...while I readjust to life in the non-touring world. Back in a bit.

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Here, then, is the final crew, left to right: Ian "Mad Scientist" Wood, Richard "It's All Good" Blackstock, Thomas "Havin' A Butcher's" Lipscombe, and Anthony "Kiwi" Irving. We first met Tony in Monterey, where he'd had his bike stolen from in front of the aquarium (one of the reasons I didn't like that town very much). After I left Rich and Tom in Monterey, they hung out there with Tony for a day, and then he stayed behind to pick up his shiny new bike, catching up with the boys again in Oceana a couple of days later. They'll be riding together down to the Mexican border, where Tony will high-tail it northwards to some airport somewhere to catch a flight down to South America. Rich and Tom will dispose of their bikes in whatever way seems best at the time, and head into Central America where they plan to become very rich by selling the contents of one medium-sized briefcase. Then they'll continue travelling until they'll reach Rio, where they will try not to catch the pox from watching volleyball on the beach.

And I? I shall fade, the way that great adventurers do, and--

Wait, that was a bit pretentious. Let's try:

Well, it's really done now, isn't it? Travelling companions have become erstwhile, and transformed into friends. My home has turned back into a trike which needs new tires and a tuneup. My tent remains rolled up in its stuff sack, doubtless in need of a good airing out and a fungicide treatment. I never know where any of my stuff is, because I now have more than a trailer's worth of space to lose things in. Tomorrow, I'll have been off the road for one week, but it feels like I left Virginia yesterday, and arrived in Santa Barbara a lifetime ago.

I am experiencing a sensation of dislocation that borders on vertiginous. The windchimes hanging from my mother's porch aren't ringing with a clear tone, because the strong wind makes them clang and noisily bind together. I feel the same way: there are no clear tones of Me, not quite yet. The transitions continue, and there's still much to be done. The fact that I pedaled nearly 2,000 miles for nearly four months to get here doesn't seem remarkable to me, sitting here on the couch, tossing pixelwords out into the tubes, just like I've been doing for the past four years. I remain a mote in spacetime.

And this mote needs a sandwich.

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Running 2,000 miles under heavy load up and down mountains does tend to contribute to mechanical entropy. But the list of items on the Greenspeed GTO that needed repair or replacement during or after the journey is pleasantly short: one SRAM DualDrive hub, one idler wheel, one cable housing, one shifter, one chain, three tires, one set of decals.

The hub was felled by a quality control gremlin, the idler wheel a casualty of a random road pebble and, to be fair, probably could have lasted the rest of the trip sans one geartooth. The cable housing was my own fault, eaten by the idler wheel because I routed it where it didn't belong after replacing a shifter cable. The Shimano bar-end shifter for the rear derailleur got all gunked up with seaside moisture, but after I disassembled it in the lobby of the Hotel de Shining in San Francisco, I decided that it would probably survive another 300 miles or so, and it did, barely. It's pretty crunchy in there right now, but its new-in-box replacement arrived today, courtesy of eBay. The chain had become an eight-foot wickedly gunked-up linky snake of griminess, so stretched out from hard pulls up steep grades that every time I stopped, I could feel it lengthen with the first pedal stroke. Velo Pro Cyclery in town had the three standard SRAM 9-speed chains I needed to make one trike-length chain, so now I've got a shiny silver powerline wrapped around my cogs and rings.

I've ordered a new set of tires from Hostel Shoppe Recumbents, and they'll be arriving this week. I ordered the same tires I toured on: Primo Comet kevlar-belted 20x1.5 herringbone slicks. I got nearly 2,000 miles out the front two, and the only reason I swapped out the rear tire with my spare in Eureka was because I couldn't be bothered to track down the rough bit on the inside of the old tire that kept putting holes in the tubes. The tires are now flattened in profile, with slashes, gouges, and missing chunks where the roads of four states have all taken bites from them.

I'd be able to show you said bites, but my trusty HP Photosmart M425, after surviving four months on the road, was done in by a roller coaster at Great Adventure on Friday. I usually wore my backpack on my chest on the rides, trying to arrange things so that nothing was crushing anything else, but at some point while I was being flung through space at ludicrous angles, something in the pack broke the camera's LCD display. As it doesn't have a regular viewfinder, that effectively ended the camera's usefulness. I'm trying to score a replacement display, or at least a cheap used M425 on eBay, but until I do the site will be a bit less photographic.

