Waiting

This time of night two weeks from today I will be on an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean; it's hard to say what this means for my next nine months. Very soon life will be nothing like it is today, and that is progression, and that is a good thing. I take comfort in intuition, knowing this is the next step -- like the day I woke up and realized my heart was no longer in hockey, and the day I woke up middle of the night at that girls house off the tollway and drove a car four hours down to Austin. This is all very simple really, and quite enough for me.

These days are defined by peculiar transitions leaving you not entirely here or there, moving between households, putting life in boxes, having no set place as yours. Here you say goodbye to some forever and others just for a little while. You pick up strange habits: popular sitcoms that continue season after season come to mind (damn you, How I Met Your Mother). You take time away from work and put it into reading the newspaper and writing out a few thoughts over coffee and drinking an occasional scotch. Life is good in transition indeed, away from a world of routines.

I confess, my upcoming travels feel somewhat like an escape, a fresh start, which happens sometimes when people radically shift their geography. Austin will always be Austin for me, a place I love and a place I will return, but it is also a place littered with memories, some of them not so nice. The great thing about new people is that you are who you are that day, a compilation of everything that happened before, and when you shuffle around the world every person is a new person. That instills a feeling of freedom, of opportunity, and even (to be biblical) one of resurrection. One day, with regards to Austin, I am sure it will all matter less, but at this moment there is tunnel vision, and the prospect of getting out after years of nonsense makes me feel like some things can be laid to rest.

I sat down last night to dinner with a fantastic group of people -- some of the closest people in my life -- who made Austin, Texas all it was. We looked great as we ate steaks and drank wine and toasted to a period of our lives quickly coming to an end. We told absurd and offensive jokes like we always have, the girls smiling in a way that showed great restraint and toleration. We moved later to the Intercontinental Hotel, that outside bar overlooking Congress Avenue and the capital, 18 year old scotch in hand. I once sat out there with Joe feeling like the whole world was caving in for reasons I still do not understand, and this time, sitting down in the same place could not have felt more different. When I crawled into bed that night, I felt very full and saw altogether one of my best evenings in Austin. I will think back on that while basking in the Mediterranean sun with a good book.

For now my room is empty with bare walls and uncluttered floors. The television sits awkwardly by a box at the foot of my bed. I'll close my eyes tonight, like most nights, and picture a few of the mysterious things that have not happened yet. I'll think of a few things that have happened too, but I'll try not to dwell on all that. In the words of the great street-artist, Banksy: "when the time comes to leave, just walk away quietly and don't make any fuss."

Louisville, Kentucky

Kentucky is a strange place. It's one of those states, like North Dakota, Oklahoma and Arkansas, that are hardly known to anyone outside the US; in reality, they are hardly known to those within. The image of this country can sometimes be of a lot of rednecks in the middle, bordered by the intellectuals, and if this image is true, Kentucky by definition contains many of these said rednecks. Every place has its own charming secrets however, there is a lot that makes Kentucky nice.

Four years ago I had no connection to this part of the world. It was one of the many places in the world that simply exist, and that I would probably never go. Then my dad married a lovely woman from there -- herself with two children -- and four years later I spend Christmas here with a new family. Step families are an interesting concept, usually forced regardless of level of connection, and there are plenty of horror stories when this goes terribly wrong. For whatever reason, I got lucky, and coming to Louisville for Christmas could be a lot worse.

I really got to know this city a year and a half ago, when I strategically choose my first Ironman. It was not the easiest race on the circuit, but from day one it felt right. On a lovely day in August, I swam in the Ohio, biked through the rolling Kentucky hills, and ran the marathon past Churchill Downs before a spectacular downtown finish.



It was a different city then than it is now, because no city is real during an Ironman. 1,500 of the healthiest families on Earth pour into the hotels and short-stay apartments, devour meals at the local restaurants, creating a mirage of fitness where the natives once sat. As anyone will say who has spent time around these races, it is all a very emotional experience. It was a lucid day, every one of those 140.6 miles, and Louisville will always be special to me.

Between the Bars

Last night, as a cold drizzle pattered the windows and roofs of Rainey Street, I clocked out and walked out of a bar for what I hope to be the last time. No need to speak in absolutes; emergencies happen, and pouring drinks and standing at doorways will always be there. To the best of my knowledge however, it's now time to start doing what I am supposed to be doing. That is not pouring drinks and standing in doorways.

Bars really are sad places. I initially landed there because I was young and in college and bars are great places to be young and in-charge and interested in the opposite sex while making good money, but all that goes away very quickly and you are eventually left with a lonely place built for some very sad specimens. Taverns have drawn this kind of person for centuries and have ruined a lot of things. There is something about human beings -- some deeply embedded weakness I suppose -- that make them want taverns and pubs and bars and cantinas in their life more than a few times a week. I was a part of this for a time, feeding the sloppy messes, and now it is a very good thing to be done.

I walked out last night, after a few goodbyes, thinking about that time a drunk guy told me to get a real job. All jobs are real, and all jobs teach you something, so I suppose there is a takeaway here too. Plenty of artists picked fruit, and drove buses, and this led them to some real human experience or at least a good story, but you come across a lot of people stuck in a cyclical trap, adding on years and reasons why they are still there and have not gone somewhere else. My time between the bars is done -- the cycle for now has been broken -- and I really don't want to ever look back. 

Beginnings and Ends

"Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?"
- Henry David Thoreau


I often find myself, when looking back at wide sections of life, doing as Steve Jobs says and connecting the dots. You see so clearly how bad things led to good things and you understand better the fact that you could not have organized any of the mess. It is all very exciting, and it always gets me thinking that if I could see these things in advance -- one cosmic moment of foresight -- I probably would want to; how neat would it be to walk into a bar and get a flash of yourself kissing some beautiful stranger now on a bar stool, two weeks down the road on a park bench? When I say this I know it's best we don't get those sneak peaks, because the mystery and the uncertainty is as much a part of life as anything in the world and you can't mess with things so important.

When I think of those cosmic moments, perhaps the greatest one took place four years ago in a car, middle of the night on the way to Austin. I didn't know anyone there and had not been around those parts in a decade. I can to this day remember driving in wonder, exploring and envisioning myself in all the places I did not know yet and interacting with the people I had not met yet; these are exactly the sort of thoughts one should have embarking alone into the world of college.

And before I knew it, four years were over in one great whirlwind of transient memories. I took tests and got grades and finished races long and short and sweat pounds and pounds of sweat alongside remarkable people. I fell in and out of something I would not call love but would not call just sex either, deciphering those grey realities that always seem to exist when young people show feelings for other young people. I travelled across such a big ocean and drank beers with people on the other side of the world which, as I found, is a great life investment. And the books I read; that meant so much. What we decide to read says so much about who we are.





And so, while it would be easy to stand complacent, basking in the glow of all that and a great city, I think it is time to go again. I did not set off one day four years ago to stay forever, and, with Steve Jobs in mind, I see that now. My tenure in Austin is done, and there is just so much more to do. That will begin in Spain and end somewhere else, and that is all I really know.

I spend my days now creating lifelike images: kissing a girl in Paris or Stockholm on a bridge in the cold; reading a book in a hammock on some Greek Island referenced in The Odyssey; walking the beaches in Normandy, where they say a leaf does not drop without someone picking it up; drinking a beer in some small corner of the globe with the guy now typing away across the hall of our South Congress abode. It is a bittersweet feeling, these new beginnings desirable, these unavoidable ends bearable; somewhere in the middle lies 5103 miles.