Pushing My Limits

I have been struggling with high pain for going on 20 years now. I can barely walk to the back of a store to pick up milk and eggs. I can ride a bike. So I have come up with a crazy or maybe insane plan to test myself and my limits. I am jumping on my bike next week and heading South from the Golden Gate Bridge. If I make it to San Diego then I will head East. I will just go as far as I am able to. I may only make it one day or one week or one month or maybe I will keep riding for the rest of my life. I do love being on the road and seeing the world go by. I plan on stopping to smell the roses so to speak.

I had planned on going to the Golden Gate last week for a different reason. As I mulled the circular thoughts over and over in my mind a stray current swept over me and I just decided to take off instead. Maybe if I have a goal I will keep going until I reach that goal. That is how I survived as long as I have with all my other crazy insane things I have done like climbing mountains, walking across Africa, and traveling through scores of war zones from Africa and Asia to Central and South America. I need goals in my life. Bucket lists are all the rage since the movie brought the subject up but I have been making and finishing bucket lists for my entire life. For the last three years or so I have not had a goal in my life, something to live for. Pain rewires the brain and can make life unbearable to endure. I need this goal to wire my brain on my terms not my pains terms. Sometimes the rewards of living seem so small compared to the price of pain. My only reward will be my own self satisfaction.

I don't care if I make it to the Atlantic or not because that is not the point of this stupid plan. The point is to push myself to a new limit. If my bike breaks down I am not able to walk to the next town to get it repaired. I will need to trust that the general public will help me if I am in need. So far in my wandering around the world people have been overwhelmingly generous to me giving me shelter and protection when I needed it and also the warmth of a fellow human.

I have some mountains to cross. Some of them are real like the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies but some of the mountains are more symbolic like pushing myself on despite my pain deranged brain telling me to quit. I have read lots of inspiring books about humans pushing their physical and mental limits to climb mountains like Everest or to get to the North or South Poles. Crawling on hands and knees snow blinded and frost bitten but pushing on to make it to the top and back again through shear determination is not about getting to the top of the mountain. It is something else. Sure there are people that start out to be the first to do this or that because they want the publicity but the vast majority of those types either turn around or die because they lack that inner strength. I have been missing inner strength lately. Basically I hit empty last week. I need to refill my tank of inner strength.

I will be posting my progress as I go along. I am posting it for myself though not for the "glory" or to impress anyone. I don't care if I get a big fat zero readers. It is good in my struggle with my own brain to put thoughts on paper so that I can look at it and keep a perspective on where I stand in my war to overcome pain and depression. I am sure a lot of my recent posts (since I quit posting about my travels well over a year ago) have been hard to read and understand by some of my followers. I have been depressed and angry as well as struggling with pain and lack of mobility. I don't like to grovel for medical care or shelter or food or anything else for that matter. I have given up on those struggles for now. I am focused on my new goal and I prefer that.

During my ride, I am going to try to survive on my $900 social security so I will need help from people as I go. I will be looking for places to spend the night and some wifi to keep in contact with my family and friends. If anyone along my route wants to help me out send me a note. I have a credit card and I am sure it will fill up quickly what with my bike costs and the inevitable shelter expenses along the way. I will not consider it a failure if I don't make it to Florida, after all I can't walk a block and I am thinking about riding a bicycle over 4000 miles by myself. The only failure is if I don't start the journey, because then I will take a journey from the Golden Gate that is only about 250 feet and there will be nothing to post about that journey.

Life goes on

After the divorce from Sue I settled into a life doing daycare and raising my kids. I did some construction on the side because I did not make enough money doing daycare to survive. I had my own house that I rented and Ellen the mother of my last baby had her own house just down the block. We spent about half the time at my house and half the time at her house. My three kids with Sue were usually with me at my house. The years flew by without a lot happening other than the usual family stuff that everybody goes through. There were marriages and graduations and all that fine stuff. My kids had some problems when they first turned into the teen years like most kids do. I won't go into details about any of that because there was nothing out of the ordinary and they all passed through their rebellious stages.

I visited Wisconsin a couple of times and some of my family from there visited me in California. I was quickly drifting apart from my Wisconsin family. My father was relentlessly mean and negative toward me. I asked him repeatedly to stop treating me like that but he just got worse. When he started telling my kids that they were assholes I ended it. I finally just decided that it was better for my own mental health and for my children to just stop being around him entirely. Cutting him out of my life pretty much cost me any relationship with the rest of my family. My mom backed up my dad's opinions with her silence about it. My brothers and sisters decided that I was being mean to my dad and therefore I was the asshole. My dad was always very careful to only treat me badly when there was nobody else around to witness his behavior. Then when other people were around he would act oh so sweet to me but he always had that evil look on his face when he looked at me. He also told people all over town that I was gay for some reason. I don't know where he got that idea from but I believe my ex sent him a letter with a bunch of her trash talking in it and he took it all as facts. I ended up having no relationship with any of them any more. I just got tired of always being the one at fault for not putting up with any further abuse from my dad. If that meant no relationship with the rest of the family then that was how it had to be.

I broke up with the mother of my kid when he was fourteen. I was just finishing building a house for the family when I got disabled suddenly. I could not get the house finished. I was flat on my back for well over a year and had multiple surgeries with the end result of high chronic pain for the rest of my life. The doctors told me I would never walk again. Ellen decided she did not want a disabled partner and started to treat me terribly. I told her that I was not going to be treated like that and I wanted out of our relationship. That was it and she quickly took my son and left me alone, flat on my back. I was glad to see her go. She was cold as hell. I was better off alone.

Losing my son however, was the second time my children had been taken away from me. I was already beaten down from the last time and I realized that I would not survive another attack by an angry ex. She filed for full custody and I could not fight anymore. She offered me $40,000 to walk away and never see her or my son again. I told her to keep her money and that if I didn't get fifty fifty custody then I was out of the picture. She told me that she would fight me forever and never let me have my son back. I did not have the mental health to continue with the fight so she won. She walked away with my son. I did not see him again or have any contact with him until he was in his twenties.

I almost committed suicide shorty after she took him away. I went down to the bay to take my life and I was interrupted by a police officer that I knew from fishing. He started to talk about fishing with me. It was 2:30 in the morning all I had was a rope and a knife with me and he assumed I was fishing. I had no fishing pole or anything. He was oblivious to the state of mind I was in. He did not leave me alone until almost sunup so I postponed my suicide that night. The next day I decided to try to live my life a day at a time. I still am taking life a day at a time twelve years later now. My depression has never gone away. I did recently reconnect with my son in the last few years. I am happy about that. He will never understand the gap in our relationship. The kids are always the losers in divorce, American style.