Errands in Reykjavik

July 19, 2019 by Filed under Amused, Introspection, Stress Tagged with

I didn’t sleep well this morning due to jet lag, and I got up and immediately had to start working.  That went on for five hours, and I didn’t make much progress. Then I got out the bike and a minimal set of gear and went riding over to the hostel — the only building in the whole city that has coin-op washing machines.

It was about four miles to get there. I exchanged some money for coins and soap, and threw my clothing into a cold water wash. There was nothing to do but wait for an hour, so I sat next to the machines and did more work on the laptop.

Laundry day!

People kept wandering into the room to see if the machines were free yet. One woman collected her laundry from the dryer and sat down next to me at the table to fold it, and struck up a conversation. She was Australian, about 30 years old, wearing hiking pants and a floral-print blouse. Her hair was brown and shoulder-length, tied behind her head, and it bobbed a little as she gestured with her muscular forearms. Every inch of exposed skin was lightly tanned and covered in freckles. When she wasn’t looking down to fold a piece of clothing, she held my gaze easily with intense blue-gray eyes.

We talked about bike touring and travel, and what it was like being immersed in different cultures. She’d traveled much more extensively than me – gone all over Europe and Asia – and done it entirely alone. For the last five years she’d spent maybe six months total back in Australia. She talked about mountain climbing, and skiing, and a huge dance festival in the Spanish countryside, and an ashram she liked in Northern India, and hopping around the Greek islands. She did technical work with a laptop to support herself but mostly she got around by joining other groups of people and keeping her costs low. She was confident and opinionated and smart and pretty and she knew it, and she casually assumed I knew it too.

She finished folding and lingered for a while. Her stories were amazing, but to be honest, something about her irritated me and I instinctively kept her at arms’ length.

I got up to switch my clothes to the dryer, and as soon as I banged the door shut a group of people barged in and threw their consolidated laundry into the newly vacant machines. The room was cramped, and the Australian woman collected her laundry and wished me luck on my travels, and left. It had been conversation to fill time. I was sure that in a day – or less – she would completely forget about meeting me.

As I sat there fiddling with my laptop, I realized what it was about her that I didn’t like. She presented herself as an open book, and casually assumed I was too dumb to notice that she’d ripped the last few chapters out and locked them in a drawer somewhere.

I pictured her, moving from place to place, meeting new people bound on the same journey and doing a brain-dump into them to fill the time, accumulating and disposing of friends and romantic partners, laying down the next destination in front of herself like a segment of train track because — well, why? Why does she keep moving?

“Hmm. I bet she’s not looking for anything in particular,” I thought. “I bet she’s trying to stay ahead of something. I think I know what it is.”

“I wonder if she realizes that the loneliness she sometimes feels creeping up the back of her spine is something that she needs to develop certain skills to alleviate, and that her current lifestyle doesn’t actually exercise those skills. Emotional intimacy, vulnerability, compromise, trust — these are not things we can step into like a new pair of shoes after walking without them for year after year. If she doesn’t attend to them, that loneliness is going to keep growing, and extend filaments into everything and lock itself in place.”

It was a prediction based on a hunch, and I knew I couldn’t really see who she was in just half an hour of talking. My thoughts said more about me – and what was on my mind – than they said about her. Was I traveling to find something — or stay ahead of something?

I rolled that around in my head as I waited for the dryer to finish, then I dumped everything into a saddlebag without folding it and got back on the road to do more chores. On the way out of the hostel I saw a flyer advertising “singles night” in the dining area. Wow, hostels really are little worlds of their own. Do they all feel like college dorms? I’m glad I’m not staying in one.

I rode across town to an electronics shop, and bought a USB3-B cable so I could use the remote control for my big camera. I also mailed a package to the nephews back home, and while I was at the post office I got a “camping card” that lets me stay at a bunch of different campsites around Iceland for a nice discount.

(I sat down later in a Thai restaurant and looked over the map that comes with the card, and realized that not very many of the campsites I need are covered by it. Hopefully I can still use the entire amount before I leave…)

I rode back to my AirBnB and dumped my laundry on the bed. As I organized it, I looked around and realized I couldn’t find my green shirt — the one with the bicycle and “Infinite MPG” written on it. Dang, I must have left it back at the hostel. I really like that shirt! Now I was gonna have to ride all the way back there to look for it. Ugh. I grabbed my bag and marched outside.

