I am not smart enough to understand the causes of a crumbling society, and I have not nearly the ability to keep pace with comprehending the effects of racism, ridicule, greed, and power. But from this view in the wilderness, society is slipping away from any ideal it may have once pursued, and the climb back is difficult no matter how the tide turns. Then I look toward the waters and wild lands still unblemished by the body politic, and I have that hope again that there is balance, that some guardrail of reason will keep us from straying too far. And to be honest if reason doesn’t return, well, I suppose I won’t either.

I’ve grown weary of the students who sit through every single class but don’t come close to correctly completing the assignment. I’ve grown weary of drivers on cellphones who swerve out of their lanes or drag along at twenty miles below the limit in the left lane while they read texts. I’m over the badgering of spam calls while people you reach out to don’t bother to call back at all. It’s all become nonsense to me. It’s all just noise now and I’m just about over it.

Paul Theroux writes as Ally Fox in The Mosquito Coast, “We eat when we’re not hungry, sleep when we’re not tired, throw away what’s useful and buy what we don’t need! Don’t sell a man what he wants sell him what he doesn’t need. Pretend he’s got two heads, four stomachs, and money to burn. It’s wrong I tell you, wrong wrong wrong!!” But “wrong” has become irrelevant. No one is wrong anymore, they just approach things in some alternative way, therefore they cannot be held responsible. Thirty-three students turned in a paper about imagery. I wrote on the assignment page the names of the four types of imagery I wanted them to find examples of. It is on the assignment page they must open to turn in the paper at all. Twenty of them didn’t use any of those four images at all and instead chose whatever imagery AI assigned. I failed them. It was then suggested to me by someone of authority that perhaps their attempt should be enough to allow them to pass; after all, they did use the term “imagery.” I am not making this up. I failed them anyway. Ally Fox hightailed it to Belize. I’m okay with the wilderness.

But here in what has been the same freaking disintegrating routine for decades I’m at the end of someone else’s proverbial rope and I’m over it. I’m tempted to go back to Spain. Or the Netherlands–yes, there in a heartbeat. Sunset Beach, Oregon. Montauk. Anywhere I can find some peace of mind, some unspoken comfort, a moment of a settled soul.

So I suppose now that nearly everything seems to be changing, ending, adjusting or otherwise cracking in half, it just might be easier for me to make the changes I can and accept the ones I can’t. I don’t for a second pretend I have the wisdom to know the difference. But that’s okay; unlike Frost on his immortal and misunderstood road, I’m checking out the other path; see what’s there for me. In the literary world it is understood that there is only one path but with choices along the way and as he indicates, once we move too far down the choice we make, we don’t ever go back. Yeah, you know what? Fuck Frost.

First of all, I have no desire to go back. While I can’t begin to offer thanks for how it has all gone so far, I’m looking forward to what’s unknown. I don’t know and none of us do if we had done things differently would we be better off now? Who the hell knows? How do we measure what we’ve done? How do we do that? Honest to Buddha, how is that possible? By comparison? If so to what? The least among us? The greatest among us? Each other? The past? Perhaps it is in how we feel in our soul which determines how well we’ve aged. Maybe the measure of a person is in the distance between his dreams and the efforts he puts forth to reach them. The only ideal comparison is to ourselves and how we might have done things differently, but that comparison is by virtue of nature impossible since one can never tell what might have worked out, who would have worked out, what distances we might have traveled into our wildest hopes if not for knowing how difficult it was going to get…and on and on and on in impossible measure. Recently Stallone said of his ambitious efforts to get Rocky made fifty some odd years ago, had he known what he would have to go through he never would have tried.

We are better off not knowing.

And today my students are, for the most part, trying to get away with as much as they can with as little effort as possible, lying their way through it all. This is not me being Professor Downer. This is Today. This is Current Events. And now all the balls I’ve been juggling have finally fallen; or, better said, I stepped back and let them fall. That’s okay though: I’ve been thinking about a project I have avoided for a few years because of possible failure, and I decided this morning to throw my words in that direction and risk embarrassment anyway. It turns out I still have some balls left.

I still have it in me, as we all do no matter our age, condition, situation, or experience, to have the courage to pursue a goal instead of simply a proverbial trodden path. The greatest lesson I learned on the Camino is that while the journey is the point—the lessons learned, the people met, the experiences which can never be outdone are so obviously the point of course–without the “goal” of Santiago, without some cathedral in the distance, we’re just meandering aimlessly hoping to bump into something good.

So, here’s hoping for Something Good. Welcome to what’s next:

Everybody Dies in July

a one man play in two acts

Act One:

An elderly professor enters from stage left with a large empty box to what is his office filled with books, pictures, stacks of papers. He clears off the desk with a swipe of his arm, and puts down the box.

Professor

looking around slowly

Time to get started.