Once In A Lifetime

Which line of cliches do you want?

The, "I worked a job I hated for 10 years and had to get out." The, "It was the end of yet another relationship and I needed answers." Or, better yet, "I turned 30 and was at a crossroads." Maybe if I let Saul Bellow tell it, it'll give me the literary quality I so desperately crave:

"What made me take this trip to Africa? There is no quick explanation. Things got worse and worse and worse and pretty soon they were too complicated."

Well, let's start from the beginning in case some future generation unearths this tome and mine is the only travelogue on record. Sorry, Odysseus, but have you heard the one about the guy who turns 30 and decides he has to see the world? For your sake, I hope you haven't either...

I'm not a man who looks for answers. I'm not a man who looks for symbols in his life, but I have spent the last six months living on the corner of Hobbiton and Middle Earth. As much as I wish I lived on the Shire enjoying first and second breakfasts and smoking my weight in pipe weed, this is the name of some street in some bedroom community. It was all too familiar objective happiness: employed, comfortable, detonating relationships  like I was hired demolition, and miserable. What a terrible thing the life of endless comfort. I had money, I have wonderful friends, but I couldn't alleviate the persistent despair. I couldn't find the reason to give something to anyone besides myself. I was incinerating the goodwill I'd spent the last decade forging on the iron of passable production at work. I was sick inside.

I reached out to my sister, one of the few who I can talk to about my human feelings--I have two modes publicly, aloof and Cowboys game--and she said, make a list of what you think you should be doing and what you want to be doing. Both lists came back with travel and writing as one and two, just swapped. She made me commit to a date, say it out loud, and 18 months later, here we are, six months off to see Europe and Southeast Asia. 

And what of the Shire? Well, I went to see Peter Jackson's much maligned first installment of The Hobbit this Christmas and Gandalf--who was probably played by Ian McKellan in JRR Tolkien's imagination--said something to Bilbo that still churns in my guts to this very moment: You've sat around long enough. The world is not in your books and your maps, the world is out there.

For the last six months when I came home from work and walked my dog I would turn off Hobbiton and on to Middle Earth and remember, no matter how much worry I felt, no matter how many times I privately hoped people would forget I said anything, no matter how many times I wished I could undo it all and go back to putting on weight and DVRing the rest of my life away, I heard the reverberating mantra--you've sat around long enough.

I'm no Bilbo, my mission isn't that important, but if all conflict resolution is internal, The Hobbit is technically over very early on. The hardest part is leaving the house.

What answers are you looking for? None. I don't think there are finite answers. What do you think you'll find? Scenic vistas, good food, and some much needed misadventure in an existence arm-barred into predictable submission. Are you scared? Of course I am, sometimes, and then I'm brimming. Just bursting. It's been an interesting 18 months. Won't you be lonely? No. If I could instill these words with one drop of the outpouring I've received the last few months, you'd ask yourself how that man could ever be lonely. I'm going to let life as it happens fill in the rest. But, if I come back skinnier, that's affirmation enough.

"Once  in a lifetime," that's the phrase I keep using. I've used it to keep bosses at bay. I've used it to assuage my regular customer's curiosities. I've used it to calm the minds of my parents who cannot understand why I would do this. I keep telling people I'm cashing in my "once in a lifetime," chip, but I can't simply say a thing. Every time I utter the phrase, it's not meant to invoke the image of an 80 year old widower giving the thumbs up as he sky dives for the first time, or the dude about to eat 50 nuclear wings to make the 'Wall Of Flame' because, "you only go around once, brah!!" Every time I say it, I hear Tina's arrhythmic bass line. I hear shimmering keyboards and a soaring delay pedal fuzz loop. I hear David chanting in his spasmodic anti-singing "...and you may ask yourself, 'well, how did I get here?'"

Under the water, carry the water, there is water at the bottom of the ocean. What began as a bucket is now a sea of letting the days go by sitting on my chest. I chose to leave home at 18 and fended for myself everyday since. I was young and furious and out to show the world, fuck you, that's what. The first bucket was a menial job so I could feed my baby monsters: food, rent, alcohol, drugs, cable TV. Then it became some other job, because I didn't have to work Sundays. Then it became not going to college because it was too expensive, and 'if I wanted my mind paved over I'd just join the military,' *passes bong*. Then it became a refusal to jar my self loose from an arrested development manifested in ensuring the ones who loved me the most suffered equivalently. Then it became promotions and building the perfect credit score and diving further and further into whatever substance there was to abuse on any given night, and then the gnawing sense overwhelmed me, "My God, What Have I DONE!"

One of the best moments of "Once In A Lifetime," comes when David Byrne is assessing the life around this fictional 80's suburbanite male and he suddenly snaps to, "This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!" The implication always felt like the reveal in a late night SciFi B-movie. Suddenly, everything in his life has been exposed as a fraud. Wether they were replacements, or his eyes were finally opened, this isn't what I feel. I'm complicit in my life. Instead, I feel like a kid who found a $100 bill on the ground. I was happy to hold it, call it my own, but after a while, I know it belongs to someone else. It's a mismatch. It's this thing I've kept crumpled in my pocket for far too long, and I'm finally exhausted enough to say, "This is not mine. It belongs to someone else."

So, what, I'm going to live everyday like it's my last? What a line of horse shit. This is the ideology of doing nothing. The sinister, deeply buried premise is the perceived life to live. You can put it off, because that last day will eventually come. You can do it then. I know a person who was told today--this day--is your last day. By then, it's already too late. You don't book a trip to Machu Pichu, you just cry.

I'm going to live my life knowing I'm going to die, but not today. Not unless the Great Equalizer decides to come for me, and I've no say in that. After this trip, a work-a-day life will have to be rebuilt. Maybe I can break the cycle, maybe I can't. Maybe I'll engineer the life I've always wanted and circle this as the line of demarcation. Maybe this is the first step to being some destitute, dandruff covered, toe glove wearing weirdo lecturing you in the Brussels airport about how, "India just gets in your blood after a while." I don't know. I can't worry about that now. But if we're doing the cliche roll call, I don't think I'll be on my death bed wishing I had been a better banker.

My name is Monte Francisco Monreal, and I'm 30 years old. I'm taking a trip. I'm taking a trip for myself. I'm taking a trip to see a world until now shuttered in the corners of my imagination. I'm taking a trip to stand far off enough from my life to learn something about it I may not know.  I'm taking a trip for my family who has given me their endless support. I'm taking a trip for my friends who have done more to keep the dream alive than they will ever know. I'm taking a trip for my mother who was going to travel when she got older, but she didn't get the chance to get older. I'm taking a trip for the vision of myself dying in his office chair to let him know, it's just life, all the other stuff is water flowing underground. 

Water dissolving. Water removed. Once in a lifetime.