Summer is Coming

I now have in my hands a 24oz can of Rockstar. Have you seen these things? They’re obscenely huge. Ginormous. Rockstar size? These cans are pornstar size. They look like they eat Red Bulls for breakfast. Chicken-fried Red Bull. A co-worker of mine has a serious Rockstar habit, and he’ll go through at least one 24oz can a day.

“Geez, an entire can before going to bed? Isn’t that a bit much?”

“Nah. It’s just sugar and caffeine. It’s not like it’s gonna give me a hangover or anything.”

“Right. The Rockstar hangover? It’s called type 2 diabetes.”

I’m starting to get excited for the summer, what with Bro Forms and other mad gear hook-ups comin’ through the pipeline. I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to rig up my canoe with a 12 meter kite, so on windy days I don’t need to work at all. I take off for Minnesota in little over a month, but before I leave I’m going to retrofit both my kite bars with a fifth line system.

The fifth line will go a long ways in preventing death and dismemberment, and to those who are not familiar with kiteboarding, nothing sounds more pathetic than split skulls and broken ribs and dislocated shoulders at the hands of a kite. Beyond kiteboarders, I think Pakistanis are the only people who can identify with the serious dangers associated with kite flying.

But yeah. Summer is coming, and it’s time again to roll this mess 1,600 miles across the country. A week ago I was stressing out that I have no plan, concrete or vaporous, for what I’m doing beyond August. I’m totally over that now, though. There is so much to see and experience between now and then, that there really isn’t any sense in trying to figure out what to do with that time. Might as well make the best of the time I have. Live in the now. Which is not to suggest it’s time that we smear ourselves down with blood and bay at the moon, but it’s high-time to do away with this awful fretting thing.

You live, you fret, you die. You very well might die before a lot of the stuff you’re fretting about even happens. Sometimes I feel like I’m expected, right now, right now at this point and time in my life, to Finally and Ultimately come up with whatever it is I plan on doing for the Rest Of My Life™. I feel like others are waiting anxiously for that shoe to drop, and for me to pull myself together and settle.

But settling is just that. Settling. It’s resolve and commitment, commitment to circumstances that you are finally satisfied with, circumstances that you are willing to commit to with all of your remaining breath.

I feel like I’m still growing out of control, that I have yet to meet my match, that I’m intended for great and amazing things that remain hidden, but are close enough to make my skin tingle. Right now I honestly don’t know what these things are, which is why I’m still firing on all cylinders in so many different directions. At some point these things will coalesce out of the fog and I will see them, plain as day. Maybe it’s something huge, like competing with Luke for world domination and such, but maybe it’s small, like running a summer camp.

I’m open to either possibility, as well as thousands of others, but that’s as strong as the pressure gets at this point. Open. Three months out, I don’t feel anything tugging me in a particular direction. I can’t explain it any other way than that. It’s clearly intuitive. That far out, the tracks disappear into darkness. I extend logic and rationality into the void in an attempt to give it more definition, but the tools feel clumsy and inept, altogether useless for gaining insight.

And so, I’m done. I’m packing for Minnesota, I’m scheduling my wilderness training courses and preparing my gear lists, but I’m done thinking about September. Instead, I’m going to dig my heels into April and go snowboarding this weekend. September will arrive in its own time, and when it gets here it will know what to do.