Buying The Ticket

So when I sold my house and I gave everything away I was then on the edge of a cliff. I had nothing to hold onto anymore. To think of the past was terrifying. Only the future remained.

The way this life has evolved, I realize I have lived a drunkcyclist life if there ever was a definition. My version of course. Most the rest of you have way more fun than I do, but I’m still drunkcyclist. I’ve lived the life to the fullest as a struggling cyclist and as an individual who has a primary identity as “just a cyclist”… or more accurately, a drunk cyclist. Mind you, the drinking was and is functional. I’ve done fine with it. But it was and is an ever present condition; to drink. This is a social issue. When I live alone, I am sober. But drinking is nearly requisite of membership because it is good. Membership is free to anyone. The only thing I didn’t experience until very late in the saga of this drunkcyclist life was a truly deep tour – at my age of 47, that was this, but this was much more than a vacation. It was an estranged culdesac that I would pedal into completely.

So I sat there at the train station in LA with my next stop being San Diego. San Diego would be the beginning of pedaling. It was a somber process to ride the train from Flagstaff out to the coast. It was the Sunliner that took me from L.A. to San Diego. Both were a farewell procession. Maybe I cried. I was riding away from everything.

I talk about estrangement because I am estranged. I am estranged to some degree from society en large, and to a greater impact, I am estranged from my family and my friends. That was the point of Baja. To be estranged. Complete freedom resides there in estrangement. It is kin to hoboism, and transiency or in fact it is a necessity of both. I am a ascitic of cycling. My pursuit makes sense in this way.

And so when I arrived to San Diego I arrived to an end and I arrived to a beginning. The beginning of pedaling and the entry into a most basic new life as a touring cyclist.