Along the way a driver shoved her way out into the intersection to make a left, putting me in danger.  “Grrr, what an idiot!” I thought to myself.  When I got to the hostel, Alanis Morrisette was singing about irony over the loudspeakers in the common area, and I grimaced and thought “Ugh I hate this song!” I checked all around but didn’t find my shirt, so I decided to ask at the front desk.  The greasy hiker guy in line ahead of me wanted to buy a postcard and then wanted to haggle over the price, and then the woman at the register put in the wrong numbers and undercharged him.  “Ugh; is everybody here stoned?” I thought to myself.

I asked the cashier if she’d seen a green shirt with a bicycle on it, and she said I should ask the cleaning staff, so I tracked them down. They said no, but I should check the Red Cross donation bins. I pawed through those and found nothing. Looks like someone decided to become the new owner of my shirt, and there was nothing I could do about it.

On the way out of the hostel, I got a message from a Facebook acquaintance linking to an editorial in the Paris Review. I unlocked my bike and then stood there reading it. “Oh wait, I’ve seen this,” I said. “Someone sent this to me yesterday. Wow; what are the chances of that?”

It was about some unfortunate woman who’d walked away from her wedding engagement and decided to go on an expedition to look for whooping cranes.  It was rambling, had an incoherent timeline, and amounted mostly to an excoriation of her asshole ex-fiancè — who truly was an asshole, no doubt about it.  It reminded me of a thousand earnest, wounded blog posts I’d seen in my 20’s from similarly-aged people on Livejournal, and I thought to myself, “Ugh I’m supposed to relate to this and give some kind supportive word about it, but I actually just loathe it.”

Then a funny thing happened.

I looked up, and said out loud, “Wow; I hate everything today!!” and laughed insanely for half a minute. The hostel kids eating lunch in the common area stared at me, which made me laugh even harder.

I had four other shirts, and the search had only cost me an hour. “Lighten up, you jackass!” I said to myself. “You’re in Iceland, your life is awesome, this day is awesome, and it’s dinner time!”

Next stop was a thai restaurant.

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Shipping business

July 17, 2019 by Filed under Advice, Curious, Stress Tagged with

Today I wrestled my bike boxes down into their folded state, wrapped some tie straps around them, and booked a shuttle ride back to the airport.

This handy wall-size collection of information is hanging in the airport.

My intention was to drag them over to the DHL shipping office and send them back to the US, and that was what I did, except it took almost four hours instead of one because the DHL office is not actually at the airport. It’s four long blocks away.

Luckily I could make this long trek easier by swiping one of the luggage handcarts from the baggage area and chucking my boxes onto that. I felt pretty silly pushing a stack of boxes down the sidewalk, around the industrial area next to the airport, but I didn’t care — as long as I didn’t get any attention from the police. If they searched me they would find a wallet, a passport, and a big pile of candy bars. Highly suspicious!

Good thing there are handcarts sitting around at the airport, or the walk to the DHL shipping depot would have taken forever, dragging those big boxes along...

This map on the wall of the DHL shipping depot shows how Iceland is in the same time zone as the UK, even though it's a good distance west.

The clerk at the DHL office was surprised that I was trying to ship boxes with nothing in them. He took measurements of the boxes, weighed them, then told me to wait as he got on the phone with the central office and argued with them in Icelandic for almost half an hour, transferring to three different people, all of whom he knew on a first-name basis. When he hung up he announced that he could cut almost 80 dollars off my shipping fee, which was quite a relief to me since the original quote was well over 300 dollars. It would cost twice as much for me to ship these boxes back home empty as it cost me in baggage fees to fly them into Iceland fully loaded.

Stats about the bike boxes:

  • The large box weighs 14kg empty.
  • The small box weighs 10kg empty.
  • Both boxes are the same size folded: 134cm x 79cm x 12cm.

Bike boxes all taped up and ready to go! The cost of shipping was insanely expensive, but they sure got to their destination fast...

I borrowed some packing tape from the clerk and since he didn’t have anything else to do, he held the boxes closed while I applied the tape, and we chatted a bit about travel.

