Just Do It

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.”

-Benjamin Disraeli

Like I said, I’ve been working a lot.  I was very excited then, to give myself 3 days to escape to glorious, balmy Atlanta mid-week.  I’d only taken one day off since returning from Spain, and while the work was varied between mechanic-ing and theatre tech-ing and carpentary-ing, it was all manual labor of some sort, and it starts to wear on you after a while. Unfortunately, the day before I left, I realized my 3 days off would be cut to one, as I’d scheduled a work training I forgot to remind myself about.  Tricky me!  Well fine.  The flights still looked good, and 24 hours are better than none at all.  And besides, sometimes all you need is a small jolt to get you in a different headspace.  When I have a day in familiar surroundings, it just doesn’t do it for me.  Variety is good, whether it be a different country or just a different borough.

…Buuuut since I have the unique opportunity at this time in my life to hop on a plane at will, I will go with this option 9 out of 10 times before considering Brooklyn.  What has two spoiled thumbs and whose employer is an unwitting enabler of their most destructive vices?  This guy.

So I packed my bags, and went to the airport at 6 o’friggin clock in the stupid I hate your ass face morning….only to find that the flight had filled up completely along with all JFK-ATL bound flights that day.  So, a no go.  But there I was, already in the terminal, past security, with a bag of clothes and a free day on my hands.  I had to be in midtown Manhattan by 6pm the next night.  Well?  Where to then?  There was a flight leaving in half an hour for Raleigh-Durham that was wide open, and also had a number of return flights the following day (always important).  I’d never been to the city, so that was a point in it’s favor.  However, I also don’t know anyone there and under the circumstances, this could be problematic.  Of course I don’t mind going to a city full of strangers, but I am usually able to start a hunt for a place to stay at least a few days beforehand.  And this would be me landing that day and asking some kind soul for use of their couch that very night.  It’s a lot.  Eh, why not?  I went to couchsurfing.com, shot out a couple of private requests and one public one, hoped for the best, and boarded the plane, still not knowing where/if I would sleep that night.

Though a generally cynical person (or so they tell me), I have a funny kind of faith that buried deep in any complex circumstance is a workable future, and this alone seems to have gotten me through a lot.  It’s not that I think things always work out for the best or any of that nonsense, I just think the worst that could happen is rarely as bad as your fears makes it out to be.

Lo and behold, when I touched down in Raleigh, I had one response from the public posting already!  Hot damn!  But it was in Chapel Hill, and this wasn’t my target area.  Still, if nothing else popped up, I at least had somewhere to go.  A few minutes later, one of the individual messages I sent in Raleigh was answered and his couch was available.  I looked up a bus route and was on my way.  Let me put this a little more clearly:  I woke up expecting to go to one city, but ended up in another, and yet before 11am I was completely sorted for a place to stay, how to get there, a slew of used bookstores to peruse, and a nice coffee shop to rattle my brain around a few hours.  Pretty incredible, when you think about it.

My host Matt lived with 3 roommates and 2 very sweet doggies.  They all live in the first house in North Carolina to have electricity.  Matt and his roommate Andrew (who each call the other Tron) and I sat in the living room and discussed at length all things theatrical, entrepreneurial, and ayahuasacal for a couple of hours.  Coincidentally, several of their friends were headed to Peru just that week, and they graciously invited me to tag along to dinner with them at a delicious Peruvian restaurant to scheme.  But I think we mostly ended up talking about gun control and I can’t even remember what else.  It was so tasty.  After dinner, I was treated to movie night!  Andrew and couple of the other guys participate in an international annual contest wherein you are given a genre and a line of dialog and have to create a short film incorporating the two within 48 hrs.  From scratch.  They did such an awesome job that theirs has been chosen as a finalist this year.  You can (and should) check it out here and vote on it.

Then it was back home to crash on the couch, er, excuse me, futon (the Hyatt of couchsufing!).  My flight the following day was still wide open and not until the afternoon, so I awoke at my leisure and stopped by the coffee shop once more to get a little work done before catching a bus back, breezing into the airport and pretty much directly on to the plane.  No delay meant I was back in New York with enough time to shower before heading into the city for work.  I caught myself thinking about how perfectly seamless everything had gone until I remembered that it was all a result of something having gone “wrong”- I’d meant to be in Atlanta, but I wasn’t.  So really, things were going well, considering.  The keys to this happy ending were perspective and persistence.  I’m so glad I didn’t turn around and go back to my house just because that bed was guaranteed, and instead took the opportunity to embrace the unknown.  Don’t be afraid to demand things from the universe. Things happen.  Things are happening all the time.  Learn to surf and you’ll get somewhere. And I don’t mean couches, I mean life, man.