Anything Goes

I’m back in Texas.

After the workshop in Wisconsin finished, we spent a few days in Minneapolis and then headed to Missouri. The plan was to drop her off in Springfield and go alone to Kansas City for an epic, rat-pack weekend before heading back to Springfield and then to Arkansas for a family event. The plans abruptly changed (so abruptly, in fact, that I had to turn around en route to Kansas City).

Spending the night at a hotel in Joplin on the way back to Texas was not the best Plan B I could have imagined, but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Truth be told, the weekend went through so many sudden revisions that we ran out of letters and had to go around the bend back to Plan A' and then finally Plan B'.

For a couple of weeks I was also walking a forked road, staring down two wildly different alternate universes. We were talking about taking teaching jobs in China for a year, but it ultimately fell through. Still, though. You discover a few things about your priorities when you seriously begin planning on being in freaking China for a year (hence the title of this post).

I could have done it. I would have missed (out on) a lot of things Stateside, but I could have gone on any adventure. Could go on, I should say. Present, future, indefinite verb tenses. Just give me a dinner jacket and a zany, pre-adolescent sidekick, and I can go wherever you want.

But I’m here in Austin, Texas. I’m here, once again looking at the same unappetizing plate of responsibility, stress, and worry with a side of panic. My glass of good cheer is empty and the waiter is nowhere to be found. I’d almost rather be dining on ashes again.

So I sit there, fidgeting idly with my fork, staring at the other diners in this dingy café that is Life, mulling over some of the things I gleaned from my visit to Stevens Point, fusing them with my reflections of the nearly realized, close-but-no-cigar visit to Kansas City this weekend.

The Bohemian Odyssey is not a pleasant one. It sounds cool to those with too much stability in their lives, but it sucks. Yeah, sure, The Lord of the Rings is a great story and a highly desirable escapist fancy, but you’ll find that in reality it sucks to be hiding from orcs and black riders all the time. The grass is always greener? Perhaps. Hm. Well, if you take away the Sword of Damocles, then I guess it’s a pretty good life.

But it’s not enough. Never, ever enough. Is it? Is it.

“We need to amp up the glamour in our lives,” I said to Juliet, regarding our imminent return to Austin.

I was going to do that in KC, but now I’ll have to compensate for that loss of a wonderful experience. Training with Sensei Banks, training with Dean “The Reverend” Yzon, playing some more Modern Warfare 2, meeting Starbuck and Herr Vogler at a casino, watching a Cardinals game with some beers at Buffalo Wild Wings, going to see Inception and Predators, followed by more drinks in order to inebriate ourselves and talk about ideas for future sequels…

None of it went down. Now it’s all me. I have stuff to do, so I might as well do it with gusto, as the good Captain would say.

(Awwww. That was almost an obligatory Captain quote! Hey, this almost shaped up to be a decent blog post, huh? All I need now is a conclusion and a listening list.)

My thoughts have been drifting back to December, back to the direction I was taking on this blog, the tone of the many blog posts that month. I was trying to galvanize my readers. I was hoping to succeed in achieving that “rat pack” camaraderie the Captain was hypothesizing about. I was on to something, but then something went awry. It’s time to take up that mantle again.

Let’s amp up the glamour. As much as we can. Gusto. Panache.


”Take back what used to make you smile. Take back what used to put some spring in your step. Take back what made you feel alive before you completely forget what it was.”
—from the blog post Quiet Dignity, posted December 12, 2009.