I keep hearing isolated phrases from music that don’t really make any sense in context, just feel like phrases that makes sense to my life right now. From Hamilton… We’re finally on the road, we’ve had quite a run… We get the job done…
of course that doesn’t actually make any literal sense in context, it’s just background music . But you know, I am finally on the road. I haven’t quite gotten very far just yet, as I write this, or dictate it anyway, I am leaving Richmond where, once again, someone I connected with for supplies along the way had questions about my story. This is a conundrum that I posted about on Facebook the other day: I am trying to learn to listen and seek the stories of others, yet, what actually happens is that people ask me question after question and I don’t get to stop talking. Of course there’s a skill deficit to that as well, and I am trying to learn how to stop talking and listen, how to stop telling my story and instead invite someone else’s story. Sometimes it’s hard to ask for the story, when it may not be a comfortable story. I find sometimes that I am scared to ask for someone’s story because I don’t want to hear the tragedy, I don’t want to feel inclined to try to solve their problems, or I just don’t want to feel bad for how much kinder life has been to me than to them. That is why I am on this particular journey, particularly to cope with the idea that I cannot fix the world, I cannot make life fair for the countless people to whom life is not fair in worse ways than how it is not fair to me.
Richmond is not really on the way, but this is not a trip about the most direct route in the first place. I’m trying to figure out my best way to camp and travel as things change, as my body is a little bit worse than it was on the last cross country trip two years ago , and I was pretty miserable that time as well. We don’t really talk much about being miserable while traveling, and that time I was directly punished for it; the woman I was visiting was very upset that I said negative things about the trip, as though The travel being unpleasant was somehow a judgment on her. But the simple fact was, I just wasn’t comfortable. And I’m not now.
So, I’ve been working on upgrading my bougie SUV camping routine, and I am very much on the fence about quite possibly upgrading to an all out camper once again. I invested in a custom mattress of the largest size that I can fit in the Volvo while still having any space at all for gear, and while I have gotten out of the habit of traveling with a cooler at all, this lime situation has me needing to keep medication cold, and so I went looking on Facebook for a good quality car fridge, which led me to Richmond. Of course, by the time I got to Richmond, the guy with the fridge for sale had stopped responding, so I went back on marketplace and found one in Asheville that is actually an even better deal, and while I was in Richmond I found somebody selling some AirTags that I need for the security of all of this gear. And then I met that person, a couple actually, and they asked questions about my story, and I guess I just kind of started talking, and then I walked away, and then they walked back up to me and we started talking again, and I guess I told them bits of my story and answered their questions for around half an hour, and I still kind of regret that I didn’t ask more questions about them and their story. I think right now I’m broken on empathy, I’m just not succeeding at properly caring more about others than myself, and I think that is really why I need this particular trip.
I’m thinking about books, and themes from different stories I have read over the years. The one I want to read again right now, but it’s not on Audible, it’s Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I feel like that really is the trip that I am on right now, chasing Phaedrus. I also feel a little bit like Thoreau in the version he tells of his Walden pond experience, although I don’t believe him and never did. Thoreau wanted to tell a story about self-reliance, and failed at it; in fact, I think he was the first archetype of the clueless self-help writer. Here’s the story of Thoreau: Henry was a privileged young man who was bored in life, and I think that he felt for some reason but he just couldn’t cut it in competitive society, and so he decided to go and run away and do things on his own. And so he tells the story about how he went into the woods and basically built this whole little country estate for himself using only the labor of his hands and blah blah blah. The truth is, he went camping on his family’s property. He was not poor, he was not starting with nothing, he pretended to start with nothing by imagining the things that he already had to be free and available to everyone, which frankly is exactly the mistake that every self-help writer makes. it is the fundamental problem of privilege.
I think that this entry has to be kind of a table of contents, and I think that I need to spell out what it is that I am learning about and thinking about and writing about. Make no mistake, this trip is a midlife crisis. It really is a crisis. I should know by now who I am and what I’m doing and why, but I just feel like it’s not working. I’ve done all of the things that you’re supposed to do, but not really, not at all. I haven’t compromised, I haven’t settled down, I truly have not learned to love and I absolutely have not learned anywhere close to how to receive love. If I am honest with myself in a way that I seldom openly am, the truth of the matter is that my life has been governed by something resembling a hero complex, what the young people are now calling “protagonist syndrome”. Now, I think their criticism goes over the top. True, it is kind of all about me, but it’s still about what I can do for others. It’s about trying to solve all of the problems of the world, and settling for spending my entire life solving problems of individuals, problems that are depressing as hell because my solution is not a complete solution. What I do is I help people who are broke because they are broken, and because I cannot help them not be broken I try to help them be a little bit less broke. And it’s not working. I tell myself the starfish story and how it’s important to make a difference in each individual life that I can regardless of how many other people are still suffering, but it doesn’t work. My dominant emotion tends to become that of Schindler at the end of Schindler‘s List, lamenting that he couldn’t do more. By the way, it’s not like I’m great; I’m lazy as hell, I barely work any hours, I rely on other people to get everything done for me basically. But you know, I make the hard decisions, I give the advice, I know what to do. But I am burnt out.
My father always told me that he didn’t know anything about practicing law or running a business or any of the weird things that I do, but what he did know was that what I was doing was not working, not in the way that I needed it to, and he said that the smart money move was for me to find something else to do, and he was right. So you know, that, but it’s not so easy to just quit so along the way I might as well start by simply taking a little break, clear my head a little bit, get back into a literary mindset.
I tried to take a day off, but it didn’t work. I hired a replacement and told my staff that I was on leave, I told the government I was on leave, and it was not enough. Ultimately, it has been a process over time to gradually pull back, as I delegate more, and I finally got the government to honor a short moratorium on my hearings altogether. For six weeks, which should be enough for me to have one proper day in the eye of the storm – three weeks after the last hearing to stop worrying about it, and then a few hours before I start worrying about the next one three weeks later. I have at least three weeks of driving before I get to the Arctic, about as much on the way home, and kind of an open ended question in the middle. It might honestly depend on when I run out of money. After that, I come back to life, I recommit, I find the next mission and I truly enter middle age.
