It’s done. I’ve quit my cushy job, sold my house
and all of my belongings, crammed everything I think I’ll need into
a suitcase and my sporty laptop backpack and I’m on a flight to Norway.
There’s no turning back. Well, of course there’s turning back,
but it would mean living with my parents, being unemployed and begging everyone
to sell my stuff back to me. I’m going to call that “Plan Z.”
“Plan A” is to travel Europe for the next five or six months,
write constantly and submit my material to travel web sites, magazines and
newspapers in the hopes that they print my missives and maybe even pay me
once in a while. Eventually, I’ll settle down in a temperate, coastal,
friendly, relaxing town on the coast of Spain, where the food is good, the
rent is cheap, the women are open-minded and beautiful and get paid handsomely
for my babbling essays, hilarious books and the occasional inspired piece
of erotica.
It’ll come as no surprise that even without the erotica
“Plan A,” has made me the envy of all of my friends. The torturously
desirable benefits include, no job, no mortgage, no car payments, no rising
insurance premiums, no schedule, no getting up at 6:30am and plowing my way
to work in the dark when it’s 12 below zero on icy roads with eight
inches of unplowed snow, no economy worries, no frat boys, no George Bush,
no Mall of America, no panic over increasingly lighter gun control laws, no
reality TV, no People Magazine, no Anna Nicole Smith, no brainless cops, drunk
on power, no road rage, no Norm Coleman, no morbidly obese people suing Mc
Donald’s for making them fat, no SUVs, no listening to dumb ass SUV
owners who are outraged that it costs them $40 to fill up the gas tanks for
their unnecessarily large vehicles that the auto industry convinced them that
they couldn’t live without, despite the fact that they will never be
in an off-road situation (until they roll the sucker into a ditch), they are
not even remotely safer and they will never haul more cargo than would comfortably
fit into a Ford Festiva.
Of course, the reason why my envious friends don’t all
drop everything and do something similar to “Plan A” is that they
would have to cope with no weekly paycheck, no health insurance, no retirement
plan, no home equity doubling every year, no lazy dinners grilled out on the
patio all summer, no Kevin Garnett, no Cartoon Network, no fantastically comfortable
bed, no seven day getaways to Cancun for less than $400, no Jennifer Garner,
no sinful runs to Old Chicago for ½ lb. bacon cheese burgers, fries
and one liter mugs of cider and no paid sick days to sleep off hangovers and
play Nintendo for six hours straight.
OK, I know that most if not all of the above mentioned things
will still be present and/or affecting me in Europe (there’s no escape
from Anna Nicole Smith), but it won’t be with the same intensity and
whatever stress it may induce will be largely diffused by the effectively
mandated, daily siestas and having very good wine with two meals a day. Ultimately,
my goal is something that my father assures me is totally impossible. A happy
life, in a great place, with a job that I love. Oh yeah, one thing I forgot
to mention on the “pros” list, no more spirit crushing “advice”
from dad. How could I forget that?
Admittedly, this balls out, all-or-nothing approach to achieving
my goal is a little risky for someone in their early thirties. As my grandmother
so sweetly informed me at our last meeting, “You should know better
at your age.” What I did know better was not to get into it with her,
but I was dying to ask her, “Know better than what?” Know that
I should just suck it up and deal with the stress and awkwardness of being
an artistic, creative nut working at the stifling Federal Reserve Bank? Know
that a couple weeks of happiness and freedom each year should be all that
I want or expect out of life? Know that pounding down my passions, urges and
dreams is what mature adults are expected to do?
I know full well what grandma thinks I should do. I should work
hard, not complain, save as much as possible and then I will be rewarded with
the kudos of having a distinguished career and a comfortable retirement. Well
I also know this: Sure, the odds are that if I stick to this model, I will
probably more or less live out the aforementioned life plan. However, as we
have all repeatedly and tragically witnessed recently, there is no guarantee
that our health or our money will make it to retirement. It just takes one
mistake, one bad split-second decision, one lawsuit, one corrupt executive,
one bad day on Wall Street, one drunken black out, one horrible bout of late
night depression, one cancer cell, one blood clot, one inattentive driver,
one mis-prescribed medication, one aircraft maintenance oversight, one concealed
weapon, one religious fanatic, one lunatic in power or one war and the life
that grandma is trying to hard-sell on me changes permanently, forever.
Admittedly this sudden and rash lifestyle change stinks of a
guy who is arguably still reeling from his recent, ugly divorce, which may
in turn be interfering with his ability to think things through completely
and all the poor guy needs is an increase in his medication to put the chill
on these schemes. Well, let me tell you, even without the divorce and the
Happy Pills, there are three things that I have always been known for in my
circle of friends and acquaintances. One, I am very, very impatient. Two,
I believe that failure to use your turn signal when you turn left in front
of me should be punishable by an immediately executed, running kick to the
ass by me and everyone else that gets caught behind you. Three, occasionally
I will formulate and carry out, drastic and irreparable decisions that no
one with the common sense of a wild, drone bee would entertain for more than
the time that it takes to fantasize about it. The latter is why I am writing
this now.
What is not common knowledge to most people is that I know that
I’m paranoid and weird and funny and insatiable and fickle (did I mention
that I worked six different jobs in my eight years at the Fed?) and a moron
and brilliant and tortured and in search of a serenity that may not exist.
The difference between me and most people with similar characteristics is
that I am acutely self-aware of these quirks and I simply chose not to adjust
them. In a nut, I am a high functioning cookie with just enough brains, ability
and determination to not only get by, but to thrive in whatever environment
that I am forced to deal with. I have negotiated many extremes in the past
15 years. I have worked my way up the ranks of the Federal Reserve System
and finessed the art of Third World bartering. I’ve lived comfortably
in the wilderness and in the armpit of the in the inner-city. I’ve functioned
in places where I could communicate effortlessly and places where basic spoken
language was not an option. I’ve survived minus 20 degrees in northern
Minnesota and plus 145 degrees in the Sahara Desert. I’ve plunged through
extreme elation and the depths of anxiety and depression. With this broad
spectrum of experience in mind, I have taken a long, probing measure of myself
and I am confident that I have the guile and strength to tap dance through
one last, extreme lifestyle change. I’ll be switching from working in
a well paying, secure, idiot-proof career while living in a comfortable, equity
cash-cow of a home to an uncertain, homeless, freelance writing gig with no
serious prospects and only marginal odds of earning a living much less outright
success.
This may well be my last, blindly optimistic attempt at a life
and career that will sustain me and keep me happy. I am prepared for utter
failure, but I intend to work like a rented mule in my attempt to achieve
my goal of being a writer while living comfortably and happily in whatever
place I choose to settle. It’s a lot to ask, but so is working diligently
for 30 years in a job unsuited for me, until I reach an uncertain retirement
that is not likely to be as comfortable or as fulfilling as grandma would
lead me to believe.
Here I go…