I would have to say that the summer is definitely over. I can tell this because of the distinct feeling that it’s time to get working on something. This is the same feeling that I think most of us growing up have had deeply engrained by years of going “back to school” at the end of August or beginning of September. It makes perfect sense, and I am reminded that I have not completed blog entries on my two big adventures of the summer – those are really stand alone stories, and they will be coming shortly. It has been an amazing summer, and this year for me, that “party is over” kind of feeling is really amplified. After months of Freedom at Point Zero, there is an ache to expand outward and make something happen – it is a combination of latent potentiality, and a sickly kind of discontent. It’s like a guilty hangover, mixed with that feeling you get in dreams when you are trying to run away from the axe murderer, but cannot seem to move your feet fast enough. For the longest time, I have been able to fend off the deadly bite of this economy, but I am here to say that on this day, the jaws of a crippled livelihood are crushing down upon me.
I’ll be the first one to point out that, while I have plenty to be thankful for, and while I have been living rather large throughout the past three months, there is a fine line between feast and famine. I am recalling with nostalgia, my departure into “freedom at point zero,” that luxurious unfettered feeling that swept me up in the springtime, when the loss of my part-time job launched me into an adventurous frenzy of exploring the possibilities of my life, as I squeezed the juice from my sputtering business with carefree abandon, and funneled all available income into life-changing activities. At the beginning of the summer, I had savings, and my phone was ringing with just the right amount of opportunity to keep me working, and playing, in a delicate harmonic balance. I dove deep into my spiritual wellspring during 10 days of silent meditation, and pushed myself to my physical limits with a multi-week bicycle trek from Ashland Oregon, down the North coast of California. I gave the summer a grand finish by collaborating to build an incredible camp for Burning Man, enjoying a week of frolic and amazement, going up against the elements and my own stuff, on a dry lake bed somewhere North of Reno.
But the assumption that my handyman business would continue it’s slow but steady grind after Labor Day seems to have been quite flawed, for in fact, I am witness to a sudden death. This moment, I am contemplating the reckoning – the experience of returning home to an empty bank account, and a silent phone. I keep hearing on NPR that the recession is over, but I think that my clients are listening to a different station or something, because I have worked about two hours post-Burning Man. As my business imitates a crash test vehicle that has been driven into a brick wall, life is crumpling in all the right places, as my sense of self-efficacy vanishes into itself with sudden impact. I am holed up at my mom’s house, frantically doing the measurements and calculations, trying to determine my next move. I’m feeling at once, pretty lucky that I have so few expenses, and again, pretty desperate to get out of the house I grew up in. If the summer that ensued was the action-footage of a wild and gnarly Grand Prix, engine screaming through the hair-pin turns of a curvy race course, then my fall is shaping up to be the “agony of defeat” scene, the disintegration wipe out shot in slow-motion, with flames and smoke, and chunks of race-car flying at the camera. For some reason, I keep thinking about my first car.
I have bought and sold 25 automobiles in my short life, but I could never forget my first car. It was a 1976 Dodge Colt wagon – with fake wood paneling on the sides, rear wheel drive, and an AM radio in the dash. I was not yet 16, when my father and I stumbled onto the rotting corps in an overgrown front yard on a Rio Linda country road. The car was stuffed full of rubbish, and had been left for dead, with four flat tires, and the words “FOR SALE – AS IS” scrawled out in the dust across the front windshield. We paid the old man $75 and towed the heap home after putting air in the tires with a portable compressor. The “AS IS” part meant, besides the fact that it did not run, that it would take half a day to excavate the cardboard and metal refuse, broken toys, old boots, beer-cans, and household plumbing parts from the interior. Indeed, it took the rest of the day to remove the thick layer of sun-baked bird-shit and dirt from the body and windows. Over the next several weeks, we proceeded to remove, rebuild, and replace the engine and transmission, applying my father’s expert mechanical skills, and my paper route earnings to finance the project. The resurrected car was running by the time I had my driver’s license, and I quickly set forth to drive the living crap out of it.