Repairing and cleaning up the trike has made me realize how much affection I actually have for it. It's been a dependable steed, backed up by an excellent company. That's why I ordered a fresh set of decals for it, to replace the ones that got scraped and mangled on the road: it deserves them. This evening, I spot-cleaned the Windwrap fairing with a paper towel soaked with a bit of gasoline, to remove the paint that had scraped onto it when I squeezed the trike through narrow motel room doorways. The manufacturer recommended using lemon Pledge to restore some of the polycarbonate's shine, and damned if it didn't do just that: there are scratches and some dull spots, but it's got most of its luster back. I've been riding the trike through town without the fairing for the past several days, but it'll be going back on tomorrow. I've missed it...the fairing gives a sense of enclosure to the trike, making it feel more like a vehicle, and it really does make a difference in terms of wind resistance and, I believe, visibility.

Finally, I've ordered a pair of new safety flags from Terra Trike. The six-foot rainbow banner, faded, torn, and road-grimed, has done its duty, and will now become an artifact. These new flags are for what I've decided will be my pedaled conveyance of choice, both here and in San Francisco.

The GTO's done right by me, and it should be ridden, not disassembled and kept in an apartment closet.

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Yes, the Google map thing is very out of date, and inaccurate to boot, and every time I set about working on it my eyes cross and I pass out. I'll fix it soon. Honest.

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Immediately after I wrote about my "dependable steed", the second DualDrive hub crapped out. Yesterday, I was seven or eight miles into a planned 20-mile ride out towards Montecito, when the hub began to behave in the peculiar way that means Something Is Terribly Wrong: not shifting properly, making strange grinding noises, bursting into flames, that sort of thing.

So, rather than head up 800 feet to the top of the ridge, I headed back to home base, where I removed the rear wheel and opened up the hub shell to have a look inside. The hub's innards are intricate and interesting-looking, full of precision-cut metal and little spring-loaded fiddly bits that flick in and out to move gears into different relationships with each other. The metal collar that secured three of those gears had, at some point, cracked into four pieces. Hence: grinding noises, explosions, etc.

Back in Kentucky, when the first hub failed, SRAM told the wrench at the Lexington bike shop that the DualDrive is "not spec'd for touring." I'm beginning to think they might be right. Paul Sims, the tech guy at Greenspeed, remains puzzled that I keep breaking the things, and Jerome, Greenspeed's US rep, is sending me a new hub, so I'm satisfied from a customer service standpoint.

Although the first hub lasted a mere 800 miles through the Appalachians, and the second hub 1,100 miles through some not-as-serious climbs along the West Coast, it's supposed to have a lifespan of many, many thousands of miles. My guess is that pulling a heavily-loaded trailer, hitched to one side of the trike's rear frame at the intersection of the chainstays and the seatstays, is just beyond the capabilities of the SRAM DualDrive. Either that or, as Paul suggested, I just "got two duds." We'll see.

In any case: the new tires are here, the new flags will arrive tomorrow, the new hub may or may not be here by Friday, so hopefully I'll be riding again by the weekend.

It's likely that the cracks in the collar began to develop while I was still heading down the coast. So I was within a week or two of having another hub failure while still on tour. I'm certainly glad that it deigned to hold together until I reached Santa Barbara, but think about what might have been: if I had pressed on across the country, I might've had a hub failure every thousand miles or so. That's five hubs.

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Having the trike out of action is making me a bit stir crazy. My body wants to take my mind out for a spin.

This readjustment isn't at all what I expected. Normally, when I'm hanging about doing nothing in particular, my sense of "needing to do something" usually has to do with something practical...do some work, write something, make some music. Now it's all about packing up the tent, hitching up the trailer, and heading odd to wherever it is I'm supposed to go today.

In having uprooted myself, I grew accustomed to rootlessness, but now I'm rootless and in one place, which doesn't feel quite right. I'm in limbo, again, which parallels how I was before I left at the end of May. Then, I was waiting for the house to sell, so that I could begin my journey. Now, I'm waiting for...what? There's time to spend here with mom, of course, while she recovers from her hip replacement. But at some point I must begin the practical tasks surrounding my relocation to San Francisco, things like job aquisition, apartment relocation, moving stuff from east to west. That's the Next Thing, but I haven't started it yet, so I feel odd and out of place.

