The end of the world has a date now. A quiet, respectable, and completely glorious little number on a calendar: January 2nd, 2025. On that day, a Friday, I will walk into the quiet, air-conditioned tomb of my current employment, and I will resign.
I’ll tell them it’s for “health reasons.” And it’s not even a lie. The health of my own goddamn soul.
For fifteen years, I’ve been a good soldier in a war I never signed up for. A quiet, respectable cog in a machine I despise. Why? Because of the child support. The last, beautiful, ugly, and completely unbreakable chain from a marriage that’s been a corpse for a decade and a half. A quiet, steady, and completely soul-crushing hemorrhage of eleven hundred dollars a month, siphoned from my paycheck after the government has already had its way with me. A goddamn tithe to the ghost of a dead love, paid out to a collection of beautiful, expensive children who I’ve come to see as little herpes sores from a disease I thought I was cured of.
I joke around. I actually love my kids. But Christ, love is a funny goddamn thing when it comes with an invoice.
For fifteen years, I’ve been trapped. You can’t be an entrepreneur when the state is watching your every move, ready to audit you, to take your passport, to throw your ass in jail if you can’t make the monthly payment on a couple of kids who are living in a mansion with their mother. So I did my time. I put on the suit. I went to the meetings. I played the part of a good, quiet, and completely dead man.
But the sentence is almost up. November 11th. The day the last one turns twenty-one. The day the chains fall off. The day the warden finally, after fifteen long, beautiful, and completely fucked-up years, lets me out of my cell.
And then, the final act. I’ll spend Thanksgiving in Austin, a quiet, week-long boot camp, polishing the websites, sharpening the tools for the new life. December will be a ghost month at work, two weeks of showing my face and collecting a check. And then, January 2nd. The beautiful, quiet, and completely honest resignation.
And I’m not just resigning from a job. I’m resigning from the whole goddamn show. The dating life, the quiet, desperate hunt for a warm body in the dark. That’s over. The drinking, the cigars, the whole beautiful, slow-motion suicide of a life lived in a cloud of smoke and regret. That’s over, too. I’m getting my weight down, my sugar down, my whole goddamn machine in fighting shape.
Because this isn’t a retirement. It’s a goddamn rebirth.
With the fifty grand I’ve managed to stash away, that quiet, pathetic little war chest, I can take off. I can go to a country where a man can still live like a king on a few thousand a month, where the sun is hot and the beer is cheap and the women don’t have a goddamn spreadsheet of your every past sin. I can take these websites, these little life rafts I’ve been building in the dark, and I can make them my whole goddamn world.
For fifteen years, they took a piece of my life every month. Now, I’m getting it back. The next fifteen years, they’re mine. It should have been thirty years of this beautiful, quiet, and completely honest freedom, but you don’t get credit for the time you do in a cage you didn’t build.
And it’s easier to go when you have a place to go. The tickets will be bought. The lease on this shithole will be up. And before the end of January, I will be on a plane to Da Nang, Vietnam. And I will spend a year there, maybe more, just… breathing. I’ll do the visa runs every ninety days, a quiet, beautiful, and completely necessary little pilgrimage to Hong Kong, or Thailand, or the Philippines. A constant, gentle reminder that I am a man in motion, a man who is no longer tied to any one goddamn piece of dirt.
And that’s the real point of this whole goddamn sermon, isn’t it? The cutting of the strings.
I’m closing it all down again. Just like I did in Hawaii, in Scottsdale, in Sedona, in Portland, in Bend, in San Diego, in Los Angeles. A long, beautiful, and completely honest history of burning the goddamn house to the ground and walking away whistling.
I have no friends from high school. No friends from the Navy. There is no remnant, no piece of DNA, that connects me to the men I used to be. No one can look at me and say, “That’s the millionaire.” “That’s the tequila bar owner.” “That’s the sailor.” “That’s the Gulf War vet.” I have shed so many skins that I’m not even sure what the original animal looks like anymore. There are no strings on me.
And yes, freedom is lonely. But the bite of that loneliness, it gets less sharp with time. And eventually, it’s not a bite at all. It’s a breeze. A quiet, cool, and completely beautiful breeze on your goddamn face.
I’ll be alone on Christmas again this year, just like I was in Hawaii. I’ll be alone on my birthday. I’m going to a concert tonight, and I’m going alone. Why? Because I don’t have the time or the goddamn energy to build a relationship that I’m just going to have to burn down in ninety days. It’s a beautiful, quiet, and completely honest kind of strength.
And it’s easy when you have a place to go.
The next ninety days, they’re not a countdown to an end. They’re a countdown to a beginning. I don’t know when the tears will come. Maybe on November 11th, when the last chain finally breaks. Maybe on January 2nd, when I hand in my resignation and walk out of that cage for the last time. Maybe it’ll be on the plane, on January 28th, when the wheels leave the goddamn ground and I am finally, truly, and completely untethered.
Or maybe it’ll be when I land in Vietnam, on February 2nd, and I walk out to that ocean, and I put my bare, fifty-seven-year-old feet on that white sand, and I feel the warm, honest, and beautiful water, and I look out at a horizon that has no goddamn memory of me at all.
I don’t know when I’m going to break down.
But I know that when I do, for the first time in my whole goddamn, beautiful, ugly, and completely fucked-up life, it will be because I am peace.
