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It’s one pm on Monday. The reverbs from Dave’s guitar are thumping through the walls of our apartment, sound waves riding on the drafts window to window – from the living room all the way across the kitchen then through my bedroom and out into the alley on the warm, breezy, sunless afternoon.

I rise from the bed, where I’ve been half-sleeping/ half-watching Leave It To Beaver reruns since returning from dropping my dad at JFK for his seven am flight back to San Francisco.

It was a busy week with him in town – evening engagements for live music, dinners, a Broadway show… and all while finishing my last week of full time employment as a truck driver. I’m glad to be free of it.

No longer am I riding in the high cab to New Jersey warehouses, loading and unloading sound and lighting boxes. No longer am I guiding the twenty-four footer into the Lincoln Tunnel or down 9th avenue toward Greenwich Village.

No longer will people introduce me as, “the delivery guy,” or the “the trucker.” Gone too are all the little habits of schedule demanded by the job: the nine o’clock commute, the one o’clock lunch, the six o’clock congestion on the train home. The titles, the timetables, even the relationships – from boss to co-worker to office pal – vanished the moment I left the job, just like they did when I left my last one, and the one before that, and the one before that…. twenty-six times now since 2006.

The handfuls of temporary occupations have afforded me a migratory lifestyle, allowing me time to write and to discover. I allowed each new town, job, or boss to shape me somewhat, in order to fulfill whatever professional need, whatever conveniently demanded role. It’s a fun life, full of wonder and adventure, new things, people, and places wherever I turn; the relationships never growing stale, the duties of a job never getting too old, the hands of the clock never spinning too slowly, the past always dissolving like footprints on the Mojave on a windswept evening.

There’s something nice about leaving, hitting the reset button, carrying with you only what you can remember, rethinking your own existence, no longer having to be what you once were. Such freedom comes not without a price. Each time I walk out of a job, a town, a lifestyle, a habit – I leave behind the relationships I made there.
Gone is the employee my former boss knew, gone is the co-worker, the pal of shared office gossip. Gone is the person I was.

Me, at the moment, I’m in uncharted waters again, floating through space with no schedule, no habits, no immediate demands, no history. Free to go anywhere, do anything.

With Dave still in the next room on his guitar, I stretch, I open my bedroom door, I slam down a nectarine from the kitchen and walk into my office where I sit, I think, and I write. My mind flys free, slowed only by the dragging loose ends of my emotions, torn from what otherwise would have become roots – relationships and possessions. I sit at my desk and I do my work.