Him:
“I visited America last year. I have some relatives in New Jersey.”
Me:
“Oh yeah? What did you do in New Jersey?”
Him:
“They took me to see Wrestlemania.”
Me:
“That’s … A very American sort of thing to see.”
Him:
“Yes! And we went on a road trip. I saw Washington. I parked in front of the FBI building by accident and some people came out and asked me a lot of questions, then they told me to move.”
Me:
“Hah! That’s pretty cool. Not very many people can say they visited America and got hassled by FBI agents.”
Him:
“Yes. I want to go back. I would like to live there.”
Me:
“Oh? Why?”
Him:
“Everything is so inexpensive!”

I laughed and told him I could see what he meant, but my experience was the opposite, because I’m from San Francisco. Things in Iceland actually cost less for me. He seemed surprised by that. I encouraged him to visit again, because his accent would be very popular with the ladies. He didn’t say anything to that but his face turned a little red.

Now this is service. Some poor traveler left their car in the long-term parking lot at the airport with their window halfway down. Since the windows are all electric, the airport staff have no way to raise them. Instead of just ignoring the issue and letting the car interior get destroyed by the constant rainstorms, they got plastic and airport packing tape and sealed over the partially-down window. Very thoughtful!

With the boxes taken care of, I pushed the luggage cart back to the airport and waited for the free hotel shuttle. Once again I was the only person riding it. Isn’t this the height of tourist season? Shouldn’t every hotel be bursting at the seams? I wonder if they over-built…

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Iceland Preparation, Flight, and Arrival

July 15, 2019 by Filed under Stress Tagged with

For years I was obsessed with the idea of taking a trip across all of Europe and Asia. The idea chewed around in the back of my brain, and I did my best to ignore it, because it was weird and scary.

Then some events in my life forced me to confront the idea directly, and I realized that even if I wouldn’t or couldn’t do the entire trip, I could at least do the starting portion: A zig-zag across the country of Iceland, during the summer months.

My most ambitious route crossed down the center of the country and took 31 days at 30 miles every day. With the six-day middle crossing included, and the ferry cross up from Vatnasafn, plus time to prep gear and sightsee, the entire tour would probably take six weeks (42 days) and most likely approach 8 weeks (56 days).

While putting this crazy plan together I made several pages of notes, divided into three phases: Entering, Crossing, and Exiting. If you’re planning your own bike tour of Iceland it’s a nice info dump.

Why indeed!

Good question, Dad. Essentially the reasons are: Low crime, good infrastructure, fantastic terrain, and not much of a language barrier. Plus it’s the extreme western point of what could be called Europe, and connects to the mainland by a ship that sails on a regular schedule.

Of course, even though I had months to put together a great set of equipment and study routes and terrain, it still came down to a mad dash over the last few weeks, when all this happened at once:

  • I laid on the floor in agony for several days and passed a kidney stone.
  • I went in for a series of doctor appointments and blood tests, for the kidney stone, allergies, and other things.
  • The water heater in my apartment began to leak all over the floor. (I can’t pass this responsibility on to the landlord — I am the landlord.)
  • I gave tours to and evaluated a dozen renters, in order to rent out my apartment so I didn’t blast through my savings on the road.
  • I drove several loads of furniture to Southern California.
  • Full time work.

But somehow, the boxes got packed. I was up until 4:00am for most of the last week, but I didn’t quit. It was time to make this happen. I was done looking, it was time to leap.

Andrew gave me a ride to the airport, hauling along the massive bike boxes in his massive car. I was running on less than four hours of sleep and very grateful for the help. Hiring an airport shuttle with luggage this big is a total crapshoot. We chatted about his camping plans, his car, and his middle child Nora, who was going through a strange punk phase and making some strange decisions. There was an accident on the Bay Bridge but we got to the airport in good time.

Andrew helped me unloaded everything at the curb, and we exchanged hugs. “Send pictures!” he said. “You bet!” I said. Then he drove off, and I stood there with a backpack, two suitcases, and two huge boxes, wondering what my next move was. Find a handcart perhaps?

