ChronoTech Corporation

So, I was supposed to spend time back in August, writing blog posts about my epic motorcycle trip. Obviously that never happened. Everything since August has been, as the blog title implies, exceedingly strange.

I’m writing this in a studio apartment with a shared bathroom, on the fifth floor of a building that was built in 1902. If I was in Albuquerque, I would be wondering how my life managed to swing towards failure so quickly after finishing college–though I would also be wondering how I managed to find a century old five story apartment building in Albuquerque, since such things quite simply do not exist in that city.

Of course, this apartment is NOT in Albuquerque. It’s in Seattle, about a mile from the waterfront, just a couple blocks east of downtown. And while the job I’m doing is not one that I imagined doing when I set out on my faithful motorcycle, it is one that, more and more, I’m finding to be satisfying. Not particularly lucrative, but definitely satisfying.

Finding myself as a freelance writer in the middle of a city of three million wasn’t quite what I had in mind, but it’ll do for now.

In the last month alone, I’ve probably put down a good 20,000 words, easily. Which is about half of the output I really need to be hitting, but it’s a start. It’s enough to pay the rent, and my internet bill. Not much left over after that. The more I write, the more money I make. I do wish I could spend all of my time writing in a blog and make a living doing that, but let’s face it, this blog is probably never going to be getting 5 million page views a day.

I would have to wonder about the sanity of the human race if it was.

Last week, I borrowed a car and drove down to Bend, Oregon, to watch my nephew compete in the Cyclo-cross nationals. He didn’t place, but he did pretty good, came in about in the middle, which isn’t bad at all considering that his starting position was near the back. On the way back from Bend I drove through the Santiam pass down into Salem. About halfway down, as I was driving past the vantage point with a view of Mount Washington (ironically located in Central Oregon,) I realized I had been on that road before, about 22 years ago.

Putting aside the fact that I’m now old enough to clearly remember things that happened more than two decades ago, I was reminded of all of the road trips that my family went on when I was a kid. I remember how happy I always was when we were travelling, and how actually reaching a destination was actually a bit of a disappointment. It was the trip that was exciting. The place we were going was always irrelevant to me.

I’m enjoying my time in Seattle, but I think that my time here may be limited. No more than a year at the most I suspect. I think after that, the old travel bug will starting biting my feet again.

The nice thing about freelance writing is that all I need to write is an internet connection, and little else. I can go anywhere, and see anything I want, and I’m at a stage in my life where there is absolutely no reason for me not do so. I think it’s time to head down to the local post office, and fill out an application for a passport. I’ve seen a lot of the good old US of A, and very little of the rest of the world, and Toronto barely counts as the rest of the world (apologies to our Canadian friends to the north…)

London, Paris, Berlin. These places tug at my soul, and not because I wish to live in them. Because I wish to see them, and move on.

I wonder what will be left for me once I’ve seen all I can of this world. Perhaps we will have figured out Faster than Light travel by then, and there will be whole other worlds to explore.

One can hope, right?