The Lifestyle

As-salaam alaiykum.

I flew today. I can't say that every day now that I'm on fucking staff. "Staff" is Air Force lingo for "desk". You know in all the movies when the cop gets in trouble and the police chief says something like "If you so much as blink wrong I'll have you on a desk TOMORROW, McCallaghan!" It's kind of like that. Except the Air Force is smart enough to gift-wrap it in the lie that "it's an honor to be selected to staff". (That means they trust you enough to not fuck up the war we've been fucking up for 26 years). They call us penguins, because we have wings but don't fly. So I pulled the lucky ticket and now I'm on staff... flying a desk... for up to two months. I know. It's a brutal reality.

I know I've thought this before, but don't know if I've ever written it down. I cannot imagine life sitting at a desk in one place for eternity. It's probably because I've been flying lines for almost three years, and I'm evolving to the point at which I can't fathom anything different. It really wasn't that long ago that I lived in a single-bedroom apartment in the foothills of Lexington Kentucky, slaving away at ROTC bitch-work and Electrical Engineering exams. Traveling was limited to the few months in the summer when Karen and I had enough freedom and wealth to take multiple trips. And then we'd clear customs back into reality around mid-August and lie dormant, numb, and left waiting for the next.

There are a lot of people who post to Instagram and brag to their friends how much they love to travel. "I've been here, and here, aaaaaand here." Maybe they travel two weeks a year, maybe they save up and are able to span the globe for a month or two. Maybe they say they love to travel but they really only mean they enjoy their cheap vacations to Myrtle Beach and Gatlinburg when it comes time. I've been reading older blog posts, lately I've been reading the ones from early 2013 immediately following a big trip to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco; and oh boy, it almost makes me nauseous the way I talk about being this top-notch world-experienced traveler. Reading it now I realize I was on one trip for two weeks, and then it was back to the real world, to the reality of being in one place for another several months.

Being a pilot in the Air Force is different. It isn't one trip that "changes you" and makes you more interesting for a few weeks when you get back home and clock back into work. It isn't months of planning and saving and looking forward to the day you pack your bags and head out. And it isn't accompanied by any sort of feeling of dread and depression when you return home and finally clock back in, alone in the same office you've been at forever albeit now painted with updated vacation pictures. That is what I used to do, but not so much anymore. And I didn't even realize the dichotomy until reading my thoughts from when my life was very different.

To me, travel used to be a moment of gratifying enjoyment that had to be earned, following months and months of work. Summer would end. Winter would come, winter would go. Spring would come, finals would be had, and eventually I'd find myself at the head of the trip of a lifetime. We'd fly out, pretending we were regulars, but we couldn't have been because I remember vividly just about every flight and layover during those years. We'd travel, we'd learn the language, we'd use public transit, we'd do everything right. But 10 days would pass, and we'd come back home and go to class. Only to start the whole cycle again.

Being a pilot is enjoying a job where movement is required. It's not ten days a couple of times a year when school and work are light. It's a line. There're no months of planning, for anything. I find out on Wednesday that I'm crossing an ocean, and I land on a different continent on Saturday. I can confirm I'm a "regular" on the airways because unlike in college, there are some flights that I just can't, for the life of me, remember. That's how you know things are routine, when days blur together and events become just similar enough to know that you went somewhere and did something, but it must not have been interesting enough if there are no lasting memories or pictures. When things are routine for just long enough, it becomes a lifestyle. It's a lifestyle of movement. And a lifestyle of movement is what I've spent most of my life desperate to achieve.

The lifestyle is the true reward. It's not the wings on my chest, or the flightsuit I wear, attracting impressed looks in Publix on the way home from base, that makes it all worth it. The pure joy of landing a 200,000lb airplane with half a mile visibility and crosswinds is an amazing feeling, but I'm often too tired to recognize it, so that's not it either. There are dozens of little tidbits of my current life that I wouldn't want to give up, but I wouldn't attribute any of it to being a sole contributor to the worthiness of my life. No, that honor belongs to the lifestyle.