As I was swapping things around in the backpack, a man wandered by with a large cart and said I could use it for ten dollars. I had to get rid of my American cash anyway, so I agreed. He hauled everything onboard and pushed it inside to Icelandair check-in desk. Usually this is the point where a lot of haggling over box sizes and regulations begins, and that’s why I planned to be here several hours before the flight. Was I going to have to pull out my phone and quote from the airline’s own website, and speak to several managers, like I had last time? Yes, a box this large can go on the plane. Yes, it’s sporting equipment. Go ahead and look inside.

The attendants weighed all my stuff, and then brought up my baggage purchases on their computer. I’d put three check-in bags on my ticket, plus the carry-on, and then I’d called earlier in the week to add an oversize bicycle to the list. With only a few words exchanged, the attendants agreed that my third checked bag could be the smaller bicycle box, because I was only bringing one bicycle but dividing it between two boxes to meet weight requirements. That was it. The boxes were checked and wheeled away in less than five minutes and I didn’t have to open my wallet.

The security line was long but moved well. I had to discard my entire bottle of root beer before I got to the x-ray, which was aggravating. Then I was at the gate, with almost two hours to spare. Time to charge up all my gadgets!

I admit I would have enjoyed the flight a lot more if I haven’t been a sleep-deprived zombie. I discovered that while the exit row did have more room, it was also stone cold because of the way the air circulated in the cabin. I pulled out my fluffy pillow from my backpack, crammed it in the corner of the chair, and tried to sleep for about two hours.

I woke up somewhere over Canada and felt a bit better, but I missed the meal service. So I summoned the flight attendant – a lithe Icelandic woman with a sharp voice who spoke impeccable english – and she confirmed that I had a paid-for meal, which she then brought. A tasty falafel salad that was a bit dry, so I gulped water with every bite.

Greenland passing below...

Another nap, some cool views over Greenland, and we were there!

Packed shuttle from the plane to the terminal.

Everyone here is on their way to a groovy Icelandic adventure. Wearing my backpack, I fit right in… But soon I would claim my massive amount of luggage, and start looking like a weirdo and getting curious looks, like bike tourists always do.

Oversize items creep down that ramp on the right and slide into the room, a few at a time. In the digestive system of the baggage conveyors, this is the appendix.

It’s like the backside of some giant box-eating herbivore. A boxivore!

Miraculously, all the suitcases and boxes got here intact.

I’d already bought an Iceland-compatible data plan on my phone to keep costs down, but it didn’t let me make local calls. I had to bite the bullet and invoke my roaming charges to call up the hotel and ask when their shuttle would arrive. Turns out I needed to: They weren’t running the shuttles unless someone specifically booked them, and so far no one had booked any today. I would have been waiting forever if I hadn’t spent ten dollars on roaming charges. So … worth it?

The boxes were opened up for inspection, apparently. Good thing they didn't lose any of my stuff.

Once everything was safely inside my hotel room I discovered that someone had opened up the larger of my two boxes and inspected it, and dropped in a tag. Now I know who to yell at if something’s missing! Arrr!

Contents settled during shipping -- but only a little.

For the next four hours I unpacked, organized, and repacked everything. I’d been doing trial runs with this gear for quite a while, figuring out how to pack it down. Laid out on the foor I have to admit it looks completely impossible to fit on a bike. And yet it all does.

Everything laid out for taking inventory. That's a lot of stuff, yah?

And that was it for me. I fell onto the bed and slept. It was early evening, seven hours had vanished into jetlag, and the day was gone.

At least technically, since the sunlight never completely leaves the sky… Welcome to the far north!!

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Are you trying to prove something?

June 2, 2019 by Filed under Introspection, Stress Tagged with

In conversation with myself.

This is one of my all-time favorite comics.  Credit to Nathan W Pyle

Do you think that a bike tour is the gateway to a more interesting life?

Do you think that the interesting things you can see from the seat of a bike make up for all the time you spent at your job, staring at screens, shut inside yourself? Staying up late because you felt unsatisfied at the end of another day spent working, saving up money so you can have an adventure?

Sure there is adventure, and good conversation. Stories to tell, fresh air, exercise, good food. Always a new thing rolling down from the horizon. There’s no denying that a bike tour could bring happiness. But why this particular choice? Any why persevere, through the hard parts — the inevitable rain and cold and hunger, the long empty patches of road where there is no one to talk to, nothing to chew on but your own curious thoughts — and the times when you’re deeply uncomfortable, when you wish for the chance to simply stop and put down roots somewhere, with an urgency that belies it as a human need like food and company… What compels you to spend your limited time on Earth doing this thing?

