Hearty Travel

(Written on March 20)

Rush hour, what a misnomer. You go nowhere fast. You also really can't avoid it if you work a nine-to-five. Today I was forced to come late, due to an all-day meeting scheduled from 9:30 to 5:30. Tomorrow is a redux. Thus, I may have to continue rising before the cock crows, if cocks crow in Virginia. Heaven only knows who I will have to deny thrice.

It is disorienting just how adaptable the human condition truly is. I moved from MD to VA for convenience. Before then, if I needed to, I could have driven 2.5-3.5 hours a day. Yes, it was a miserable coil of misery wrapped around a bar of despair, and a horrid current of shock jolted throughout, inducing pain. Yes, I've butchered that electromagnetic metaphor, what a shock to the system.

Side note: I'm sitting in Wendy's eating dinner, and a facial dead ringer for Super Bowl MVP Peyton Manning just drove up in an Iowa-registered Chevy Cavalier. Beyond that, I know it is not Peyton because he rode his offense everywhere in the playoffs, not a Chevy. (This is our country....)

I also don't know how it happened, but traffic just now mysteriously lightened. Seven ticked by on my watch, and the rush hour just lifted. Inexplicable.

Peyton-two has just seated himself across from me, likely to watch his car, parked next to mine. I somehow feel inadequate just being so near a man that marginally resembles American royalty.

And it's strange how that works, isn't it? Britain has their royal family, America tolerates Hollyweird. We laud gridiron football, while the rest of the world follows the Champions' league. GW meddles in Iraq for oil, and the rest of the world just shakes their head.

Is America so contrarian because of its roots? It takes a certain brand of person to up and travel off for several weeks to the unknown frontier. It's hard for me to envision, since I can fly to anywhere on the planet within a day. I guess the modern equivalent would be tripping the light fantastic to Alpha Centauri at relativistic speeds.

Hell, you would really be leaving everything. Mail could take months to reach the "New World." Gunning it to Alpha-C would separate you from your loved ones. You really would fall out of synchronization with Earth. Several months for you, years for them. From the terran baseline, it would be time travel, and they would bid you fare well, but would your trip be that well-fared?

What kinds of people would make that trip willingly, assuming we possessed the arcane technologies required (and also assuming that any technology sufficiently advanced will appear magical)? What people would the authorities willingly send on such a lonesome travail? And the crazy thing? They would probably survive, maybe even thrive. Sure, their world might be morbidly different, and they would have to make a wealth of concessions, but barring catastrophe, those stolid survivors would find a way.

Side note: How worthless was that last statement? I think it may be a side effect of L-school, forcing me to couch my statements in generalities so as to render them correct, even if they become worthless and devoid of meaning. Here, I use render in the fashion of rendering pork lard, if only because I feel greasy after L-school. I make these worthless statements a lot, or I'm more conscious of it now. Either way, damn your black soul L-school.

The point is that I have finally traveled just far enough in my life to be without a readily-accessible support net. It is a planned venture to visit people in MD, a significant effort and expenditure of time and energy. There had better be a damned good reason to get me and the Lady Surfer up there.

I am not on my own. I will never be on my own. The people that matter, I carry them in my heart whereever I go. When I hug them, it leaves a little indent on my heart. These worn creases actually hold the damned thing together. Even in my darkest moments (L-school), when it felt like I was alone and abandoned, deep down, their love kept me going. I only now have the emotional distance to accept this. Back then, it was just walking down a dark corridor with no light at the end, walking because I had to trust others could see what I couldn't.

I still wonder if they saw a mirage.

Most of them are now at least 45 minutes away. However, they are still right beside me, within me, part of me, bridging that gap in the span of a heart beat. I've moved to VA, but have not evicted them from my heart.

I'm sure when I reread this, the diabetes will require an insulin shot or three. Also, Vanilla Sky ruined "Good Vibrations" for me. Every time I hear it, like now, it fills me with caution and fear. What a screwed-up movie. "Tech support!"