Travel Makes Me Giddy

I'm all set to fly out to Tucson for Thanksgiving. My dad lives there and I just love the desert.

Tucson is surrounded by big red mountains, the desert makes for great hiking, and the prospect of 1% humidity is enough to make any Midwesterner flush with get-up-and-go. Besides all that, I just love to travel.

I found cheap airline tickets out of my hometown (Springfield, MO), around which much of my family still lives, so I'm going to visit with them for a few days before I bound onto an airplane and zip into Phoenix, where my father's wife will pick me up secretly and then drop me off at their home where I will wait until the old man arrives from work, when I will surprise him. You see, Thanksgiving has always been his favorite holiday, and this would have been his first Thanksgiving without his family around since he moved to Arizona.

But I will have the privilege of surprising him on a day he would likely otherwise have been bummed out. I'm so excited! It's gonna be a blast.

I'm so worked up, I don't even mind paying the stupid airline a "checked baggage fee."

I've Been Meaning to Call...

So it's been a week or so since I posted anything here. I've been backpacking and writing (revising, mostly) and contemplating what I'm going to do for money since it's been months since I've held an actual job.

I wouldn't call myself lazy (though I do show the symptoms occasionally) but after my last experience with Corporate America, I just don't have the stomach for it anymore. I have lost my job to corporate "right-sizing" or "we're sending your jobs to China" 3 times. 3 TIMES! I'm only 29 years old!

I cared about each one of those jobs and the rug just kept getting yanked out from under me; I just don't think I can take another one seriously ever again.

So, here I am, contemplating.

A Couple of Mentionables

I guess I'm official now. The folks at SundayMorningRides.com didn't waste any time posting my first article.

I sort of get the feeling I could've submitted a list of random words pertaining to anything remotely within the realm of motorcycling and they would have posted it, but I understood the gig before I took it--that it's mostly about building content and generating better search results for the site and all that web stuff--I get that, really I do. Considering I'm still at the 10-yard line of my career, having my own monthly "column" rates pretty high on the Coolness Scale; and it will make for good solid resumé fodder at some writerly train station on down the the line somewhere. I know this too.

But to tell the truth, my inner writer--the part of me which is still beyond my own conscious grasp; the deeper part of my, I don't know, my soul, I guess, where the big picture is displayed on some secret Jumbo Tron, of which I only catch occasional glimpses--feels like I'm selling myself short.

It's a logical step; I get it. And don't get me wrong, it is exciting to see my stuff "out there." The project is also forcing me to write in ways I've never written before. This whole thing can only serve to help me, I know. I don't want to seem ungrateful, because I'm not. I just didn't expect to feel the way I feel, that's all.

I just finished reading the Catcher in the Rye last night too. Maybe that's all this is. I always get a little down when I finish a book. I mean, it depresses hell out of me. Now I feel like a phony. A big goddam phony. (If you don't get that last bit, you need to read the book.)

Anyway, tonight I'll celebrate over my first published piece. But I'll do it a little sullenly.

Here's my new column, by the way: Burnout, by Jed Hunt