I became confused reading an old thing I wrote. It was a piece about Miami and returning after Spring Break and how typical it is that I'm depressed and riddled with the post-vacation blues. I didn't understand what I was reading at first; what is honestly depressing about not being in Miami? I've spent most of my life not in Miami.  But then I thought about it and memories came flooding back to me; memories of how it had to have felt when I didn't leave home twice a month, when home wasn't gorgeous and in Florida, and when work wasn't at 30,000ft. At that particular point in time, travel wasn't a lifestyle, travel was an escape.

On this side of the present, travel is not an escape. Instead there are two realities which exist in parallel: that it is exciting to leave home, and that it is exciting to return home. It is exciting to fly and it is exciting to travel, but there is no relative end to it, in which you clear customs and clock back in. And thus no post-vacation blues. When an end doesn't exist, perceptions of travel change a bit. I don't yearn as much for it anymore, because it's always around the corner. I return home and can enjoy my birds and my pool, because I'm aware of the mystery that exists and will reveal itself to be my next destination. There are never post-vacation blues, even after Karen and I take an actual vacation, because travel is no longer treated as an escape and the subsequent recapture.

Travel just is. If you miss it this week, it'll be there waiting for you the next time around. At times, travel is something that you couldn't avoid if you tried; times when you end up in a place one way or another, and have to make it across town to the hotel, and then have to get food, and then you might as well get drinks. Travel is forced upon you. You don't even have to try.

But when you do try, you can sculpt beautiful, awe-inspiring, experiences. All of the best, the ones to literally write home about, were crafted-by-hand and carefully put into action. Trying, is what leads to the best travel.

I'm writing this while sitting in the Fox, the staff is clearing tables and stacking chairs in preparation for the Superbowl. I got back on base about an hour ago after a scrumptious Indian meal and some time at the beach, and before that I worked my shift until 8am. At about 2am this morning I made the decision to try; to try to travel.

The thing is, while travel is a given, a guarantee with this lifestyle, to go beyond that requires an amount of work. There are two ways to get off base on this deployment: legitimately, and illegitimately. Equally a pain in the ass. In order to go legitimately, you have to find at least one other person to go with, you have to find both a vehicle to use and a period of time when it's available, you have to do paperwork, and most importantly you need approval. Going illegitimately bypasses the paperwork and approval process, but is no easier. Now you need to find a way to travel 12km to the front gate, abetted by someone who can keep their mouth shut. You need to call a taxi or limo service to pick you up at the front gate, and schedule a return time, and you need enough cash, phone battery, and Wifi to warrant your safe return.

Regardless of which method you choose, it takes work. It takes researching and calling people and exchanging favors and making decisions at 2:00 in the morning, time that could just be spent doing anything else.... doing nothing. But if you put in the work you may find yourself walking along the beach of an island in the Persian Gulf watching the sunrise, or raging to house music in a Toyota 4x4 rolling over sand dunes, or just enjoying a very nice meal with some friends.

The beautiful thing about each of those examples, is that on each of those days, we decided to leave base about 6 hours before actually going. The next big thing is right around the corner. It always is. We live life with that fact.

Whether we try, and make it the best day that could be had abroad, or we don't and the circumstances of the time and place are allowed to just fall into place; another is just around the corner. Another flight, another place, another day, another experience, is just around the corner.

That is the lifestyle of movement. In which traveling isn't a break from reality, it is reality. It's losing count and letting memories blur together, because more's to come. It's not having to dread the last day of a trip, because you don't even know which the last day will be. It's enjoying time at home with your family, because leaving home is no longer an escape. It's one, after another, after another, after another, for as long as you can remember and as far as you can envision ahead. It's the lifestyle, that makes it all worth it.

An idea I had while driving through Doha today, was finding a real, tiny, rural, Muslim town in Qatar. I want to go there. I want to find some middle-of-nowhere place and have lunch, like Karen and I did in Cambodia or Oman.

I'm sure within a week or so, at 2:00 in the morning, I'll find a way.