My Best Me

I woke up this morning and did my best Huck Finn. I roasted up the biggest slices of bacon that I’d ever seen with potatoes on the side all over a blazing campfire. I drank black coffee and squatted on my hams. I thought to myself, so this is what it was like before people were rushing all about. Back when sailing down the river meant reinventing yourself anew at a neighboring shore.

I can imagine at least.

I wake up some days and can’t really decide what it is I want most in the world.

I rode to Pacific City with my dad yesterday and as we were cruising along with old red barns and rusted-out trucks stringing the side of the road like Christmas lights, I started thinking about what it would be like to be a doctor. What if, from the very get-go of things, I had said I wanted to be a doctor? Well, right about now, 25 years down the road, I’d be just in the thick of things doing my clinical. I’d have my whole life mapped out.

So, for a while there as I pedaled along, I did my best doctor. I thought about how it’d feel to walk around in a white lab coat, talk to my mom about interesting ER stories and introduce myself at parties as Dr Lane. It felt pretty good to play doctor.

Damn, why didn’t I choose to go into medicine?

Most everyone’s greatest fear, well at least one of the bigger ones, is to be tried and tested and found to be wanting – not good enough. (Unless you’re my friend Chuck, who for all intent and purpose seems to be afraid of nothing.)
I have enough rejection letters from magazines and publishers to wallpaper a spare room. Not a living room or a master bathroom, though, I’m not that kind of pathetic yet. However I could paper a spare bedroom. I know this because I did it one summer to give myself motivation.

All it did was to make it hard to get up every morning like every teacher who’d ever given me a poor grade was standing above me and wagging their finger no.

So I wonder sometimes: am I good enough for this?

I happen to be a bizarre mix of things. I can be incredibly insensitive to others and incredibly sensitive myself. I think that can be boiled down to two words: self-centered. It’s a hard line to walk because I’m either feeling sorry for something flippant I said to someone else, or I am feeling sorry for myself, or maybe just indifferent.

Don’t feel bad for me though – that would just feed the cycle.

I’ve got a friend who I don’t hear from in years and then I run into him at a bookstore randomly. He is usually walking along in this casually hurrying sort of way that would be absolutely impossible for anyone to pull of but he does it like most people put on or take off a hat. Anyway, his life is just sort of working at whatever sort of job he can get, selling clothes or something, with his English degree in his back pocket, and then he cruises off for months at a time to backpack and wrestle bears in Alaska.

Sometimes he seems happier in every moment than I have been in my entire life.

The guy drips confidence like Oregon precipitation and is the definition for what cool will be five years down the road. At which point he’ll be a professional surfer in Brazil.

After I saw him I did my best impression. I thought about camping up and down the coast and working jobs where I’d find them. I’d meet cool friends with names like Shoeless and Jaxon Love. I’d become non-boastingly good at the guitar and once in a while I’d send a post card to a friend.

It would be a good life, I suppose, but it wouldn’t be me.

I need to figure out how to do my best me…