Leaving in a Week

"Do you ever miss having a normal life?"

This was the question put to me by my brother's girlfriend, Wyndi, and I wasn't sure how to take it. I liked it for the way it made me feel sexy and daring, like the kind of person who picks up and goes and doesn't look back and.... But none of that really sounds like me.  I don't just pick up and go. Things could go either way in my constant internal tug of war between a desire, a need, to have things the way they always have been on the one hand, and...something... boredom? (probably)...a spirit of adventure?(I hope)... pulling me away from what I've seen to find the things I haven't. My life feels extraordinary from the inside, but I don't assume it looks that way to everyone, or even anyone. But it's my own, and I love it.

 So, Wyndi, here's what you need to know: Yesterday was the first day of autumn. No one has noticed, and no one has officially called it yet, so I'm going to. The dew point was lower, the air less humid, something. Maybe it was the light. But something about this time of year forcibly reminds me that time is barreling forward, a torrent that can't be refused and a current that won't let me keep my feet. It's a time of year that makes me antsy and blue, and when that feeling comes upon me, I have to start moving. One day, I'll take an honest look within to determine the source of the creeping despondency that keeps my fingers drumming nervously on whatever when I'm standing still and my heart burning for something to break the routine, but not today.

I'm leaving in less than one week; moving to a small city of 19,000 or so called Royan, in the Charente-Maritime département of France. It is less than a half-hour by train from where I used to live in Saintes, on the ocean - well, at the mouth of the Gironde Estuary, anyway. I've been there a few times, and I'm glad I'll be living there. I have a lot to get done this week, and a lot on my mind. But I do not miss any other life I could be having, except for one.

 

Killing Bill

"Jon... look man... I know you're not... I... I can't leave... I can't leave you this message; you're not ready for it... Alright, I'll see you later."
-My brother Mike, on my voice mail.


Last Thursday, I was at Mike's house painting a surfboard. I had chosen to portray a giant hurricane bearing down on the State of Florida, in honor of the actual giant hurricane, Bill, for which the board was made. Chances were, Bill was going to start sending us the best surf of the year in 24 hours, and Mike had enough confidence in Bill to shape a board to the conditions we were expecting, and enough confidence in me to ask me to decorate it. The hurricane went on fine, but Florida...

-Uh, Mike? I've got some bad news.
-What? he said, glancing over. Ah, c'mon, man! You're killing me. (My attempts to freehand draw our already phallic home state left it looking even more penile than usual.)
-Hang on, let me draw some rivers...
-Those just look like veins.
-I think we're done here.

Friday evening, we pulled up to the ocean. Checking the surf, we saw that the first of the groundswell from Hurricane Bill had already arrived. A few minutes later, I was dropping into my first wave, a 3-foot-overhead left. I was on my own homemade board, Don Quijote, which was not consciously designed for waves like these, but it did fine. Paddling over to Mike, I told him I was okay with dying today, if I had to. He concurred, and we went back to catching waves. His new board was performing exactly as he'd hoped it would.


By Saturday afternoon, we had been surfing more or less continuously since Friday evening, pausing only to eat, drink, and sleep. Our shoulders were aching, and the skin over the points of our ribs was tender from lying on our boards all day. We'd had to leave Guana River State Park, where we'd started that morning, due to an apocalyptic lightning storm that had arrived while we were in the water. We had just arrived back at our friend Isaac's house, and I'd hoped to take a break, as I had been dealing with a - let's call it "advanced dehydration" - since I woke up that morning. From outside, I heard Mike's voice. I stepped outside, trying to let the balcony railing hide the fact that I'd already changed into dry clothes. I told him I'd meet him out there, but fifteen minutes after he had encouraged me to "grow a penis and some balls" and paddle back out, I was back in the ocean.

My last wave was a left, a near-perfect mirror image of the wave that had started my session on Friday. I dropped in (back on Don Quijote) and stayed as close to the peeling lip of the wave as I could. I shot out of the pocket, cut back, and maneuvered back into the right spot as a massive scream was building inside me, like the scream you feel in a horse race when your horse is in front, or as you watch a footballer streak toward the goal with the other team in hot pursuit. Finally, the wave closed out and I just as I was about to get crushed by the lip, I shot over the top of the breaking wave in an ungainly dive toward safety. I stood up in the chest deep water, and bellowed at the top of my lungs. Do you see that? Did every one of you assholes SEE THAT!? WOOOOOOOO!!!!

Bill had been a success, and arriving as it did less than two weeks before my departure for France, it felt like a gift. Good times.

Mission Statement

The name "1,000 Dead Ends" has a faintly cynical ring to it, but my designs for it are resolutely positive.

Here's my whole thing:

I am in a strange place in life - post-graduation, pre-career. Like in The Graduate, and like all my peers. In this place, you watch, you wait, you play cards close to chests, and you pursue the moments that look like they might have that abstract, illusory quality of being "defining." This is a place where, in your native language, you flick words like "safe" and "comfortable" and "practical" sneeringly off your tongue in caustic tones to describe the lives of other, successful people.

Why do you do this? Why not live and let live, or hell, do some of your own succeeding? Because you are afraid to fail. You're unaccustomed to failure. This is not because you are great, but because you haven't tried, and if you try nothing you can fail no more. So you "rise above" and give a careless middle finger to the choices that could lead to success and greatness by any other path than a glorious, meteoric ascent. You wait for the one moment in which your potential explodes in a cataclysmic flash that elevates and illuminates the 1,000 and more moments before, which all passed unmarked in a slow-moving flow of wild dreams that begin where you are, and end with you transcending your condition in some way or another (but you didn't really have the energy or focus to figure THAT part of it out). It feels inevitable, like destiny.

Here's my other whole thing:

I am also in the place where I'm beginning to suspect deep down that these magnificent, potential-energy-exploding-into-light-of-a-thousand-suns-in-a-single-defining-moment kinds of lives are difficult to come by in real life. Also, I'm pretty sure that no one has a destiny. We DO have signposts to guide our way, however; well-worn adages that read like this:

-"Nothing good in life comes easily."
-"Great achievements require great sacrifice.
-"Etc."

These words are designed to grant you the license to dream big and swing hard. What could go wrong? Well, a lot, I suppose. There's the fear, and the distinct possibility that every avenue that appears to you could lead to a soul-crushing dead end; where dreams slink away, broken and shamed, like the soldiers of an unsuccessful revolution. There could be a thousand or more such dead ends in life.

It's a daunting and ambition-quenching project.

However, there is a positive message in all of this, for though I want adventure, I have to accept that the pursuit of it may incur some misadventure. I want to try, but I have to accept that I might fail; and learn to laugh away the failures like I laugh away the clumsy efforts at poetry that I find in my old notebooks in storage units. I have to dream, and if nothing comes of them, at least will be able to say that once I had doomed dreams that I followed to a nadir.

So, with all of that in mind, I'm creating this blog to:
-Practice writing.
-Help me to maintain my interest in adventures.
-Shame me, by its very existence (and the attendant risk of hypocrisy), into having adventures when I might feel too tired or whatever to pursue them.
-Entertain and/or enlighten anyone who might wonder "what [I'm] up to these days?"

Hope y'all enjoy.

"I can wish nothing more for myself than this, that I find, somehow, courage to pursue wild dreams to their 1,000 dead ends, and hope that the 1001st dream is a success."
-Author Unknown