From an Undisclosed Location with Love

June 3, 2013 – From an Undisclosed Location with Love

Only twenty-two days past my self-imposed deadline I finish the first draft of the book I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year. It’s a tale of expectations and love and the failure of love. It’s not the story I set out to write. And it’s too early to know if it’s any good. I finish it in just enough time to take a few days “off” before I pack up my bags again and prepare to catch a flight out of town.

It’s time to move on. I’ve known this day would come (time passes by so quickly now) and I’ve been looking forward to it. It means forward momentum, getting out of the humidity of Texas, and keeping with my nomadic lifestyle for a little bit longer. In spite of knowing all this I’ve reached that conflicting phase where I’m ready to go but I don’t want to leave. I worry that I’m being foolish; I should stay and work a little longer (I know money can’t buy me love but it sure helps out with other things). Also it’s been delightful living with my parents (aka friends). 

We’ve settled into a nice existence. Who would want to ruin that? And what will the dogs do without me there to play with them during the day?

But I can’t stay still. I feel the moss starting to grow up around my feet and, soft as it is, I can’t have that.

So early in the morning, after days of agonizing over what to take and what to leave I zip up the last bag, grab my snacks, bid Mom and Rocky a see you later and get in the car. My dad drives me to the airport with his dog Oscar along for the ride. They drop me off curbside. Dad helps me unload my things. I hug him goodbye and go to check my bags. I’m on my way toward the airport entrance when Dad heads back over to me. “I just had to tell you,” he says. “Oscar is really upset that you aren’t coming back with us.”

I look back and see Oscar’s fuzzy head through the car window, hear his frantic whining. My heart cracks just a little. Even when I understand that it’s not forever, leaving can be hard to do. There’s always someone, something to miss no matter where I am. Always. It’s not forever, I think at him. Maybe dogs are telepathic. Or maybe not. Sorry, Oscar, I know you don’t understand. I smile because that’s all I can do right now.

A final wave from me to Dad and then we’re out of each other’s sight.

I board a plane, buckle in, and head west. West to where the mountains are. West to where I’ve left a good portion of my soul. West to Colorado.

With the financial help of a friend I rent a car and spend a few days catching up with folks I haven’t seen in two years. I can’t believe it’s been that long since I sold nearly everything I had, quit my job, and left the country. What a two years it’s been. I meet up with my Judo buddy Christal for lunch one day and as we get each other up to speed she asks, “When did you get back from Peru?”

I pause to backtrack nine countries, a couple oceans, four states and four seasons. Peru. I’ve almost forgotten the chaos of Lima, the noise, the crowdedness. How and why I went there in the first place. Almost. It seems impossible but what I say is true. “I got back last June.” And now here it is practically June again.   

“I couldn’t do what you’re doing,” Christal tells me later. She means the living month to month, place to place, and dime by dime. In contrast I don’t think I could do what she’s doing; studying for her MBA, working two jobs, and keeping her truck’s tank filled with gas.

For a lark, I visit my old place of employment.

Denise greets me from behind the desk I used to hide my flip-flopped feet under. Thanks to the openness of social networking we don’t have much new to share with each other. “You should go wander around and say hi to people,” she tells me at a lull in our conversation.

When I worked there I didn’t often get the chance to leave the confines of my desk. So the expansiveness of the whole building feels a bit daunting. There are so many offices. So many halls. I don’t know who I might run into. “I’ll go bug the Finance Department,” I say. I worked under their umbrella and know my way around those cubicles at least.  

I knock on the divider as I come around the corner. Then I shuffle my feet and smile at the surprise both Joan, my old boss, and Tami express at my sudden appearance. I’ve interrupted them trying to fix something fiscal, but they don’t seem to mind.

They ask me what I’ve been up to and I tell them. They ask me what’s on the agenda for the future and I tell them as much as I know.

“A rolling stone gathers no moss,” Joan says.

It’s warm in this part of the building. I wipe a sheen of sweat off my upper lip and try to look at ease. I shrug in agreement.

“Do you ever want your job back at the front desk?” Joan asks.

“No way,” I say a little too quickly perhaps. “I don’t want to work behind anybody’s desk but my own.”