Is it ego? Are you trying to prove something to yourself?

Imagine you’ve already met your goal; made your journey, and you’re back home in your daily routine again. What have you proved except that you can exploit the available technology in a somewhat unconventional means, to go on what most everyone around you will see as a weird extended vacation? One that most people would not choose for themselves, and would not be able to relate to? Because really, people do not like riding their bikes as much as you do. They will not get it. You seem like a nut-job more than an adventurer, placing yourself in danger on the road, especially when everyone around you is “getting there” faster in a car.

People smile and say “that sounds cool,” and sincerely wish you luck. But make no mistake: They don’t relate. What you’re doing isn’t cool.

Likewise, you can’t be in it for the rebellion, for the “coolness points” of doing something different that sets you apart from others. There’s no happiness in competing for novelty — only a caustic version of pride. No matter how interesting your bike tour actually becomes, there are people all over the Earth who have spent their time doing far more interesting things, far more often, and being so dang humble about it that you don’t even know they exist unless you blunder into them and talk awhile. You will probably meet a bunch of them as you go.

No, if happiness does emerge from this journey, it comes from meeting your own personal expectations.

What do you expect?

What sets those expectations? You weren’t born with them, you learned them. Where did they come from? Consider your personal history.

You grew up playing adventure games, traveling far away in your imagination — and surrounded by the redwood forest, deep and quiet, blurring the line between your imagination and real places. You grew up riding a bicycle, and have come back to it in adulthood, integrating it with your daily life, working against the car-focused environment and economy surrounding you. Visions of far away lands have been brought to you by the internet, and a flood of practical information as well. This age of scientific wonders, and the accumulated toil of countless generations before it, has knit the world together with roads and airlines and shipping routes, and the gear to explore them is affordable. It’s all there, visible online.

You see a goal within reach, but not too close, like a mountaineer scheming to reach a summit “because it’s there.” Just how far could you ride? Just how far could your mind range? You calibrate your expectations and your happiness based on what’s available. You make it up as you go along, and perhaps you’re even conscious of how arbitrary that is.

It feels like these threads have been converging over years, over decades even. How much of your life, in retrospect, has been about this idea?

But then again, how much of this is just selective remembering — a story you’re making up about your distant past to justify your actions? A lot of it, probably. Why make up the story? Maybe it’s not your past but your present life that holds the answers.

Lately you’ve been spending way too much time immobilized behind a desk. That desk is the centerpiece of a routine you follow almost every day. It goes: Get up, ride to work, stare at screens, talk about programming and science with nice people, eat some food – hopefully something nourishing – spend a little time with loved ones, read a book or watch a film, run a few basic errands, and then go to bed for a night of unquiet dreams. Then start the routine again.

It’s not a bad routine. In fact, it’s a routine that most people on Earth would happily assemble and roll with for their entire lives. There are undeniably good things about it; things you cannot pack up and take with you on two wheels.

But it’s still a routine. And there’s no doubt you would break this routine if you started a long bicycle trip. If you picked yourself up out of your home, moved thousands of miles outside your comfort zone, dropped down in an unfamiliar land with some hardware and a map, and had to contend with the elements and interact with the locals to move yourself across the globe, your routine would be totally demolished. It’s impossible to stay in one place while riding a bike, so a desk is out of the question. (Same with computer screens. Only the tiniest of screens fits on a bike and if you stare at it for more than a few seconds you fly into a ditch.)

You would be forced to witness the world, rather than think about it abstractly like you have for too many years. And perhaps that’s exactly what you want. Maybe it isn’t happiness you’re seeking, or the execution of a grand plan; maybe it’s an intervention. Life in one place has gotten too easy, and you used to have expectations for how it would all arrange itself, but life outmaneuvered and outlasted your expectations, and now you’ve drifted into this weird place nobody warned you about, and been seized by this weird idea as a means of escape.

What do you want?

Is this a “midlife crisis?” What’s your crisis; being bored? If you did exactly what you’re doing now but you were 20 years old, even motivated by the same sense of boredom, would you doubt yourself? Would others?

