A Mancunian Candidate
MANY generations ago, someone in my family's heritage--on both sides of my bloodline--made the choice to pack up what little they had and take a risk as large as life itself. A gambit of leaving home to make a new life--a better life--in America, and they flourished.
There is no clear path to the choices young men must make to stake their claim in this world, nor is there any one person whom has the answers to questions about life and immortality. Have I already fufillled my fate upon a random act of kindness, aiding those in a time of need beyond my imagination?
My lust for a car started a chain of events that led me from Where the West Begins to where the West ends. I had it all...a morning walk to an easy, fun job (albiet stressfull) with a vista of Oceanside so grand it kept rent forever wasted on an empty apartment, its teenage tennant instead often spending long nights alone leaning against the pier, ears washed with waves and eyes gazing at the stars.
But I wanted more, and got it. A prestigous banking career that took me from an apartment, a girlfriend, and a generous salary readers of San Diego Magazine gleam of, all the way to Malibu. With keys to a vault housing Hollywood's diamonds and pearls, and Dick Van Dyke's occasional visits to deposit his cheques.
Was it fate that a friend made on the internet, so true to his heart and pure in intent as to wait five hours for me at the airport, welcome me to his humble room rented in a part of England that had seen better days before, and give me a reason to end the stalemate of suburban luxury I'm caught in?
Could it be that something larger than myself guided a lost passport from the haloween hazed streets in Austin into the hands of a stranger that googled my name and sought me out, mailing it to me without even asking so much as for reimbursement for postage, without which I would have never been able to make the trip of my youth that led me to this point--this moment--defined by yet another risk taken, but so large and so grand that even in my methodical, analytical, and intelligent effort is still a leap of faith into the unknown.
There are those who say I could not be making a try for this at a worse time. The dollar is weak, a world economy in poor arrears. I've spent much of my life studying loads of subjects for hours...learning the intracices of banking law, the absolutes of pharmacy, and the essence of photography, but what have I got?
A bipolar mind of a manic depressive wondering if things will never change...if my daily dose of antiepileptics, mood stabilizers, anti-anxiety drugs, and ADHD course of treatment is just a product of my environment, or true science.
Insofar as these things are concerned, they are not paramount. Six weeks remain until once again wrapping my arms around my mother at the airport, bidding friends goodbye--for however long I do not know--boarding the KLM:
Once more across the pond.