She’s not offering me the job back--it’s Denise’s (thank goodness and sorry)--she’s asking a legitimate question. And imbedded within it are the other questions, Do you regret what you’ve done? Do you wish you had more stability? Would you do it all over again? My instant response reaffirms for me that I’m living my life the right way. Sure it’s stressful at times, sure it’s uncertain, but I have freedom now that I never had when I had a regular paycheck coming in. Joan and Tami nod their heads and laugh a little, and they say things like, “I understand that,” and “Sure.”

At the sound of our voices Jim, the department head, pokes his head around the cubical wall. After the quick recap of all I’ve just told the ladies—where I’ve been, where I’m heading--he says, “So you haven’t put roots down anywhere yet?”

“My roots only go about three months deep,” I say. If that. For now I’m still a wanderer. A nomad. A drifter. A rover. Following the wind, chasing the sun, and seeking the duality of peace and adventure. I love Colorado and I’m sure I’ll end up here again, but I want it to be on my terms. And until I can work that out I’ll vagabond a little longer.

A few moments later, I bid them goodbye and head out into the open air. There’s the familiar top of Pike’s Peak covered in snow. There’s the sun inching its way westward. There’s the world in front of me.

I look around and take a breath. I’m about to go back into hiding. It’s one way to get things done without distraction. Out of sight, out of mind. 

And while I’m pretending I’m in the Witness Protection Program my goal is to write a proposal for a non-fiction book that would allow me to travel the world again and write about my experiences. If I can sell this idea then I can stretch my wings and fly a little bit longer.

If not, well, then I’ll keep on living place to place, month to month, and dime by dime until it feels right to let the moss collect and grow.

Being Invisible

May 3, 2013 – Being Invisible

If I were to choose a superpower and Flying was already taken I’d probably choose Invisibility. This would be a helpful talent to have as a writer and I’d call what I did Observing not Spying. It’d also come in useful when I needed to get my work done. If people can’t see me they can’t interrupt. See, my problem is that I create enough of my own distractions without having a constant stream of interpersonal interactions pulling at my attention. Chitchatting with my library buddy Dave, having entertaining and meaningful conversations with my siblings and sibling-in-law, and the omnipresent joy of being bossed into dancing by a niece all add up to minutes and hours that I’m not writing. I fret about it. So much so that the health benefit of having strong social and familial connections is lost on me as I stress out over my inability to focus.  

Why can’t you just BE? I ask myself. Why do you have to DO?

I don’t know, I reply. I just have to.

My writerly angst becomes chronic and I activate my superpower and disappear. What I actually do is get in the car with my parents and drive away from the Hill Country to their house in Dallas. I sit in the back seat of my mom’s car and think, I’ve done it. I’ve done what I’ve always thought of as my last resort; I’ve moved back in with parents. Of course it’s not a permanent situation, of course my parents are more like friends, of course I’ll be helping out—working one day a week with my mom and fixing healthy dinners for us all—so that I am not a lazy, non-working slob. My real goal is to hide out in the safe confines of their house (out of sight and out of mind) so that I can save up some money, figure out my next adventure, see if I can get healthy again and, most of all, finish the first draft of the novel I’m laboring over.

I’m a project oriented soul. I like to have a goal, set a deadline, and then work hard until I’ve met it. Then take a short break and dive into the next thing. This often means long hours alone, set routines, and a rigorous work-writing schedule that I stick to rain, sleet, snow, hail or shine. I haven’t had any of those things since I left Oregon in early December and it’s wearing on me. I’m jittery, emotional, unfulfilled and having more than my usual amount of conversations with myself.

Why are you such a basket case?

You make me sound neurotic.

Aren’t you?

Apparently.

My project: a new book. My goal: a first draft. The deadline: April 30^th.

Since the first of the year I’ve been working nearly every day writing a handful of sentences one day, deleting them the next, rewriting them the day after. But it’s not fast enough. I get diverted by modeling gigs, chicken farming, family excursions into town, birthday parties, lack of sleep, too much sleep, and worry about my future. I want big results. I want to see real progress. I want to dive in completely and lose myself in the story. Full immersion isn’t possible with so many moths and vultures and neighbors and dogs and falling leaves and meals to sidetrack my mind.

You really are neurotic.

Shut up.

What I want is six months of reclusive confinement in a mountain cabin or a biosphere on Mars. I began to dream about closets, small spaces, and solitude. The closest thing I can get to that right now is the guest room at my parents and a spot at the kitchen table for my computer and stacks of books, but only if I tell no one I’m coming.

