A Brief Explanation

In the spring of my 49th year, a whole lot of things vanished from my life, quite unexpectedly.  Beloved of ten years:  gone.  A week later, job:  gone.  Home:  with no job (i.e., no paycheck), the ex-beloved gets that, so gone.

I'm not one of the many, many people who seem to believe that everything happens for a reason (and even if everything does, I believe that the reason may well be a stinky one, and I really just don't care that the stinky thing happened for a stinky reason).  However, none of these important pieces of my life had what seemed to me a sensible reason for vanishing; the disaster-dump struck my rational brain as a mysterious phenomenon.  And when mysterious phenomena pull all my comfy, safe rugs out from under me, I am willing to pay attention.

For many years, I've sought safety and comfort -- but always with a niggling doubt that they might not be the best things for who I want to be.  And now, suddenly and horrifically and excitingly, I am, without conscious choice, unsafe, uncomfortable, and completely flummoxed as to why my well-laid plans went so far agly.

It strikes me that maybe I should try something different.

So I'm starting with a journey around the US.  I'll chronicle bits of it in this blog, and bits of it in journals, and some of it in photographs, and I'll forget huge parts of it in the tedium of driving 400 miles of interstate in a day.  But I'll try to learn a few things as I progress.