I live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I have been here for three weeks and am still in a sort of state of shock about the whole thing. This entry, then, is about two things. The first part is about what it means to be home, and second, what it means to try to make Louisiana my home.
I have long believed that home is not a place, but a presence. Home exists when and where you exist in a particular way. For me, home is about family and friends. For example, a few years ago some friends of mine and I were shooting a short film. One of the locations was in the middle of a town called Tonopah Nevada. Tonopah was a silver mining town in central Nevada that, by the time we had arrived in 2005, seemed to have pretty much dried up. The point is that despite the fact that there was little, if anything, to do there and that the towns population had reduced from 10,000 to roughly 2,000 in the matter of a few short years, for the few days that we were there, it felt like home. We were never at a loss for something to do (we were filming, but not all the time), and no one ever got bored, or depressed about being, literally, in the middle of nowhere. Had I been there alone, I would not have felt the same way.

The point being is that I think that there is only so much time spent alone that can be helpful for a person. It doesn’t matter if they are in London, Honolulu, or Tonopah, what makes a place home, and what makes a place worth living in are the people who are around you and care for you. This gets me to that old adage, “home is where the heart is,” and leads me to question if, and how much we possess our own heart. When we’re kids we think in terms of “best friends.” I think our hearts are objects that we divide up and dole out as we see fit. It’s bad form to hold too much of your own heart, if any, so we immediately give it to others to hold. When we’re young, we don’t have as many people as we would trust with it when we are older, so it belongs to fewer people, and the biggest piece goes to your best friend. As we grow older we cut it up into more and more pieces and continue to hand them out to more and more people. When someone gives their piece back to you, it could be devastating. It’s not that the heart is literally broken, but it feels like that must be the case or they would have kept it. And then we don’t know what to do with it. What if it is broken and we just can’t see how? It would seem unethical to give the broken piece away without fixing it. I mean, really, who wants to inherit a broken anything? Then if we can get convince ourselves that it’s not broken and that it works fine (even if that’s not really the case), we try to force it on someone else or we just hold onto it and pine on the one who once cared for it. But there is no set standard and no guidebook as to who to give it to and what to do should they give it back. It’s a scary process.
I have lived in a lot of places in my life, from California, Georgia, North Carolina, and for a couple of months, Ireland, and now I live in Baton Rouge. I am about to start the process of cutting up my heart again and handing it out. I need to do it soon, but not so quickly that I overestimate the sizes I need to give out and the amount that I need to give out. There is also the fear of stepping too timidly. Some would say that I never have this problem but that doesn’t change the fact that I feel like I do have this problem...
This ends part 1. Part 2 will present a little information about why the Long Road home can only take place in Louisiana. It’s a section of the country unlike any other...