This is the tricky part.

I have long-time friends and family in the Dallas area. If word gets out I’m there I fear that I’ll fall back into what I’m trying to escape; visits, parties, hang-outs, family lunches, events. I want to be there, but not be there. To hide away and not hurt anyone’s feelings. I don’t know if it’s possible. I don’t know if meeting my own needs (however neurotic) is selfish.

 

“We can get you disguises!” Mom tells me.

I imagine myself sneaking out of the house with gag glasses with a fake nose and mustache. Or a trench coat. Or a cape. Or a wig. That’s if I leave the house at all. I don’t see myself getting stir crazy for a while. My mom’s backyard is paradise, their home a haven. 

We arrive at the house. The dogs greet me enthusiastically, I greet them back. I look around the house I spent so much of my life in already. Welcome back, take your shoes off, stay awhile. It’s cozy, friendly, bright.  

 
Enjoy where you are, I tell myself, because you won’t be here forever.  

I got it. I will.

Dad goes to the store to get us some groceries, Mom goes out to check on her garden, and I unpack my bags, go incognito, and get to work.

Instar: Stages of Growth

April 12, 2013 – Instar: Stages of Growth or Life as a Caterpillar

The caterpillars hatch the day I leave the Hill Country. It’s Easter Sunday. I’m sitting at the dining room table sipping coffee and checking email when Marie comes in. “The caterpillars hatched!” she says.

“What?!” I exclaim. I jump up and follow her outside.

In the weeks she’d lived under the patio roof, our Giant Silk Moth friend had laid tiny pearl necklace lines of eggs on the ground and on the table. She’d done her evolutionary duty and passed away silently one day when I wasn’t there to hold her tiny little tarsal claw.

The uneducated grief I’d felt at what I’d seen as her unfair life had been replaced with an appreciative awe of the lifespan of the Cecropia Moths. In short, the adult female moth lays eggs, the eggs hatch, the little tiny caterpillars munch on leaves and then go through five total instars (which is lepidopterist talk for growth stages or molts). When they’ve eaten up to 86,000 times their weight they cocoon up for the winter, and then in the spring they emerge as glorious giant moths that mate and start the whole cycle over again.

With all this in mind, Phinehas and I had carefully transferred all the eggs that we could from where Moth had laid them to the safe confines of a wooden box. The information my mom had forwarded to me about Cecropias had gotten me worried that there would be nothing for the little guys to eat when they gnawed their way out of their egg shells. Even though I wasn’t really sure I’d be able to identify them, Phinehas and I took a long walk around town searching for maple, willow, apple, alder, wild cherry or birch trees. We didn’t find any of those and ended up stealing oak branches from someone’s yard because the leaves looked big and juicy and I didn’t want to go home empty handed. Also we have an oak tree in the backyard.

 Not that this would do baby caterpillars any good. But we put the leaves in the box next to the eggs anyway.

Days went by. Caterpillar eggs usually hatch ten to fourteen days after being laid and we’d already passed two weeks’ time. I’d lost hope that they’d ever hatch.

This lack of hope had shadowed me over. Not just with regard to the caterpillars. I’d slipped into a low and dangerous mood. The independence I both love and crave felt unattainable without money to make it possible. Canada was a pipe dream. The trips beyond that were unimaginable. I just wasn’t making enough money. I wasn’t making money quick enough. I felt out of control. I felt like a victim. My pep talks and chiding to snap out of it weren’t working. I hated who it seemed I was; someone unable to adapt to the ever-changing world of life with a two year old, someone so socially introverted that weekends wore me out and made me desire small, closed off spaces where I could be alone, someone needy and weak, someone unable to move forward. The short term joy I’d felt being pain free after my shots diminished when some inflammation returned, and I begin to associate myself with arthritis.

My thoughts were opposite everything I had believed before about life and myself.  

“You have got to get a grip!” I said. “This has got to stop. You don’t like what’s going on? Then change it. You are not a victim. You’ve never been one. Stop sniveling. If you’re worried about money go get a job. If you can’t adapt to this environment than find one that works a little better for your neurotic self. You’ve got a roof over your head. You’ve got food to eat. You’ve got people around who love you. There’s even sunshine on a regular basis. What’s your problem?”