Typical: for the last few weeks of the trip, I couldn't wait for its end. Now, I miss the motion of it all.

Like I said: not being able to trike is messing with me noggin a bit. I need to ride, as a middle way between motionlessness and constant travel. I hope the new hub arrives tomorrow, so that I can ride up a mountain, and look down the valley and across to the ocean, and remember where I've been, what I've done. It's becoming unreal to me.

Not only that, but my creative brain is full of fluff. Full of the Big Ideas, it is, but no focus at all, no ability to laser them into the pixels. Bit of a drag, seeing as how I've got all this free time now.

Tomorrow's another day...mebbe I'll have to spend it installing and testing my new hub! Yeah.

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So, I got the new hub on Monday, swapped out the innards, took it four times around the block, all was well.

At around five today, I decided to squeeze in an hour's ride to nowhere. I rolled out of the driveway, shifted the new hub into 3rd, and was rewarded with a bunch of distressing metal-crunching noises.

I put it back in first, headed back to the driveway, and opened up the hub. Several bits of loose metal fell out. One of the four small flip-out bits (called "pawls") at the non-drive side of the hub was broken into pieces, and the spring and retaining ring that held them all in place were mangled.

I replaced the broken spring, the broken pawl, and the bent retaining ring using parts from the old hub, which I still have. No dice: the hub still makes unpleasant not-working-properly grinding noises in 2nd and 3rd now.

This really kills the average lifespan of DualDrive hubs for me: before today, it was just shy of 1,000 miles, based on two hubs. Now, it's about 650 miles.

I'm just baffled. Doing the swap was fairly straightforward. All the bearings seated properly, I didn't bang on it with a hammer or set it on fire or anything. It worked fine on Monday when I toodled around the block a few times. I might not be a mechanical genius, but I'm an OK wrench and I knew enough to study the way the old hub was put together before I started mucking about with replacing bits of it.

Ian Sims, Greenspeed's CEO, figures that the first two hubs failed because of the caged bearings...sort of like these bearings right here. The eponymously-named bearings bear the weight of the axle, and in a bicycle hub, consist of balls sandwiched between two "races," which are sort of like tracks the balls roll in. "Caged" bearings have the little balls set into stamped metal ring-shaped cages, to hold the balls in place on the races. They make assembly easier, but they're not as strong: fewer balls, because the cages take up space between the balls, means a higher load per individual ball. So they might not hold the axle steady under load, see? The axle, as I toted my trailer up and down mountains for months, was twisting and putting strain on the hub's mechanicals that eventually cracked them. Twice. Short of spending $1,000 for a 14-speed Rohloff hub, the solution is to install what Ian called "crowded balls," meaning bearings without cages. That allows for more individual balls, less stress on each one, a stiffer axle, and longer hub life.

I do feel the need to say "Oh, grow up" now...but only to some of you. You know who you are.

Anyway: replacing the caged balls with crowded seemed like a doable thing to me, so that's what I was thinking about doing when I left for my fifty-foot ride this afternoon. Without, I might add, the trailer. So even though the explanation of the first two hub failures works, because they were both under heavy load for extended periods, today's failure makes no sense: no load, new hub.

It is of course possible that I did something terribly wrong...maybe I missed a small broken chunk of the old hub innards that got stuck inside the hub shell, and it mucked up the new hub's works. Maybe I shouldn't have taken it apart and juggled the pieces while doing a little softshoe and singing I'm Just A Hub-Jugglin' Fool.

But enough of this idle chatter! What to do? Write to Jerome, Greenspeed's U.S. rep again, that's what. And ask for another hub. Again.

One of the great things about Greenspeed is that they're a small company...small as in "nine full time staff members." I cc:'d the CEO, and within half an hour he had cc:'d me a note he'd sent to Jerome, which basically read: I think we need to get this guy a complete rear wheel with a new hub that has crowded balls. Because he shouldn't be allowed to have a cone wrench, in the same way that a monkey shouldn't have a gun.

