Random Search, episode 1.

The Moth (a guest post by Sarah Devlin)

As a freelance writer and editor without a budget for travel, I spend the majority of my day online checking facts and looking for inspiration. I’m not a fiction writer. I write articles for marine trade journals and magazines. I write profiles and reviews of places where I have never been. I debate and opine about arguments in which I do not participate. I review trade shows I haven’t attended. I rely on phone interviews, emails, and Internet searches, and for every article, I must become a temporary expert on a topic that appeals to a persnickety niche market. I click on nearly everything I see.

As you can imagine, I have walked down some odd cyber streets, and fallen into my fair share of Google holes. This time, it started with a moth resting on an uncashed freelance check on my kitchen table.

I found myself reading about a fight between ad men George Lois and Julian Koenig, and then clicked from Portland, Maine, mayor candidate Erick Bennett (you’ll have to find him yourself) to the Maine Gazette. I watched a Modest Mouse video after seeing a friend’s image of a dead mouse on Facebook. I worked my way from researching why I felt so crappy after getting a tooth filled to the story of Wallis Simpson. (I don’t really know how that happened and, by the way, I have no desire to see Madonna’s new film W.E.) I discovered Stephen Dorff is Sofia Coppola’s muse. My god is Stephen Dorff good looking and did you know he collects vintage cameras?

But this is about a moth. I never discovered what kind of moth I was looking at or why it rested and eventually died on my kitchen table. I ended up listening to a recent podcast of the radio show, The Moth, and I read the Death of a Moth, which sent me into the type of funk only Virginia Woolf can induce. I had a brief interlude with Death of a Salesman, which didn’t help, before returning to my original search and ending up with The Mothman Prophecies. Eventually, I went here: http://www.mothworlds.org/belmont/. I shouted in glee (which reminds me that I recently read online, not surprisingly, Lea Michele is kind of a diva).

Sometimes, I feel like one of those Wargames guys, sitting in a room surrounded by computer screens. Or like someone earnestly and feverishly typing comments into a Walking Dead forum. At other times, hopping on my elliptical machine, or staring out the window, I feel like I Am Legend—the book, not the movie. I drink plenty of whiskey and I look nothing like the Fresh Prince.

But I travel every day, all day long, visiting some of the strangest sites I will never see if I get on a plane.