Letter to the editor

Dear Dan,

I was stuck in Miami because I’m greedy. I spent some airline miles and hotel and rental points and shot off to North Carolina for a long weekend on a whim. My friend was celebrating the completion of a two year restoration on what was essentially an abandoned house in the woods. Now it’s amazing. Having great taste and an architect wife didn’t hurt the process. I should have stayed home. I should have used those points more wisely and maybe expanded my horizons, gone to Peru or the Galapagos. Lately, I find I just want to be around friends more than be any particular place. So I was greedy and sped off. the flight home got canceled and I got rerouted through Miami to get to Houston. That flight was delayed…and I spent a long night in the Miami airport. It still felt worth it to be in the company of true friends for even a few hours.

My travel life is like that a lot. I’m not sure if I’m particularly unlucky or that the airlines don’t function as well as people believe. I’ve never flown somewhere and returned without some form of inconvenience. Flights get delayed. Bags get lost. Once, I got on a plane in Grand Rapids and 5 hours later got off that plane and I was still in Grand Rapids. Flight still holds some wonder for me though. I still think that I’m starting an adventure every time I go to the air port. Even though I might only be training forklift mechanics on front end inspections in Tucson AZ, when I get on that plane there is still that granule of hope in the back of my mind that i’m in the opening scene of what will be an epic movie. I feel grown up, navigating around the country and doing a job in a different city each week. No, that’s not right. I don’t feel grown up. I feel like I’m pretending to be grown up and fooling everyone around me. Like I’m acting a roll in a play. It’s like I have a grown up costume on, and I get that giddy feeling in my stomach….It’s that feeling you get in your gut when you play hide and go seek. You’re hiding and you know if you make a noise, that person a few feet away will find you.

My life in Houston continues. I eat and work and sleep. I make just enough money to keep me docile and content. My job has no real accountability tied to it. The goal in my job is to increase sales of forklift parts in the western third of America. In the last three years I have failed to do this. Sales are actually down 50% from the day I started. They keep promoting me though. the only real deliverable my job requires is that you write a report showing why you traveled to a part of the country and spent thousands of the company’s dollars to do it. As far as I can tell, no one fact checks these reports and although they get emailed to more than a dozen people, they are quite often never read. Knowing me you would think that I would fill them with lies, or embellishments, or even not do them at all, but for some reason, the opposite is true. I tell exactly what I did and what happened in a reasonably interesting and jovial manner, and people love it. I am seen as an example for others to aspire to. Last week I was promoted for the fourth time in four years. I am now in charge of forklift sales (not parts) for the western third of America. By any reasonable measure I am a failure in business, but I am completely amazed at business’ ability to reward activity over results. This is the real life equivalent of someone finding you more attractive because you tried and failed to lose weight by dieting.

Life goes easy on me.

I’m still bad at making new friends. I spend most nights alone. This may seem like a bad thing, and it may be. I think loneliness is underrated. I’m starting to enjoy it more than i thought possible a few months ago. I think it would be hard now to come home to more than an empty house. Maybe that makes me selfish, but I wouldn’t have thought it possible to feel this way even a year ago and that feels like learning…. lately I’ve been going out more than before, and for some strange reason i know that trend will continue. It takes time to build up a life in a new place; more the closer to middle age you get, and less the farther past it you get. It’s that 30 – 60 time frame that seems to be concentrated more on spouses and children than friends. Couples dominate the landscape. “a married man can not afford single friends…

I used to keep a journal. The link is on the info page of my face book. It might help pass the book keeping time at the bar. I know you said it’s an Irish pub, but in my mind it’s very much like roadhouse and you are the calm accountant (with wire rim glasses for some reason) that slowly gets up from the desk in the final fight scene to dominate 11 guys because a body flying through a plate glass window spilled an ink pot on your ledger. When the last man falls, you walk back to the accounting room and the bad ass main character says to the overweight bartender who stands gape mouthed with shock in his eyes “who knew?!”

I think I’ll post this letter there; it’s been a while since I posted anything. I hope that this wasn’t too much for my first letter to you and I hope that you know that I wrote this to you, even though it will be visible to the world.

Your once upon a time friend,

Michael ian Minter