OK, he might've thought that last bit, but he didn't write it. I remain fairly sure that a complete rear wheel with a new hub that has crowded balls will show up here within the next several days. And that's just fine with me.

On the rare occasions when I actually tell people how much I spent on this thing, I always tell them what comes along with that high price tag: bulletproof support.

Now, I actually set out to write the sort of thoughtful post-trip post I've been threatening to write since the journey ended, but I seem to have written this instead.

So maybe I'll write that other post later.

UPDATE:
-------------------------
Instead of watching me stumble around trying to explain bearings, you can just read Ian's concise treatment of the whole issue, which he just posted to the IHPVA's [trikes] mailing list.

Of course, if you've read this far, you've already watched me stumble around trying to explain bearings, haven't you?

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Every so often, the most mundane things will send me back several weeks, to a time when I rode from place to place, carrying everything I needed with me. This morning, the mundane thing was standing on the drain in the shower stall in my mother's bathroom. I must've used over a hundred diffferent shower stalls of varying quality as I crossed the country, so one shower became much like another. When I closed my eyes this morning's spray, I could catch fleeting sensations of On The Roadness, as though, when I stepped out of the pleasing warmth and towelled off, I'd put on a set of triking clothes, settle down into the cockpit, and pedal away.

In reality, the trike is in the space between the house and the shed under a tarp, its rear end propped up on an empty plastic kitty litter bucket, because it doesn't have its rear wheel on. I'm actually quite disappointed about that...the plan was to Keep On Riding here in Santa Barbara. I've got maps of bike routes all around the city, even a couple of big 50-milers with real hills in them that take you through wine country (as seen in the movie Sideways, but not by me).

The new wheel's going to take awhile, because Jerome has to acquire the bearings to do the crowded ball conversion, so I'm hoping it'll be here by next Friday. I was planning to head back to San Francisco on Saturday, but I think I'll wait a few days after the wheel arrives, so I can get on the trike and ride it around here before I have to steel myself for triking in and around San Francisco.

Yes, that's right: the trike will be my San Francisco transportation. After riding it into and out of the city, it the idea became more realistic, especially now that I've got twin six-foot flags, to which I've added two very brightly-colored 13x13 flags. So I'm not really any more worried than I was riding an upright in New York. In San Francisco, they rent these little bright yellow gas-powered three-wheeled cars to people, and they're not much bigger than the trike.

Plus: hills are fun when you're not toting a heavily-laden trailer.

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I spent part of the afternoon watching a slideshow of photographs from my journey, which made me miss several places of a beachlike nature. Among them, Patrick's Point State Park in California, where I camped on August 12 and August 13.

So, in the interests of sharing more from the journey and of putting posts up that don't take too much effort, here's a bit of the past, captured in late afternoon off of one of the park's trails. Click on it for a 1.5MB embiggened version.

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I miss the road.

More particularly, I miss all of the things I couldn't really pay enough attention to, because I was in a weird place mentally, or because I was focused on getting to the next physical place I needed to be, or because of some other thing that kept me from being just where I was at the moment. Part of that was due to the newness of the experience, in its entirety: this was my first tour, and with that lack of experience came a certain nervousness born of just not knowing what to expect.

The length of the journey began to wear on me, as well. The number of pictures I took dropped off over the last two or three weeks of the tour, as I focused on putting one pedal in front of the other, to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Now, I look back to the Oregon to California coastal portion of the journey and I can see myself doing it again. I look back to Virginia and Kentucky, and I know that, someday, I will ride there again. And west of Bardstown, Kentucky? It'll all be new, once more.

Here's a bit of video from Patrick's Point (the same place I took yesterday's photo). Looking through these snippets of video and the photos...it's a strange, dislocating experience, putting me in places I've been, places so very different from where I am here, now, on this couch.

Obviously, the "being present" problem remains unsolved.

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I wish I'd been able to put these videos up while I was on the road, but once I stopped staying in motels, with their wi-fi and their phone jacks, bandwidth became an issue.

So, what I've decided to do is put the videos up in their original chronology. Today's video is from July 20.

To view it, click here.

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...the damn map. It's a laborious process...I have to go back through my GPS routes for each day of the trip, then cut and paste the coordinates and some code for each little flag point.

