Adventures in Leaving the House: Memento Mori Edition

I work from home. I’ll never complain because there are more advantages to that arrangement than I can even count, but there is one down-side: I don’t get out much. So on those occasions where I do leave the house to visit people or get away for the weekend or pick up a loaf of bread, it opens the door for

Here’s a little peak behind the scenes of this blog: In case it wasn’t obvious from the ending to The Fun Part, I haven’t been writing my posts live and in synch with the progress of my book. Sorry if that ruins the illusion for you. Instead, I’d written many of these posts in advance and had the scheduled to publish according to a schedule largely pulled out of my buttocks. 

And I’m glad I did, because the past month or so has been brutal. My grandmother on my mom’s side passed away in the end of February, and then my aunt on my dad’s side passed about two weeks later. Both passing were sudden. Maybe “sudden” seems odd in regards to my grandmother (who would’ve been 90 next month), but she was still very sharp and in good health – even complaining about the latest episode of Big Brother the night before passing away.

Since I’ve been losing family members at an unsustainable pace, you can imagine that writing blog posts or working on my book has not been a priority.

I suppose I could be using this state of mind for my writing. I do have a future story in mind that deals with death in much the same way my current story deals with loneliness. I haven’t been writing, though, for the simple reason that I don’t want to. As I’ve learned over (and over and over) the years, sometimes it’s better to actually live your life than try to record it. Then again, maybe I’d have a picture of my aunt from this decade if I was better about recording things…

This entry is going to be pretty thin on the “Adventure” end of “Adventures in Leaving the House,” but I did leave the house, spending last Saturday driving around the northeast in a moving truck. 

Strange fact about me: I’ve long fantasized of leaving all my troubles behind to hit the open road in a big rig, living out of that capsule hotel-esque bunk that many big rigs have and delivering random items across the country. In this fantasy, I’d pull up to random houses and announce to the residents that “According to my clipboard” – because nothing shows authority like a clipboard – “I’m to drop off this new washing machine at your address.” I’d be like Santa if he were sponsored by Sears. 

Some day...

The reality of the day was much less exciting, mostly me driving white-knuckled due to the wind, clipboard-less. Just hours of quiet save for the radio or whatever I had streaming out of my phone. I covered about 400 miles that day. It actually was just what I needed.

Something else I find helpful during such times is The School of Life, a YouTube channel dedicated to exploring the big questions in life. I’ve included a pair of their video essays here: the first addressing the inevitability of death and the second (which I’ve had tabbed for easy access since 2016) talks about powering through hard times.