Quo Vadimus

"Dana. I'm what the world considers to be a phenomenally successful man. And I've failed much more than I've succeeded. And each time I fail, I get my people together, and I say, "Where are we going?" And it starts to get better. And that's what you should do."
- Clark Gregg as "Calvin Trager", Sports Night episode 45

God has this habit. When I'm feeling a bit too confident, He knocks me back down a couple of pegs. When things are a bit too daunting, He knocks me down a couple of pegs. That's a steady habit of God knocking me down a few pegs, so that I know who's boss, and so that God has an opportunity to adjust the focus. It's only one of the reasons why I am an instrument of God.

I've had a rough week. I've accomplished very little, and I've been continually distraught over what is likely to be the abrupt, unexpected, and unreasonable dissolution of a very important relationship in my life. This is all occurring as I realize that in a short while, I will be somewhere else, probably alone; also, it occurs as I recognize that I no longer hold the important distinction in the lives of several people who I have come to hold very dear. I'm sentimental, and I'm a historian and archivist. I save things because they remind me of memories that I treasure, and I work to maintain relationships with people who I consider to be precious. When I'm forced to discard things that have been important to me, and when I'm forced to acknowledge the dissolution of relationships with people who have been and continue to be precious to me, it's about all I can do to hold myself together. I can do it because I have strength, and because I have focus; but it's difficult for me.

I don't like to avoid things, but at certain times, when my emotional attention to an issue isn't absolutely pressing, I'm not above a bit of distraction. The first signs of trouble in the aforementioned relationship occurred early last week; the first big indication of trouble was last Wednesday evening. When I got home from an outing with DHSM last Wednesday, I found that my long-awaited Amazon.com package had arrived, and among the items within it was the complete run of one of my favorite television programs, Sports Night, on six DVDs. This afternoon, only hours under the wire, I accomplished the unexpected feat of watching the entire run, two seasons, forty-five episodes, approximately fifteen and a half hours, in just under a week.

Normally, I don't much care for television. I watch far too much of it, and most of it's garbage. Don't get me wrong, there's some great stuff; MI-5, Battlestar Galactica, and even South Park are programs that are well worth the effort to watch. Even though it only ran for those two glorious seasons, Sports Night is one of those programs. It had intelligent jokes, intelligent plotlines, and warm, sympathetic characters. Ladies and gentlemen, Sports Night made Friends look like a drunken barn dance in Downtown Deliverance.

Having seen the series finale of Sports Night at least once before, I knew where the story arc was taking me. As I watched the final episodes, I knew the course; I knew the trajectory, I knew where the story was taking me. I'd attempted to translate the Latin phrase, "QVO VADIMVS" ("Quo Vadimus") with the tools available to me, but had received a very tentative translation due to the overwhelming number of things that "quo" can mean. As I continued to watch, it kept becoming clearer and clearer.

"Dana. I'm what the world considers to be a phenomenally successful man. And I've failed much more than I've succeeded. And each time I fail, I get my people together, and I say, "Where are we going?" And it starts to get better. And that's what you should do."

I realized at that moment, as the character of Calvin Trager, a fabulously wealthy man preparing to save an ailing corporation from impending doom, spoke to executive producer Dana Whitaker (played by Felicity Huffman, and sorry Lycan, she's married to Bill H. Macy) about one of the things that had made him successful, something began to dawn on me.

As I drove down to work a few minutes after the conclusion of that final episode, and listened to the City of Blinding Lights Single, things kept processing in my brain. It came to this lyric...

I've seen you walk unafraid
I've seen you in the clothes you made

Which reminded me of the following lyric from Trip Through Your Wires on The Joshua Tree...

I was broken, bent out of shape
I was naked in the clothes you made

And when you're thinking of U2 lyrics repeated or rearranged on subsequent albums, you can't forget these lyrics to Gone from Pop...

You change your name, well that's okay, it's necessary
And what you leave behind you don't miss anyway

Which were completed like a covenant in Walk On on ATYCLB...

Love is not the easy thing
The only baggage you can bring
Is all that you can't leave behind

[...]

Leave it behind
You got to leave it behind
All that you fashion
All that you make
All that you build
All that you break
All that you measure
All that you feel
All this you can leave behind

And it struck me, in that space of a half hour between the translation of "Where are we going?" and the memory of all those lyrics: I need to figure out where I'm going. As I've said on here many times lately, I'm barely getting any work, and the best work that I'm getting at this job is a frustration. I'm waiting on word about this NASA job, but that's up in the air at this point, mainly because it's taking a while to get any reply back whatsoever. I know that I'm not going to Indiana, because the standing invitation to visit F3 has been rescinded, and unless there's a drastic change, she's made decisions that will force me to close that chapter of my life. So what am I left with?

No job (essentially)

No woman

Nowhere to go

A bunch of stuff, some of it junk, some of it keepable

A friend roster that's as depleted as the Uranium slugs in an A-10 Thunderbolt II's gatling gun circa Gulf War I

So it's the perfect question: where am I going? And my honest answer at this point is that I don't know. The only problem with that is that I need to know. I need to start forcing myself to engineer an answer to that question, and determine where I'm going. Maybe it's just like salvation, or alcoholism: the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

When there's more, I'll inform everyone; for now, this feels like a pretty major breakthrough in my life. It's a first step. You know what they say; the Spirit moves in Mysterious Ways.