I also have to check to make sure that the code works properly for each change I make to the .HTML file, because each time I try to complete the map, at some point during the process I seem to break the Google Maps API. This time, for example, it's refusing to add the last flag I've entered into the code. I've also noticed that the map is wildly inaccurate the further you zoom in...Astoria, for example, is a coastal town, and the map plotted that point a few dozen miles inland. I know my coordinates are correct, because I pedaled from place to place using them. So I can only conclude that Google doesn't plot GPS coordinates onto the its maps very accurately.

Which is a drag. But when it's done, it will be the slightly out-of-focus Portrait of my journey.

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I've heard from The Boys. They're currently in Mexico, hanging about on the beach:

We saw the demos in mexico city, people with machetes and flags with stalin, marx, and lenin. All pretty intense. We are in puerto escondido at the mo just chilling, the bus we arrived in was plastered with graffiti from oaxaca, US journo was shot last week, all pretty screwed up. We are probably gonna head for san cristobal de las casas in a few days, skip the town of oaxaca.

If you haven't been following things with our neighbors to the South, their southern state is currently boiling over. When I was there in late '94, Oaxaca was a cool town, only mildly tainted by rumors of "Sub-Commander" Marcos and his band of Zapatistas. From what I've read, this flare-up has pretty much trashed the city, making life very difficult for folks who live there and reducing income from tourism.

What started out as a response to the government's totalitarian suppression of a teacher's strike has attracted the usual band of totalitarian-loving opportunists. And as always, the People's Revolution types are more than willing to accept sacrifices on behalf of the greater good, especially if it's The People who are making them.

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That is, on August 22, 2006, I wrote this:

We're sitting around the campfire at the KOA in Manchester Beach, stuffed full of turkey meat-sauced pasta and beer. (I'm not stufed with beer, mind you, just pasta. Beer's for the other fellows.) Today's ride was only 26 miles, but it involved taking the trike up the steepest incline I've ever ridden. Route 1 skirts the coast, traveling up and down along the bluffs (seen here, looking north). At one point, outside of Elk, we gained 200 feet elevation in just under a quarter mile. One hairpin turn involved the aforementioned incline, and that required some serious effort and weightlifter-style grunting on my part.

I had been on the road for thirteen weeks at that point, had met up with The Boys, and was about a month away from pedaling into my mother's driveway in Santa Barbara, fully intent on heading back up to San Francisco, securing employment, and starting life there.

At the moment, I'm sitting on the porch in the cool of the post-rain Santa Barbara evening, with Royksopp on the iPod and the laptop on my lap, smoking a 1992 Rocky Patel Vintage Segundo. (If you must know: a couple of months ago I had a dream in which I was smoking a cigar, and on the theory that yes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, I acquired some. I rarely indulge, but since I quit drinking, mainlining cheese, and sniffing glue, I needed something, and a cigar every couple of weeks won't kill me much.)

There is less of me about, now: when I left on my trip in May, I weighed 245 pounds. I weigh 205 now, trending downwards.The new pants I bought in January are already getting baggy at the waist. I am (mostly) gainfully employed at the local outpost of a national bookstore chain. My stuff and my cat remain in New York. Finding no writer's groups to join, I started one. I've met some good people. I bought a guitar. I'm still at mom's house.

Is this where I'd imagined I'd be when I left from Yorktown on May 25? No, it's not. But then, I really had no idea where I'd end up. My first night on the road, I wrote:

It’s crazy and wonderful and terrifying and stupid and lovely all at once, and I could explode into a soaring fireball or collapse to neutron density at any moment.

It was, and I did. Repeatedly. I don't have the dreams, now, that I thought I would have once I reached the end of my road. When I was a kid, and went skiing, I could feel the bumps of the moguls and the granular ice through my boots, long after I had quit the slopes and gone to bed. I thought that, once I stopped riding, I'd have pedaling dreams, tent dreams, outdoor dreams. But I haven't. (Just cigars, among other things). The reality of the months on the road remains with me, insofar as I am here, now, and not where I was. The means by which I reached this place are under a tarp alongside the house, and packed away in the shed. Very real. Concrete. Five months on, I'm still not entirely sure what the journey was about, or what I accomplished for myself. These are the facts: four months on the road, 5,000 miles traveled by trike and minivan.

