Eye buggers big as granola nuggets block my boo hoo ducts, products
of the crystallized sentiment that rushed me when about the sixth person
in two weeks asked why I haven’t sent out a travel missive. It tears me
up that people give a rat’s ass about my whereabouts and howabeings.
Many followers of the logs say they live vicariously through me and my
wild hair adventures. It’s the fun ones people like to read. “Fun” is
not the word I would use to describe the journey that has replaced my
South American tour guide dream and perhaps that’s why I haven’t been
sending out many travel logs.
It’s coming up on a year that I quit
my job with faith, fervor and the grandiose idea of copycatting
Elizabeth What’s-Her-Face’s Love, Eat, Pray ….or Pray, Love, Eat …or Screw, Gorge, Supplicate…whatever
the hell the title of the book is that I am intensely jealous of.
Things have just not gone as planned. I’m not in the mood for clichés,
so if you’re thinking “Plans never do” or “Man plans, God laughs,” or
“It’s all about the journey,” or “Bloom where you are planted” or
“Things could be worse,” kindly keep it to yourself. Clichés piss me
off. First of all, they reek of triviality, but deep down under the
fake there is something profound, like a trophy wife who is a guru.
Second, I try every which way to prove them wrong, but after an
exhausting battle to poke a hole in their lofty ideals, they end up
being right. Third, they require absolutely no cleverness to think up
and so the average ding-a-ling can make himself out to be Rasputin, when
in fact he doesn’t even know who Rasputin is.
Anyway, all I have
to show for the aforementioned grandiose idea is a freeze-dried romance
in Spain, a journal full of self-indulgent reflections and an
unfulfilled longing to see all of South America on the back of a big-ass
truck. Besides that, my “world travels” have landed me back in the
‘holler, Virginia, the very place where I was born and raised. That
ain’t exactly the exciting adventure I had in mind.
My sensitivity
about this issue showed itself shortly after the return from Spain. On
the way to the airport to catch the flight to VA, after a three day
layover in Dallas, where I own a home, that I cannot stay in, because I
rented it out, thinking I was going to be on a hi-ho adventure for at
least a year, a friend gave me her unsolicited opinion about what is wrong
with my life at present. According to her, I don’t know what I want and
I’m wandering around aimlessly trying to find it. What I need to do is
settle down and conduct a ruthless auto-examination of my conscious, so I
can come to know myself and what I truly want, and I don’t need to go
traipsing around the world to discover that. Those were almost the exact
words my mother said to me in 1993 when I went to live in Ecuador. (One
of the best decisions I ever made, just for the record.)
Her
supposition of my current lifestyle as flawed flew all over me like ugly
on ape. I said nothing, but my innards ruffled like the feathers on a
horny rooster defending his hen. The gift in that discomfort was a
reminder of exactly what is “wrong” with my life…what’s kept me
from fulfilling any of my dreams or my highest potential: worrying
about what others might think. I worry that I might be perceived as
irresponsible, or that my irreverent sense of humor might offend
someone, or that if I write the truth I might expose a family secret, or
that I might say a brutal truth that hurts someone’s feelings, or that I
might make somebody mad, or that I might be criticized by those I love
or that…...
Well, I’m smack-dab in the middle of a midlife crisis
and crises call for drastic measures. They call for females sprouting
fuzzy balls and rolling them in attitude. They call for digging
deep into one’s own beliefs, casting out the ones that cripple the
spirit and keeping the ones that empower the essence of the individual.
In my case, they call for loyalty to my knowing that I haven’t a drop of
malicious intention coursing my veins and as long as I’m not asking
anyone for anything, I owe them no explanations. The moment has come to
say Fuck it with a big fucking capital “F.”
The bottom line is, if I say the truth as I see it and do what I really, really, really want to do, someone will be offended and feelings will be
hurt. It’s a given, and for that reason the Universe threw apologies
into the game. So, there you have it, a few summative paragraphs of
what’s going on with me and my missing missives, all written on the
road, under the influence of a new anti-depressant, self-help books,
conversations with old-souls, twenty years of psychotherapy and a
shitload of clichés.
Otherwise, at present, I’m in Hendersonville,
NC attending a Wilderness First Responders training, which many friends
and family seem to have confused with casting a role on Survivor. I am
not eating worms and rotted deer testicles or letting scorpions and
spiders crawl all over me. I’m learning what to do in the case of a
medical emergency when out in the wilderness and days away from a
hospital. It’s intense and makes me wish I would have paid attention in
Anatomy class instead of sling-shotting notes up to my best friend on
the front row.
There are 16 participants and I could be the mother
of 15. They keep saying “Yes, m’am,” to me as if I just asked them if
they washed their hands after they used the bathroom. The instructor
uses me for the examples in the “elderly” emergency cases. So, I thought
I’d show them what the old lady is made of. We had one hell of a
thunderstorm Friday night, with thunder, lightening, hail, side-ways
rain, and gusts of wind that would take the shingles off an outhouse. I
stayed in my tent the whole night while those wimpy whippersnappers
slept in the cabins. Of course, given that I was about 200 ft from the
lake and under a 200 ft tall pine tree, what I did was just plain
stupid, but I showed 'em.
Actually, they are all very sweet and
try to make me feel included. Last night they invited me to beer
drinkin’ and star gazing on the dock and even offered me a toke off the
reefer going around the circle. Tonight they’re driving into Ashville to
go bar hopping and asked if I wanted to go. I politely declined, to set
a good example. We’ve got class tomorrow at 9 a.m. and I’ve got to know
what nasopharyngeal airways, myocardial infarction, defibrillation,
hypovolemic shock, the appendicular skeleton, and many more things I
can’t pronounce are. Tomorrow we get to practice e-vacing someone with a
compound femur fracture. It will probably be an elderly person. Hot
damn.
So, I’m off to study. Hope everyone is well. Much love, G
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