Hustling Dice, Traveling Rocks, and Duct Tape

I don’t spend a lot of time talking about when I made more money hustling dice than I did working my eight-to-five.  Or the time I decided to move to Ft. Collins on a whim but ended up living in my car for a few weeks and then just coming home.  Or when I got super mad at my housemate and threatened to dump her cremated cat into the fish tank.

I don’t talk about the trail much either.  I don’t dream about it anymore, and my feet were pretty much healed up until I fell down a staircase last week.  Ass Over Tea Kettle.  Guess I can walk many hundreds of miles, but can’t seem to get out of the building after work.

I do think about cycling though.  A lot.  And I probably talk about my bike tours now more than I have in years.  Like when I met a guy named Luke David John Bill during a horrible storm when we both sought refuge in an old church.  He taught me about Traveling Rocks and we practiced doing handstands and played cards for half the night between the pews with just the light of one headlamp because we thought we’d get caught by someone and end up tossed back out into the screaming gale of lightning-ridden Plains.  It brings me a certain joy to know where my heart lies.

I wanted the PCT for 20 years, and I know now that it wasn’t a perfect fit for me.  I’ve made my peace with it, I think.

I don’t really feel like The Trail is unfinished business.  I don’t really feel a pull to hike.  My soul doesn’t sob at the idea that I didn’t finish the trail or that I may never be able to, or that I don’t even care to try.

I don’t have any particular feeling about it at all these days.  Not happy or sad or proud or devastated or any of those other big words that people use which actually fail to describe much in the way of nuanced and complicated human emotion.

It’s just kind of this thing I did this one time.

I have been busy with a new invention, though.  I made a list of all the gear things that drove me insane over my 15,000+ miles of long-distance cycling, and I decided to do something about it before I choose my next adventure.  So I fill my days researching ideas on Pinterest and making private Amazon wish lists and cutting up cardboard boxes and then putting them together in clever ways with my ever-present roll of pink-with-owls-on-it duct tape.

So you just wait, World.

Here I Come.