Winter Travel Journal
Ula, the 12-week-old Irish wolfhound I've been hanging out with. 9 seconds of happiness with her, that took place over this past weekend, when I babysat for her.(written March 15, 2022)
Read this once (it won't change for the rest of the trip(s): I'll be linking this post to Facebook. If that's how you got here, here's some background: About 12 years ago I started this blog as a food journal. I had a medical situation and needed to lose weight. Initially, that's all I did here: Journal my food intake and my weight. It contributed to helping me lose 20+% of my body weight in 6 months, and continuing has kept me on track since then. I started adding commentary after a while, originally 7 days a week, then 5, but lately it has become occasional.
While I'm traveling, I let go of the weight-tracking and food journaling, except for the occasional food shot when I've eaten something interesting. And that's where we find ourselves now.
I've been in Florida for eight days.
Most of those days, the weather has been cool, rainy and windy. Not the first two, when I flew into Fort Lauderdale and met with an old friend I hadn't had one-on-one face time with in thirty-five years. That was wonderful.
The drive up to Daytona Beach was pretty easy too, but when I got here (I'm in Wilbur By the Sea as I write) it was cool and windy. And then there was that cold bomb over the Southeast last weekend.
I should have been ready for it. The most constant thing in my whole trip this time has been shitty weather everywhere I went.
With no exceptions - oh, a day here and there, sure, this year the pretty days were few. Fewer than on any other trip.
Still, not a thing I can actually change that I would change.
I made a lot of memories. I had a great time. New friends, new playing experiences, old friends and deepened friendships. All while, as best as I'm able, living in a way consistent with the way I live when I'm not traveling.
In other words, my social life still takes place in bars and restaurants. I still make music as much as I can. I still appreciate the good things that come to me and feel gratitude for all of it.
That's what I try to document in these blogs. The things that happen. I realize that I'm the subject, and that I'm something of an egotist, but I'm not selling anything, not pretending to be a documentarian or writing an autobiography.
These are the good parts. The people I meet, the things that happen. I've been using this John Lennon quote a lot: "Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end."
That gives finality to the things I write about here. Because, the things I write about turn out okay. That started happening before I retired (this is my sixth year of retirement).
And they don't happen because I'm a master fixer. It's a source of amazement to me. A friend in Ecuador said, I shouldn't say I can't explain my 'success'. It makes me sound like I don't deserve it, it's ingenuous. I get that. Instead, I said, "I just don't know what it is that makes me worthy."
But I don't take it for granted. I hear stories about people who've been through kinds of hell I've never come close to experiencing. Next to these, I've never been tested. In fact, I often feel like I've somehow gotten away every ignorant, dangerous, insensitive, thoughtless thing I've ever done. But not because of any smarts, talents of skills of my own.
I say I'm lucky. And on that score, I ask to be forgiven for my confirmation bias, but it seems that, as long as I believe it, I am provided with the evidence to keep believing it.
Of course, it's a conceit, and I'm somewhat conceited. But I don't take my good luck for granted.
And I don't write to make anybody feel bad. That is the last thing I want. Don't compare your life to mine (unless you were born the same day as me - then I'm genuinely interested in finding out what your seventy-two years have been like - but let's not judge each other). You don't know about the dark times, before I was happy, and there's no reason you should want to.
What you see today is what 12 years of happiness looks like. Because, like Happy Jack (ref of an early hit by the Who), you can bounce me on my head but you can't prevent me from being hap-py. I made a decision to be happy, and I'm sticking by it.
That's the part that you see. I showed my old friend Stuie a picture of me about 6 months after I got to Syracuse, because he couldn't imagine me being overweight, which I was when I got here in 2008. Overweight and pretty unhappy. He had missed the part of my life, the decades, when that happened. He was appalled. Other people have seen it and said I was unrecognizable.
There's a lesson there, but it comes down to this:
All those good and bad times got me to right here, right now. Which, in my judgment (right here and right now), ain't a bad place to be.
This is the last post of this Winter's trip. I'm on a plane home tomorrow, I'll be in my apartment for dinner. Which I will cook for myself. That is going to feel great. I'm really excited to see how things go the next nine months, before the next winter trip. I'll get over that.
I am grateful for everything that got me here, for my family and my friends, and for the very fact that I can say about the 2021-2 winter trip: It's the end, and it's okay.
