I get my own nomadic lifestyle from.