The problem was I used to enjoy my own company and here I was trying my own patience. I felt as if I had hatched from some dark egg and didn’t have the right kind of leaves to eat. Also I was afraid that if I left this place, this house, and this family earlier than scheduled that I’d be admitting failure, that I’d be taking the easy way out. That I’d miss out on something; my niece’s silliness, my brothers’ companionship, the dual nature of peace and gossip found in small town America, the conversations over fresh rosemary tea with my sister-in-law, all the interesting wildlife that passes through this backyard—vultures, bats, beetles, lizards, Giant Silk Moths.

But there is always something to miss no matter where I am. There is also always good in every situation. There is also always forward momentum to ride on. As my dad often says, “Where there’s life, there’s hope.”

Now here is life and here they are, tiny little black fuzzy backed caterpillars hardly the length of my littlest fingernail. I fall in love with all of them. “Oh good job, Moth!” I say out loud to the lifeless mother moth who is taking up corner space in the wooden box until Marie can find the right things to preserve her with. “Look at all these little guys!”

The oak leaves Phinehas and I had hopelessly placed in the box have wilted. Marie takes the young leaves off her newly planted apple tree and she and I trade new leaves for old, careful to avoid throwing out any of the caterpillars as we make the exchange.

Let this be a lesson to you, I tell myself. Sometimes you just have to wait a little bit longer.  

I’d lost sight of the big picture, I’d forgotten about the surprising beautiful miracle of life while fretting over my present and over my future. Wondering where I wanted to go and what I was willing to do in order to get there. I had some vague ideas, but I kept expecting something to drop into my lap. The perfect thing. From out of nowhere. And I waited. And waited. Eventually, remembering that taking action is a good way to put things into motion I’d made the decision to leave, taken responsibility for myself, packed my bags and stacked them under the dining room window, thinking that a lower stress environment would aid me in finishing my novel-work-in-progress and give me better opportunity to plan my next step. I was still fretting a little about my future.

Give it a little bit of time. Wait just a little bit longer. Eat some leaves.  

“Good job abandoning them and me,” Phinehas says later from the patio rocking chair while I’m gazing in at the squirming, exploring, apple-leaf eating caterpillars.

“I’m good at loving things and leaving them,” I say. This is easier than saying how much I’ve enjoyed Phinehas’s company, how I’ve been touched by his thoughtfulness, how I wish that we had gone against reason and just taken off for Canada—who needs money? who needs a dependable car? —how proud I am of him and how I hope that whatever he does brings him happiness.   

The sun gleams down. Birds sing. A bee buzzes by. Ben walks out.

“It seems fitting that the caterpillars hatched on resurrection Sunday,” I tell him.

“It seems fitting that they hatched before you left,” he says. He’d tried to talk me out of leaving. “What can we do to make it work?” he’d asked.

“You guys have done everything just fine,” I’d replied. “You’ve been really generous and hospitable. This is about me being proactive.” This is about me shedding my skin so that I can grow into my new one.

He puts his hand on my shoulder and gives a squeeze. I try not to think about Marie leaving the room after seeing the library card she’d loaned me with the house key sitting on top of it. “That makes it seem really official,” she’d said. “I’m sad about you going.”

“Me too.”

I try not to think about missing out on the daily time with Shea. Not being a part of her discoveries anymore. Not getting pulled along with her fist wrapped around my fingers to see some new bug, or being asked to pick her up so that we can both better watch the airplane passing overhead. Not to have her bring a book over and sit in my lap so that I can read it to her. Not to make animal sounds together. Not to have her look up at me and say, “Dince. All Night.” and wait for me to take her in my arms and spin around the room singing “I Could Have Danced All Night” together over and over and over again.

Those are the moments that love felt just like joy.

They’re too sweet to think about now, I can’t cry. Do the caterpillars cry when they slide out of their old exoskeletons and find that they’ve grown bigger, changed colors, become something new? No. They don’t cry they eat the old skin, they reabsorb and digest it and use it to fuel their next growth spurt.  

Let that be a lesson to me too. I can imagine that I’m like a caterpillar and my old skins are memories, experiences, loves, dissatisfactions, unrest, pressures, the past. And this part of life is just another instar. That moment in time between one molt to the next.

