40 days

There is a doom upon the land.

It is hard to think of anything that is working right. The world is cooking, and we are as responsive as frogs in a pot while life of all kinds sloughs off the globe in great, Thanos-worthy waves. My country has fallen under a darkness of hate and the worship of ignorance, and if the underlying system hasn’t outright failed, it is certainly at a failure point. Around the world, democracy doesn’t seem to be in vogue anymore, and the idea is starting to seem quaint and dated. Freedom means only free markets, or, at best, the freedom to hurt your neighbor.

The machines are rising. Not the old ones, not the gas engines and windmills, not the pulleys and tires and aqueducts. The new ones. They’re already in us, and we in them.

In my own life, things are not much better. I am rarely the person I want to be.

I want to be done with this. I want to cut a hole in the stomach of this thing and get out.

My cousin is getting married, though, and that’s a fine and hopeful thing. Even better, he lives in Anchorage, Alaska, and the whole family is flying out for the wedding. I’ve never been to Alaska, and that sounds great.

I don’t fly much, though, if I can avoid it.

Google says that it’s 4,500 miles from where I live on the Atlantic to Anchorage, diagonally right across Canada; a 9000 mile round trip. I do some math on how quickly I think I could ride that, then adjust downward toward the always-elusive and never achieved casual, enjoyable rate. Then I add a couple days as a margin for error, and arrive at 20 days to get there. Double that if I come back, and that’s 40.

I want to ride to the edge of the world. More than that; I want to ride until I find the outside, or at least until I reach the background radiation. I want to ride until time cracks.

I want to ride until I find where this went wrong. I suspect that it was a long time ago.

40 days is just enough time to wash the wickedness from the world and get a fresh start. I hope that it doesn’t actually rain the whole way.