By the end of summer, my neighborhood friends had figured out their own system for determining who would ride shotgun on the way to school in the morning, and I had discovered that I could make the car lay down some pretty cool rubber by yanking up hard on the emergency brake at about thirty miles per hour. We were starting to get light rains, and I quickly made a sport of zipping around the neighborhood after a drizzle, Starsky and Hutch style - hanging fishtails around corners and practicing my countersteer technique. It was not that I was irresponsibly abusing some car that had been given to me or something. Oh no - I had skin in the game, and a certain level of intimacy with my machine. I was practicing defensive driving, indulging a sophisticated delight in “seeing what she could do,” and probably had been infused with some of my dad’s fascination with automobiles.
It was late September when the first big rain came. Back then, Sacramento got real rain starting in September, just before a brief “Indian Summer” came and went. This weekend, it had rained all weekend, and by Sunday evening, I was itching to go out for a drive around the neighborhood. When you’re 16, a wreckless drive around the neighborhood is such a fresh, exciting experience, full of possibility. I headed up to my High School, and drove my little danger-wagon around back and onto the soccer field, to work on my hydroplaning skills. I could feel the saturated soil and grass compact beneath the wheels of my car, as I tentatively crawled out to the middle of the field. I cranked the steering wheel to the left, mashed down on the gas, and tingled with pleasure as the first chunks of sod splattered the underbelly of the car. Adrenaline surged as I spun a tight series of doughnuts, gliding across the wet surface like a hard-boiled egg on a wet plate. I gathered a few more G’s with each revolution, and I could see the lights of the gymnasium whiz past my windshield, as I struggled to hold a reference point and watch my tachometer. I was just becoming concerned about my limited visibility, when one of my rear wheels grabbed onto a chunk of dry ground, shot the car out of it’s arc, over some deep humps, and sliding down the hill at the edge of the soccer field. I bottomed out on the concrete as the little car careened across the sidewalk and onto the street.
When the vehicle finally came to a stop, I had busted two lines off of the radiator – one spewing tranny fluid, and the other steaming coolant. I nursed the wounded car closer to the curb so that it might appear intentionally parked, shut ‘er down, and tried frantically to smudge out with my tennis shoes, the thick tracks of mud leading from the edge of the grass, to the wheels of my car. The effort went over like shit-flavored bubble gum, and so I grabbed some change and high-tailed it over to the campus payphone to call my dad. I had a long, wet walk, rapidly contemplating my poor judgment, and which would be the worse of two fates; what if the school cop rolls up on my obvious folly, while I am on the phone begging a rainy-night rescue from my irate father? Hmmmm.
Sometimes it’s not easy to believe that things are going to turn out ok. Sometimes it is hard to tell what the best action to take really is. I believe that there is a refractory period that follows the kind of peak experiences that I created for myself this summer – a kind of coming down experience. I am also pretty clear that the difference between Freedom at Point Zero and Unemployed and Broke at Age 42, is my ability to be self-supporting through my own contributions. Right now, I feel like a faith-based organization with no members. I’m ok with that. It is what I signed up for when I decided that this was going to be one hell of a summer, one way or another. I sold my beloved truck and most of my belongings, moved back to my mom’s, and put the pedal to the metal.
Nearly three months later, I am learning that it is always wise to sift through the wreckage - there is bound to be something worth pulling out. The blessing is that, rather than panicking to keep a roof over my head, mostly I’m scrambling to re-establish some momentum toward the next stage in my life’s evolution. There is a process unfolding here, and a nugget beneath the surface. I am currently undertaking a yoga studio tour, and it is probably something I would not have thought to do if not for my financial challenges. To stretch my dollars, I am going around to all of the yoga studios here in town, and doing their introductory specials – typically ten days for ten dollars! There are a lot of yoga studios in Sacramento, and they all seem to have this intro special. What I’m doing is fun, educational, and a journey deeper into a practice. Also, it’s probably at least partly responsible for my sanity at this moment.