Always growing. 

Thanks for the lesson, caterpillars, may you all live to be Giant Silk Moths, and, in the meantime, may we all glory in the stage we’re in.

Hail, Hail, Flatonia!

March 28, 2013 – Hail, Hail Flatonia 

Phinehas and I go back in time. First to the 1800s and then to our childhoods. This all happens as a result of our reading Richard Zelade’s splendid book Hill Country - Completely Revised 2^nd Edition - Discovering the Secrets of the Texas Hill Country and planning adventures. Phinehas got the book for Christmas and has been suggesting a trip to the “Devil’s Playground” since he moved here. Somehow we haven’t gotten there yet.

For now, it’s the weekend and the book is out on the table. I’m being lazy. Phinehas is making eggs for his breakfast. Ben is washing dishes with Shea, and Marie is outside watering plants. For something to do I’m reading snippets out loud from the Shiner-Lockhart section because this is the part of the country we live in.

“This is such a great book!” I say over the sound of the running water. “Check this out.” Then I read to them about the local circuit-riding preacher Andrew J. “Andy” Potter.

Parson Pastor Preacher Potter (as Phinehas and I later dub him) was “warned not to come to Red Rock on the next Sabbath. Potter replied that he would most certainly be there and that furthermore he expected a fine chicken dinner afterward. When he arrived at the meetinghouse the following Sunday, Potter laid his shootin’ irons on the rude pulpit table in front of him and announced, ‘Now I sent word that I was coming to Red Rock to preach and I’m gonna preach. But I can shoot too. And if anyone wants a fight and starts one, we’ll shoot it out.’ Potter preached his service and got his chicken dinner.” (Hill Country 346-347).

It’s any number of Old West tales—preaching, shooting, traveling around on horseback—and is as familiar as the characters and scenes we, my siblings and I, came to love from the Louis L’amour books we all read. It’s history and rattlesnakes, it’s not staring into the firelight so as to keep your night vision clear and looking over your shoulder so that you’ll know your way back. It’s tracking and surviving. It’s the late 1800s before Texas was tamed. It’s the time when Lockhart “enjoyed a reputation as a tough town” and people were killed on the very town square that’s less than a mile from the house inside which I’m calmly reading. Fighting Parson Potter even died in a Tall-Tale type of way in the church I walk past nearly every day on my way to the library.  

This is how Zelade tells it: “It was the year of our Lord 1895, on a Sunday evening in a little country church just outside of Lockhart, and ‘as Fighting Parson Potter raised his hands in a closing prayer, the lights of the little church were suddenly blown out by a strong gust of wind, and when the lamp were relighted the audience gasped to see the preacher lying dead in the pulpit. As the lights had gone out, so had gone out the life of Texas’ most picturesque preacher. Fighting Parson Potter’s wish – that he might die in his pulpit – had been granted.’” (ibid 382).

What a difference a century makes.

I ferret out more stories to read aloud and towards the end of the book stumble across the section on Flatonia. This town has such wonderful draws as Friendly Tavern which is “short on décor (except for the domino tables) but long on local color” (Hill Country 442) and Grumpy’s Restaurant which Zelade says “is about the only place in town to get a sit-down meal” (ibid 442).

“Where’s Flatonia?” Phinehas asks me.

I do a quick online check. “It’s only forty-nine miles from here.”

“We should go,” Phinehas says.

So a few days later we do. Because the internet says that Grumpy’s is permanently closed we eat a hardy breakfast to sustain us, and pack water and tea to drink along the way. It’s a good day for a drive. The clouds add texture to the sky and there’s enough of a chill to warrant the wearing of a jacket. We accidently leave Hill Country the book at the house, but we already know what Flatonia is doing out in the middle of Hill Country. The name has nothing to do with the flatness of the country (which is a slightly disappointing fact. I would have liked the irony).

The town was named after F.W. Flato who came to Texas in the 1840s and did brisk business having something to do with shipping and the railroad.

We leave Lockhart then Luling behind us.

Our first stop is the Oak Hill Cemetery.

As we turn off of Highway I-10 onto TX-95 I spot the tall trees and the looming monuments to the dead. I say something like, “Cool cemetery.”

“You want to stop?” Phinehas asks.

“Yeah,” I say. 