“Go out there and explore!” they would say. “You’re young, you don’t need to think about anything permanent at your age.”

What about now? Instead they would say, “You’re old. You’re supposed to be settled into something and know what you want out of life.” And “settled in” means, among other things, staying in one place.

You’ve been settled before. More than once.

You’ve managed to work your way into plenty of situations that seemed ideal at the time – jobs, relationships, living spaces – and moved on from them eventually. Your only regret each time was not doing it before things got as bad or as boring as they did. Not everything requires escape of course; some things just require difficult adjustments, and then they continue in another way. But to pursue this particular crazy idea – a long-range bike trip – you are taking apart things in your life that are good as well as bad. That’s obsession. And probably stupidity as well.

People all over the world struggle mightily just to claim a fraction of the resources and connections you have acquired and kept during your life, let alone things that you have accidentally or deliberately wasted. If the extreme good fortune of your position is not apparent to you now, it will be apparent soon, because this journey will put you in close contact with many of those less fortunate. How will you feel then, about what you left behind? How stupid will you look to the people you meet, when you try to explain yourself?

But on the other hand…

What if you don’t have a choice?

Life is full of contradictions and it should not be surprising that something that seems like a really bad idea also seems like a really great one.

You’re well into your forties. By all accounts your life is more than half done. Way more, if you think of it in terms of the aging of your mind and memory. What kind of joke would the back half of your existence be if you spent years on the cusp of a journey that you could quite easily have taken, only to turn around and creep back into your house, close the door, and keep taking the paycheck and eating the fat meals?

Even if it’s a difficult journey to finish, it’s trivially easy to start. Just get on the bike and keep going. People have bicycled all around the world hundreds of years before you were born, and (you hope) thousands and thousands more will during your lifetime and long after. If they can do it, so can you. Do you really need a reason? Ego, identity, change, intervention, escape… Why are you so worried about it?

It doesn’t matter. Possible answers to the question of “why” erupt like weeds – fresh ones every day – and you pull them up, inspect them, and throw them in a pile. The only thing you are certain of is the obsession itself. Unprompted, irreducible, and stubbornly refusing to fade. You’ve spent so long thinking about it, outlining scenarios and testing hardware and saving money, that at this point if you didn’t do it, you might not have much of an identity to fall back on. You’d be some vague person with a job and a house and some good relationships who thought about something really hard for years to the point where it began to seriously interfere with and alter their life … and then dropped it.

Are you afraid of what you’ll learn?  Are you afraid in general?  For how much longer are you willing to put up with the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously preparing to go and planning to stay? The world is absolutely flooded with opportunities to miss. There is no shortage of them, only a shortage of time. Past a certain level of preparedness, the days you spend preparing turn into their own thing. Are you more comfortable with preparing than you are with actually doing? Are you comfortable in purgatory, and questioning your motives so you’ll stay?

Get on with it. Whatever happens – good or bad, or even just boring – it will be your choice. You’d better be okay with it.

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Age, sickness, and the new normal

January 20, 2018 by Filed under Inspiration, Stress Tagged with

Just after Christmas I visited my father. I only had a handful of days before work started again, so the schedule was tight. I drove for nine straight hours into the Oregon mountains, through forbidding white walls of fog and lashings of rain, and spent the next two days with him and his wife in their cozy home, sharing stories and looking through photo albums, and tag-teaming crossword puzzles. He’s not as mobile as he used to be, but he sure can murder a crossword.

During the visit I realized that I had reached a strange milestone. Just a few weeks ago I celebrated my 42nd birthday, and now I was exactly half my father’s age. I pointed it out to him while I scanned the crossword clues.

“Congratulations,” he said dryly. “Feel any different?”

“Well, … starting to feel a bit old,” I said.

“Hah! Just you wait,” he said, and snatched the crossword back for another go.

Of course it was true. However old I felt, I had nothing on him. I could take all my aches and pains and multiply them by two – no, five – and throw in misbehaving bowels and Senior Moments, and I’m sure it still wouldn’t match the sheer annoyance of being 84. I would just have to wait. (And hope to make it that far.)

But on the 9-hour drive back out of Oregon, something happened that gave me a shot at real perspective: I came down with the flu. By the time I was back in Oakland I could tell it was going to be a really nasty one.

