A series of professional and personal disappointments. A young man on the brink of his 30s. No idea where his life is bound — forward, over the precipice? or backward, over that one? — or what he’ll find once he gets there. A motorcycle.
The details of the disappointments aren’t important. (Once you reach a certain age, they never do — and not just because the memory isn’t as reliable as it once was.) Suffice it to say, I really had no freaking idea what was going to become of me. It wasn’t quite despair, this feeling — not the stereotypical “my life is in the toilet,” you know. More like fear, maybe: was my life in the toilet?
Nothing seemed to be working out quite as I’d imagined it would, and a large part of that failure translated to: I myself wasn’t working out quite as I’d imagined.
Nothing doing on the writing front. Interesting but crapola jobs, plus an interesting but decidedly not crapola job that I’d still managed to fail at. Friends and classmates settling in to comfortable niches. One marriage flushed away after just a couple years. Nothing like a satisfying relationship within the horizons I could see. I had the bike, yeah, but I’d already taken the “finding-myself” tour on the road with it, camping around New England. Found some great photographs on that trip, and then of course I’d found New England itself (which I still love). But myself…?