My situation, though, has resolved into day-to-day immediacies. I miss my cat. I miss not having a place of my own to live in. I salved the missing of material things, for now, with the guitar purchase, which has given me a creative outlet in addition to the writing I'm doing with my inspiring group. In time, I will find the means to fully remedy those external lacks.

My internal milieu, though...that's still a mess. For the first time in a long while, the number of good days seems to be exceeding the number of bad, but it's not a situation I'd call stable. The good days feel fragile and diaphanous. I'm not sure, not sure at all, what it will take to change that.

But...the windy day voice is, I think, trying to break through: are you ready?

I think so. I think I am.

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Well. Quite a lot has been going on during the past several weeks. I have, in the space of just the past week, acquired 1) a job and 2) an apartment. This required a speedy trip back to New York--I landed at La Guardia about half an hour ago. Tomorrow afternoon, I'm going to pick up a rental truck, drive it to Spanish Harlem to retrieve Bob the Cat and my guitars from my friend's place, and then drive to Warwick. I'll spend the night at a motel there, and then, early on Tuesday, I'll drive to the storage unit. I'll load up all of the Stuff that's been sitting in it, and then head West for a five day cross country journey, the second one in less than a year.

I have answers, now, to many of those "What's Next?" questions I've been asking since I left Yorktown on May 25. I like those answers. Very much.

So, for the next five or six days, I'll be on the road once again, with a home at its end, along with a job and a bevy of fine new people.

It's a Whole New Thing!

I'm into it.

And also, at the moment, exhausted.

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No point in mentioning these bats, I thought. Poor bastard will see them soon enough.

Loadout, surprisingly, went as planned. About three hours to empty the storage unit into the truck. It all fit. And I have way too much shit for where I'm going, so I will need to come up with a speedy and profitable way of divesting myself of said shit.

The driving went almost, but not quite, as planned, due to the fact that there was some disagreement between the laptop and the GPS unit as to which route I should take. The GPS wanted to send me along I-80, through Chicago, and the laptop said, "No, he wants to go south, and avoid Chicago, along I-76 and I-71," and the GPS replied, "Well, what the hell do you know, you non-specialized piece of Malaysian-built Dell sputum? I was born to navigate, bitch!"

Then I had to separate them. The laptop was right, of course, and it cost me about 40 miles to get back to where I needed to be, during which I flew along darkened Ohio country roads listening to sides one and two of Physical Graffiti and generally being a loon.

Tomorrow will see the first full day of driving. I predict crazy high mileage, loud music, and a cheeseburger.

It's been a long day. This morning, I was in my old hometown. I drove past my former house, which has had all of the things done to it that I could never manage to do because I was too drunk or depressed or both. I went by to see some innkeeper friends of mine, only to discover that one was away for the week, and the other had died of cancer in August, while I was on the road. I had heartrending conversations with my ex. I got mountain-rained on in Pennsylvania, the kind of fat, thick rain I remember from Virginia-Kentucky border country.

I'm in a motel again. On my way across the country, again. With my guitars, and the rest of my stuff, this time. And a whole New Thing awaiting me, in the West.

Crazy, baby.

Bedtime.

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I'm in Joplin, Missouri, after taking advantage of a time zone shift to put in 13 hours of driving.

And I'd really like to write more.

But, apparently, I can't stand up anymore.

Or type.

So that, it would seem, is that.

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But it is, apparently, only 897 miles from Joplin, MO to Gallup, NM, where I am now.

There were vicious rainstorms in Oklahoma. Tumbleweeds in Texas. And Led Zeppelin. Lots of Led Zeppelin.

Now me go sleep.

*mfrgl*

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Oh. Right.

Yes, I've arrived.

And I am so tired that I'm trembling.

Which makes it difficult to.

Um.

Think. That's it. The word I'm looking for.

More when I am conscious.

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I've been thinking, for some reason, that I started my journey on May 26. My archives tell me different, though. It was one year ago today that I left on my journey, pedaling away from the Yorktown Victory Monument in Virginia...away from Pea, our house, and the East coast, where I had lived for almost my entire life.