My body felt like it had been run over by a truck — one of those harvester trucks that creeps through an orchard in first gear while the farmers fill it with fruit. I could almost feel the way the tires had rolled up my chest, and pushed every joint of my body into the ground. I kept thinking that a few hours rest would make it stop, and I kept being wrong. Go for a bicycle ride? Forget it. Do a load of laundry? Forget it. Eat a hard-boiled egg and go lie down? Okay, let’s give that a try – but no promises.

(The most I managed to eat in a day was half a bowl of noodle soup. I set it down on the counter and wandered off, and the ants got the other half.)

For the next week, the limit of my mental capacity was playing video games and petting the cat. Forget working — even answering emails. I couldn’t read more than a few lines without forgetting where I was. Part of my brain was floating overhead in a balloon, doing its own thing, and there was no way it could participate in waking life. To keep the few appointments I had – one with a contractor, one with a mechanic – I clutched my phone like a spool of thread in a labyrinth, and set a dozen alarms.

I needed hot water bottles to stay warm, and it took every ounce of my concentration to avoid burning myself with the tea kettle. The act of filling them was usually so exhausting that all I could do afterwards was go back to bed, where I would sleep for two or three hours at a time and make hideous patches of sweat on the mattress. The week passed in a myopic, pointless haze. I might have felt depressed over the waste of time, if the feeling could ever get strong enough to displace the massive indifference that filled me like sticky tar in a railroad tie. Every ambition beyond mere existence was gone. In a way that was a blessing because if I tried to do anything ambitious, I’d probably cause an accident.

Partway through this ordeal, while laying semi-comatose in the bathtub, an idea occurred to me that was so alarming I had to say it out loud to the empty room just to get some distance from it:

“What if this is normal?”

What if the ambitious, lucid person I remembered being a week ago was just a shell, and I got so sick that it broke? What if I don’t just magically get that part of my personality back when I’m feeling better, and instead it’s in little pieces that I’ll never find? What if my brain’s been permanently cooked by fever, and my chance to do anything complicated with it is gone?

I felt panic, but even that feeling was weak. I couldn’t manage a strong feeling of any kind. My heart was already racing just from disease, so no change there. But as I shambled around the house, slowly recovering, the idea kept jumping out at me. My feeling of alarm grew in parallel to my recovering strength, and became a kind of motivation. “If I’m ever going to do big things,” I told myself, “I better do them while I have the ability – and the desire. I just hope I get them back…”

It was sobering to know I could so easily lose the ability. It was appalling to know that I could also lose the desire. … Not just for specific things, but for everything. Take my current state of health, and instead of corrupting it with the flu, corrupt it with time instead; add ten or twenty years … Where’s that line, between attempting something really ambitious and surviving it, and screwing it up and freezing to death over some dumb mistake or losing concentration at the wrong moment and getting mangled in a ditch? How long before I put a huge plan together and then have to tell myself, “No, I better just stay home,” and how long before that becomes my preference anyway?

I don’t want to wait and see.

As I worked on my recovery – cleaning the house, washing my sweaty laundry, hocking up the remains of the flu – I tried to reset my perspective.

42 isn’t old age. Well, it isn’t these days, at least. If I were living in 19th-century England, I’d probably be dead and buried by now, and have several sets of grandkids scratching around in the fields, but in this modern world I can probably go another 42 years, and retire to a cozy house in Oregon sometime in the middle of the century if that’s what appeals to me.

No, I can’t be in tip-top physical shape any more, but how much does that really matter? With the passage of time I’ve been exchanging that physical ability for improvisational skill and situational awareness. My position in this modern world depends on knowledge and connections – things older people accumulate – rather than my ability to dig trenches and chop trees all day. Plus, I’m better at distinguishing between stuff that will permanently injure me and stuff that will just be annoying. And I’m a lot less afraid of dealing with strangers.

Yes, I can do things. I just need the will.

My little pep-talk to myself dropped into the background as my flu symptoms vanished, and I was grateful to see my sense of ambition return. Old is definitely a state of mind, and I felt very lucky to leave that state behind. Maybe I’ll end up there some day just from sheer wear and tear. But dammit, not yet!!

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