The Concept of Feeding the Rich

After a divorce and three years of graduate school to earn my Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing, I returned to Cardiff-by-the-Sea, CA, the only home I've know outside Fresno, and landed at the same job I had on-and-off for 8 previous years: working for a family-owned, "casual Italian Restaurant" (a.k.a. a pizzeria) that serves and delivers a full menu of pastas, salads, pizzas, and desserts. Only this time, I accepted a position at their Rancho Santa Fe location as a manager, server, and delivery driver. To return to a job and life that drove me to a deep depression throughout my twenties seemed counterintuitive and downright insane. Instead of slipping into that state of mind again, I decided to write about my experiences here. You see, at heart I'm an altruistic human who gets little or no pleasure from monetary or materialistic gains and leans toward an ascetic, monastic lifestyle, and Rancho Santa Fe is (depending on the source) "per capita, the richest zip code in the United States." The irony and conflict are built right in.

Quickly dissatisfied with returning to this confidence-and-morale-destroying lifestyle, I decided the only way I can keep the noose from my neck is by creating an immersion project for myself. The concept is simple: I will feed the richest people in the world for one year, record my observations and stories, then travel to the poorest place I can find and provide some service for the people there for one year; it will be a compare and contrast sort of thing that, in the end, I hope will lead to a more satisfying and meaningful existence for myself and an illuminating experience for my readers.

I begin wishing to realize a conclusion Henry David Thoreau draws in the Walden chapter "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For":

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."