Till the Money Runs Out: October 2011

On Saturday, 15 October, I awoke on a friend's sofa in a panic. I had surfaced from a terrible nightmare in which I had announced to my supervisor that I was quitting my job and flying off to Croatia. I had no plan, no idea what I was doing. I had lost my mind.

As I got my bearings, I calmed down. OK, I told myself, I'm in Atlanta, Georgia, lying on Bryan and Laura's sofa, and everything is fine. Just fine. Then, I was thunderstruck by a shocking realization:

That was no fucking dream!

My heart raced, and the fuzzy cloud of my hangover rapidly assumed a sharper reality. The day before, during a jog with my supervisor, I had announced my departure plans. I had given the organization a little over two weeks to deal with my impending exit. In two weeks I was flying to Croatia. The goal was simple: to reboot my life. I hoped to find work in Europe as a writer and a DJ. I had no job prospects. I could barely speak a few phrases of the Croatian language. I had enough money to last me maybe six months, but probably not.

The last several weeks had felt as if I were taking a step out of an airplane, and the parachute on my back was of dubious quality. A nervous knot lay in the pit of my stomach during all my sober moments, so I tried not to have too many of those. I regularly awoke between 3 and 5 AM flooded with fear. If I was able to get back to sleep at all, I slept fitfully until the alarm summoned me.

The sleeplessness, in conjunction with the weight of my odd, self-inflicted situation, left me in a constant dream state. I floated down the streets of Atlanta in search of my usual morning Diet Coke, afternoon Moe's burrito, and evening pints of Stella at the Midtown Vortex. All around me, people drifted by like plankton.

I'm doing something extraordinary, I sometimes smugly told myself. But the late night terrors always wiped the smugness off my face.

On the morning of 5 October I awoke at 3 AM, right on schedule. I decided then to write down everything that was keeping me up at night. I entitled the document: "Reasons you will fail."

The document began with the statement: "You haven't any evidence that you have the talent to succeed as a DJ and a writer—and ample evidence that you don't."

After presenting a depressing stack of evidence, I concluded: "If you went to Europe, you would most likely be spending money without earning money, and you would eventually run out of cash."

And yet, I continued to move incrementally forward toward my goal of flying to Croatia and living there. I was proud that I was doing this despite my many opportunities to balk. I could have balked at buying the plane ticket. I could have balked in telling my supervisor of my plans. But scared as I was, I kept moving forward. I told myself that that was what courage was, being scared shitless to do something but doing it anyway.

Now seemed a good time to go insane. The whole world had gone insane. The Eurozone was in ruins. In the United States, Occupy Wall Street was chugging into its second month. (As an illustration of our interconnected worlds, David Brooks unsettlingly noted in a New York Times opinion piece that U.S. President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election prospects are tied to the decisions being made by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.) An Arab spring continued to dramatically reshape the Middle East. If the world was going crazy, now was a good time for me to do the same.

During the first half of October I spent a week visiting my mom. I couldn't tell her my travel plans right away because I feared she'd react badly to the news. Besides, the plans were more hypothetical at that stage. At that time I had not yet bought the plane ticket, nor had I told my office about my impending departure. I hate burdening people with hypotheticals.

I spent that week doing all that I could for her. I cut down a dead tree, moved a heavy desk and some armchairs to the curb for trash collection, helped her select a new laptop and printer to replace the slowest computer on earth, and set her up with Skype. The last two items I craftily forced through; although I wasn't saying anything yet, I wanted to be sure she had a way to communicate with me once I headed to Europe.

But my week at home wasn't all work. We visited the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial on Roosevelt Island, Washington, D.C. I had recently read and much enjoyed Edmund Morris's three-volume Roosevelt biography, so I wanted to pay a bit of homage. We crossed a wooden footbridge, under which men fished, and found our way to the larger-than-life statue of Roosevelt, who stood before a number of marble slabs containing choice quotes from his writings. One quote read:

"A man's usefulness depends upon his living up to his ideals in so far as he can. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. All daring and courage, all iron endurance of misfortune, make for a finer and nobler type of manhood. Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die. And none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life."

While home, I went through my dad's history books seeking inspiration from stories of people who had left the familiar for new lives elsewhere. I read about the pioneers on the Oregon Trail, people who had gathered all their possessions and their family and headed west with, at best, only a vague idea of what awaited them there. Some succeeded; some became cannibals. What had compelled them to take such risks? Was it that the lives they had left behind were so awful? Or were they merely delusional, foolishly pursuing a truly impossible dream?

My mother and I visited some former neighbors who now lived in the Goodwin House, an upscale retirement community in a condo. The visit reminded me of my own mortality. Time is running out, memento mori, all that stuff.

The final two weeks of October flew by.

On Monday, 17 October it appeared I would be able to work half-time for six months, with all my health benefits. This would be of considerable aid to me in transitioning into a new life. That same day, the director of the organization warned me to check with our Office of Human Resources to be sure that working 50% time would be enough to qualify me for health coverage down the road; he had heard rumor of a change to the rules that might demand an employee work at least 75% of the time in order to hold onto his or her benefits.

On Wednesday, the 19th, my future with the organization was considerably different. Now three months would be the limit, and my health benefits would be cut off on 1 January because yes, the change the director warned me about was going into effect then.

On Saturday the 22nd, at an Asian restaurant in Canton, I received a fortune cookie with no fortune inside of it. "What does this mean?" I asked the waiter.

"No fortune is good! It means you make your own fortune!" he said.

That same Saturday I drove from Canton to Helen, Georgia, to enjoy the spectacle that is their version of Oktoberfest.

On Sunday, the 23rd of October, while sitting at a Decatur bar listening to Deerhunter, I learned that a wait person with proper connections can buy a bottle of wine at the bar despite Georgia's ban on alcohol sales on Sunday. However, this realization was rapidly rendered of historical interest only, as a few weeks later Georgians voted overwhelmingly to repeal this ban.

On Saturday, the 29th of October, I enjoyed a farewell party at the Highlander bar with friends. As it was Halloween weekend, we were served by young women who wore plush Chippendale outfits. I'm not gay, but those Chippendales were hot.

I spent part of Sunday, the 30th of October, hanging out at the Brick Store bar with friends Amy and Nathan. I had been living at Nathan's for a few weeks in order to save money and to escape from the miseries of motel life. Amy smartly reassured me that, no matter how stressful things might get in Croatia, "there's always beer."

Amy had flown in from New York City. Since Nathan's weekly business flight was due to depart around the same time as hers, they left the house together. Maybe I was just hung-over and exhausted, but I admit that during our goodbyes there were some tears. And so I was left alone at Nathan's house for a few more days.

Later that day I write: "Phoenix. Resurgens. I am killing myself over the next few days, but I will be reborn into something more powerful afterward." This expressed Obi-Wan optimism was almost certainly beer-derived. I added, "So nervous to say it, but it's true; I want to begin this adventure."

Monday, the 31st of October saw me bid farewell to my co-workers. I find farewell luncheons to be an awkward chore, so I made sure to let people know that if they could not join me I certainly wouldn't be offended.

That night, trick or treaters dropped by Nathan's house. I handed them the Tootsie Roll lollipops Nathan had thoughtfully purchased for them. Not since the end of my college days had I felt so suburban.

"I could live at Nathan's forever and be happy," I wrote. "But this is not my house, not my place."

The 1st and 2nd of November were "Twensday," the longest day of the year. That was the day I woke up in Atlanta and went to sleep in Zagreb.