It is horrible to find yourself judging your friends.  The world is cold enough without doubting those nearest and dearest to you.   America believes in the myth of the Rugged Individualist, the one who creates an empire out of a single apple and who doesn’t need anything but guts and relentless hard work.  It just never occurred to me that I might someday have to become that mythical figure (one that never truly existed, by the way) to succeed in the alternate form of success I am pursuing.

The painful truth is that I may have reached the crossroads in my life where the friends I have truly cannot understand what I am trying to do, can relate to it only intellectually, if at all.  If I was pursuing monetary success it would make much more sense to them than this odd mission I seem to be on, a man too lazy to acquire any kind of material wealth or comfort, a little scornful to boot, smugly superior in his quixotic charitable pursuit.   I find myself alone in the ways that matter most and it may be that I’ll have to find my new way with a new group of companions, people I’ve yet to meet.  The odd phrase from the New Testament rings in my head “let the dead bury themselves”.  My dreams are telling me the same thing.

In the dream last night I was literally left stranded by the highway, far from home in the darkness of a rural night.  Three cars filled with several of my oldest friends had taken off without me.  I’d been left because, without explanation, I’d stolen two or three minutes to pop into the rental car of a friend from out of state who, in real life, I have started consulting with about the nonprofit.  His car was last in a line of three or four cars that all did u-turns to take off up the nearby highway ramp without me, a moment before my friend said goodnight and drove off to his hotel in the rent-a-car.  

In the dream I called one friend driving off who cooly told me his coordinates on the map and his merciless wake up hour for work the next day, by way of answering my “where are you?”.  In the dream I exploded in a way I have not in waking life in many years “dick move, asshole!” I yelled into the phone before hanging up and trying to figure out how to get home from this distant town in the middle of the night, or at least find shelter until morning. 

This kind of hilarious practical joke by close friends reminded me of the day several of us biked the Five Borough Bike Tour with tens of thousands of others and the two friends I was separated from didn’t stop at any one of the four or five obvious places to wait for me.  I rode about ten miles in the throng of pedaling strangers and eventually found them at the next rest stop.   They had all rested and were ready to move on by the time I caught up.  I was trying to get sunscreen that stung like mace out of my eyes with bottled water.  Another guy from the group and I wound up racing on the Belt Parkway to try to catch up to the other three an hour or two later.  This was the first year a macho friend rode with us, and evidently she was intent on competing in this leisurely ride.

Twenty miles later, after riding hard most of the day to catch up to friends who seemingly didn’t take a moment to think of me behind them, struggling to catch up, I finally decided to call it quits.   I took a nap under a shady tree in a park by the Verrazano Bridge, rolled over in the cool grass and crushed the screen of my new Motorola Razr.  I biked to the nearest subway and went home.  The next day I flew to Florida again.  Two weeks later my mother was dead.