Liminal Settings
Needs have to be met. That's what "needs" means. I needed a setting and couldn't use the one I had. So I had to leave.
The electrification of the Tom Sachs, my camperized delivery van, was finished. The cargo bays were stocked, and the solar panels were clean. The Winnebago drop-trailer, Intrepid, was packed and ready. It was time to go.
My destination was not certain. I thought about the Hollywood Tower Hotel in Los Angeles, Sal's Battery in Jones County Mississippi, maybe as far as Santa Barbara d'Oeste in Brazil if I could drive there. I just needed a place to be.
Please know that I am embarrassed by that prosaic complaint; that first world, narcissistic, trivial problem that I don't feel like a genuine version myself while countless millions of other people face the consequences of the endemic, existential threats of our times. I just needed to get those words out of my system. I just needed to say it out loud so I can get it out of my nervous system!
It's funny. There are so many things that I thought I knew just because I understood them intellectually. And even that is an overstatement. I didn't actually understand them, I could just string together enough parts of them to convince myself that I understood them. Everything is larger than my own particular view on it.
"I alternate between over-thinking and jumping to conclusions," I told one of my old bosses during an employment performance agreement meeting. And even my over-thinking was under-thinking when compared to the truth of the matter.
I always hated the thought of running away. The idea that I would quit something, give up on it, leave-something-in-the-lurch offended one of my main ideas about myself. The idea was so deeply engrained that I even applied it to the concept of vacations. Vacations to get away from something - work, boredom, the hassles of mundane life - offended me. I would vacation to go somewhere, but I looked down on the idea of vacationing to get away from where I was. The irony that now I have to get away from everything is not lost on me.
"Where are you going again?" my father asked me at the end of my stop-over visit in his city-of-residence. When all you know is that you can't stay where you are, how do you pick a direction?
"South," I said.
"That's more of a direction than a destination," he observed.
"The South?"
"Well, that adds a little colour to the picture, I guess," he said.