Kill the Clock

Soundtrack

"A ten-year accumulation of these vagrant addresses can weight on a man like a hex. He begins to feel like the Wandering Jew. That's the way I felt. After one night too many sleeping on some stinking cot in a foul grotto where I didn't want to be anyway and had no reason to be except that it was foreign and cheap. I decided to hell with it. If that was absolute freedom then I'd had a bellyful of it, and from here on in I would try tomsething a little less pure and one hell of a lot more comfortable."
  - The Rum Diary

I ran about 6 years on the stopwatch of what I term the "madman lifestyle".
I think every man gets about 10 years straight that he can burn it at both ends. 
I got as far and as deep into the rabbit hole as my nerve, luck, manic brain and brawn would take me.
I felt invincible but then learned that will only get you so far, and eventually the luck, wit, and brawn run out.

Then you can either burn out or press forward in a more ordered fashion.
Or take option "C" as I did: check out of the Chateau d' Craziness for a time.

I outlasted waited out the beast of the drink and found a proper substitute.
I've come to value sleep and working not hungover.

I saw who was a real friend and who didn't give a fuck about me.
I'm a bit sharper yet more dull as I don't have the fortitude or rather the desire for the nightly jaunts into the mouth of madness. And now I enjoy those impulses with a more measured step and a more concerted depth of relish when the urge to howl at the moon overtakes me.

I know this relatively ordered time in my life has a short lifespan. This is the most normalcy I've managed for most of my adult life.

Physically, my build is unchanged. I still look far younger than my biological age and routinely still get carded be it for movies, alcohol or whatever.
My demeanor has changed as has my taste in clothing to a more relaxed, vagabond flair. My hair and my willingness to bow to provocation have grown more relaxed as well. I'm told it suits me.

The decade F. Scott Fitzgerald discusses in his seminal novel and the one Thompson addresses above draw near.
Soon, I will have passed into the second half of my life span.
I once doubted I would see 50. Now, I'm thinking it'll be more like 60.
That's progress I 'spose.

I wake with a new found sense of mortality that insistently pressures me to keep searching and press on.
I took a break from the road, from my roughshod rambling and roughhousing over whatever crossed my path....but I know that come next summer...I will take to the road again.

Some of us just weren't build with "stability" in mind.

I'm debating further relocating further south or Seattle pending some job opportunities but one way or the other, come next ******, I am moving shortly after the close of ********.

I have completely conquered my desire for creature comforts/the vast majority of possessions and as the drink no longer wields the siren call of yesteryear....I'm as free to choose as I've ever been.
That overwhelming urge that if I don't flee soon, I never will....made insistent by that refusal to be all those other people that settle, plant roots then wake up at 42, miserable and bitter, and with no one to blame but their own fear of the unknown for their shitty life.

Good luck and happy hunting.
 Be who and what you are.
  This is what you were always going to become.