I'm a little dysthymic at the moment...a lot of up and down with this medication, although, to be fair, I've got a lot of up down without it, so it's somewhat difficult to determine the cause of my mood at any given moment. "One day at a time" really doesn't work for me, as my moods are measured in hours.

I've lost a lot over the past year. Some of it I needed to lose. Weight. Alcohol. The absurd belief that I could continue doing the same things I had been doing and somehow effect positive change in my life at the same time.

Other losses...well, "regret" doesn't quite cover it. There's Pea, of course. This is a woman who, during the four months I was on the road, gave up what should have been her "clean break" period at the end of our relationship to be on the phone with me nearly every day. She knew what I didn't: I was in no shape, mentally or physically, to be attempting what I was attempting. I was alone, hanging by a thread, and had no one. So she was there for me. Every. Day. She was my lifeline. I miss her. Not because of what she did for me, but because she's the kind of person who can do that sort of thing, if that makes any sense.

I want to be able to say, unequivocally, that I'm in a better place now than I was a year ago. Objectively, that's true enough. I've pulled off a whole set of major life changes. Subjectively...subjectively, these are difficult times for me. I might not be drinking, but I'm still well within that period of sobriety when everything that's been suppressed by that anesthetic is hopping about in my skull with frenetic abandon and generally having its way with me.

Had I not been on the road, there is a better than even chance that, if I had just moved back to the city, gotten an apartment, gotten a job...I would have killed myself. Not on purpose. It would have been some stupid accident. Too much alcohol, maybe with Xanax, just another routine attempt to numb myself out that happened to end in vomit and asphyxiation. Instead, via a stubborn, senseless sort of grace, I put myself in a situation which made that impossible.

So, I'm glad I'm alive. I'm glad I'm near the ocean, even though I haven't gone to see it in months. I'm glad I'm finally self-aware enough to recognize where I am in my life, do the work that I need to do, and avoid repeating the mistakes of my past.

Or, at least, avoid repeating them in exactly the same way.

Or...perhaps, if I do repeat them in the same way, making sure that they don't produce the same goddamn results.

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On this day last year, I had been on the road for nine weeks, and was enjoying some fine cornbread at Cannon Beach in Oregon. I'd arrived in Astoria two days before after a pell-mell cross-country minivan trip, and posted "I Demand Joy" from the desk of my room at the Lamplighter Motel.

As it turns out, I can demand all I want. Doesn't mean I'll get it. I wrote,

...this morning, for the god-knows-how-many'th time, I started awake with a ball of panic in my gut, as though a thunderclap had tossed me out of bed. No reason at all, it was just there, looming and full of dread, ready as always to take control of my entire day and turn it into a senseless trial.

And I'm just sick of it. Enough's enough. No more. I don't care if I've inherited a ridiculously hair-triggered fight-or-flight mechanism. Whatever patterns were softwired into my postnatal plastic brain can damn well unfold themselves. I've known for several years that my inner emotional life often had little connection to my outward circumstances, or was disproportionately intense...but at no time in my life has this been more evident than the past few days. Speeding through the landscapes of America on my way to what had been the best part of my grand plan - skipping to the dessert, essentially - I still couldn't shake out of the funk. No question: I do have some real-life Stuff going on. But until that water rolled over my bare feet, and I looked under the towering route 101 bridge out towards the widening Pacific, I didn't fully realize that I can choose whether to be overwhelmed or not.

I still haven't fully realized that. Who'd choose this state? The incapacitating chest-knot, obsession so irrational I can taste it, like copper vapor in my throat when I exhale. Watching my mind spin and spin some more like a thing unto itself, blurring on its axis, set in motion by psychological forces so deep I can't even see them. Only their effects are visible, like surface waves created by a seaquake.

So, after a year, on this day, I can look back and see...more of the same. In a lot of ways, I've advanced not a whit in 365 days. In a lot of other ways, I've advanced quite a bit. When comparing the whits and bits, on this day it's the whits that are weightier. And I'm still sick of it. Enough, apparently, was not enough.

On this day, a year ago, I took the photograph below, somewhere between Astoria and Cannon Beach. Two months spent in the company of that absolving ocean wasn't sufficient, and I still don't know what will be.

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