We park and make our way onto the memorial grounds reading names and dates and inscriptions as we go. Some of the people were born as early as 1822, others not until after the turn of the twentieth century. Some died as recently as last year. Phinehas and I remark on plot sizes, names, years gone by, and the monuments themselves. The grave markers tell such incomplete stories in their brevity: a baby who lived nine days, a man named Richter who was a veteran of the Spanish American war, a woman who lived to be nearly one hundred years old, and James C. Doggett who died in 1902 when he was only 24 years, 4 months and 26 days old because God loved him best and called him home. 

Being here among the dead is sad and it’s not. Cemeteries are beautiful for keeping names, not alive, but rather unforgotten. Our being here gives these ones a kind of immortality. Because living forever might just be others knowing that you once lived.

It’s with this on my mind that we get in the car and drive into Flatonia and back into a long ago time. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a horse drawn carriage. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Pastor Parson Preacher Potter swaggering down the street with his pistols on his hips and a bible in his hand. The town is quiet. Most of the shops look closed. There’s not much to do, but we knew this coming in. It was part of the appeal. We venture into an Antique store.

“Where are y’all coming from?” the friendly shop owner asks us, knowing immediately that we’re not from around these parts.

We chat about nothing in particular, the shop owner recommends that we visit the Saddle Shop around the corner and to not miss out on the antique shops ten miles away in Schulenburg, and Phinehas buys Shea a toy cow.

This is small town living, this is old America where there’s no such thing as chain stores and I imagine that people still order things out of a Sears and Roebucks catalog. This is farm country, the place where people know their neighbors and talk kindly about the weather and health with the out-of-town strangers.

We visit the Saddle Shop and chat with the owner about business and where we’re from, where we’re going. Phinehas buys a wooden frog and fox for Shea. “Y’all enjoy your stay and come back and see us again next time you’re here!” the Saddle Shop owner says when we leave.

“Take care,” I say.

“We will,” Phinehas says.

We go around the corner and walk past Friendly Tavern. It looks closed, lonely, well-used. It feels like a ghost tavern. We don’t even try the door. But we do go inside The Flatonia Argus building. It’s the local paper.

“You want to go inside?”

“No,” I say.

“Are you scared?” Phinehas asks, his hand on the door handle.

“Kind of.”

We step inside. It’s an old building, long and narrow. There are old front pages in color and framed hanging on the walls. The girl who comes from the back room at the sound of the door looks surprised to see people inside the building. We make friendly small talk with her to justify our intrusion and are both disappointed to discover that they use computers instead of type setting. There’s no thick clicking of keys or whirring of machines. No smell of ink leftover from the past. Only the long, narrow building and a movement into the present—everything is computerized.

Outside again and we’ve seen what there is to see in Flatonia. At least in the daytime.

So we pack ourselves into the car and decide to head, not to Schulenburg as the antique shop owner suggested, but to Shiner which is home to the Spoetzl Brewery and maker of Shiner beer.  

It’s a twenty mile drive and we’re there in no time at all.

We’ve arrived too late to get a tour of the brewery and settle for the free beer samples that are given there in the gift shop (Zelade calls it the “hospitality room” (341)) and content ourselves in watching people, checking out the gifts, and critiquing the tastes of the different beers on tap. We’re given four wooden tokens to use to redeem our samples, four is the limit. The cups are small.

“Now what?” Phinehas asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe we can drive through the rest of Shiner and see what’s here and then head back?”

That’s what we do. I’m scanning streets as we go and see an old opera house down off to the right. “An opera house! That looks interesting, turn at the next street,” I say.

Phinehas does and that’s when we pass the park.

It’s a park like the ones we played at as children. With a skyscraping slide made out of metal and not plastic. With swings that go so high we can almost touch the sky with our feet, we just have to go a little bit higher. We almost touch the sky. With a merry-go-round, an old school merry-go-round. I haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid. We get on the merry-go-round. We have to. I have to. It’s as fantastic as it ever was. 

“This is better than an amusement park,” I say. I’m transported back decades to summer days and laughter and running and spinning dizzy play.

“Faster! Faster! Faster!”  

This is immortality; the remembrance of youth, the taste of childhood in my mouth, the breeze of the past on my face, the rush of centrifugal force pulling me to joy, a brother there to share in the fun.

This is adventure.

This is living.