The Meaning of Life
Good Title, huh? My summer part two...
The meaning of life....is somewhere in the Western United States, alone in a cab of a rented truck, watching your speedometer match your thermometer at 104. Shirtless and listening to Willy, Waylon, Johnny, and Kris break in the speaker system on my rented 2024 Tacoma, I hauled ass across the country, imagining myself drawing a horizontal line across a map of the US, something that made the miles come easy, and the rest stop diet cokes flow fast. Flying on four wheels, I told myself I had reached the top. How perfect of a story, moving millions from the cab of a truck, pulling off the empty highway to take diligence calls with some of the sharpest minds in AI/ML, then adding 600 miles to the odometer, pulling into a new town each night, negotiating my way onto old friend's couches with only a few hours notice (thanks AJ), an epic that childhood me would be proud of. But it wasn't perfect; I got severe altitude sickness around 13,000 ft up in Colorado, sleeping where each breath of icy air must be chased by a sip of mountain water.
And when I say I got sick at altitude, I mean dangerously sick. Maybe it was my trip to England; maybe it was my mind jumbled from trying to assess the seriousness of a few new moles; maybe it was the four days on a loveseat, or could it have been the 1000+ miles I covered solo in 36 hours, thinking back maybe it was the three months prior of working 16+ hours a day, returning a few emails before I even took a leak in the morning, maybe it was all of it, and the truth was I had run myself into the ground.
Whatever it was, I ended up quite sick at the top of a mountain in Colorado; having pulled out of SF 36 hours earlier and ripped it directly to Reno, I was running low on gas, both literally and figuratively. My journey to the mountain top had a couple of stops in between, I had hauled from SF to Reno, Reno to Salt Lake, and Salt Lake to Breckenridge, CO. (Side story: when I pulled into Salt Lake, I was sunburned and wearing running shorts, smelling like a man who had sweat through his clothes twice over, and I wanted a big boy steak. I wandered into the nicest restaurant in Salt Lake; everybody was in suits, and they thought I was a doordash driver; I told them I'd eat at the bar and I saw the look of shock on their face that I dared to come to their fancy party without my fancy clothes. I took a seat, dropped $150+ for the biggest bison steak they had with a glass of red, two sides of mashed potatoes, and a heaping of side-eye from a couple of fuckwits who thought they were the reincarnation of Joseph A. Bank.)
Anyway, I was telling you about Colorado. Well, I was in CO, having dinner at the top of the mountain, when my vision started to go all…. speckly, I could still see, but I had more and more floaters each minute, toss that in with a crushing headache and a night in a reno casino hotel, and I felt like shit. But feeling like shit ain't a problem, get some sleep, drink some electrolytes, and i'm back in the game, this feeling though, this felt concerning. Remembering that I was at a truly high elevation, I went to Dr. Internet for answers, and what I found was terrifying. I very clearly was in the middle of an acute and potentially life-threatening episode of altitude sickness where pressure from your brain expanding (omg, so you think I have a big brain!!!) can push on your optical nerves, causing visual changes. It was still light out, and I still had 95% of my vision, but my friend was working, and the lower altitude was at least a 45-minute drive away. Concerned that if I waited any longer, I would be putting my life at risk, I jumped directly into the truck and used the adaptive cruise control and lane assist to take me down the mountain, checking the altitude every 90 seconds, praying I would hit sub 6K feet. Well, I did; I made it about 150 miles from Breck, into a rural part of CO where the altitude was supposed to be the lowest in the state.
I woke up the following day, crushed a few more hours on the road, but still felt off; I called family and told them that not only was I a bit mixed up, but that the day before had been quite a ride. A family member who was a physician told me to pull over and get checked out immediately, just to be safe, so about 1300 miles and 3 days out of SF, I pulled into an ER in rural CO. The doc was nice, and the nurses all hit on me (fit check: I had on a great pair of boots and bootcuts jeans, with a belt buckle the size of my fist). Well, I told doc colorado that I felt “like…. uhhh not my best”; he asked me about my last few days and said that the only solution was to keep it rolling on to greener and, more importantly, lower pastures - clearing me to drive and 1 hour after pulling into the ER, I was pulling out, back on the road. I made it to somewhere in Nebraska, thought I was in Kansas, realized that another day of rest was called for, and slept at a roadside hotel, eating plastic waffles and drinking corporate coffees until my body, mind, and soul started to come back into alignment.
When I checked in with the physician family member, he told me something I'll always remember as both scary and a true badge of honor: "It looks like you found the limits of the human body." He convinced me not to try to for the remaining 1000+ miles to the east coast, and I decided to drop the truck off, but not after a little more adventure. I ripped it to South Dakota, where the closest drop-off was, but saw that the Badlands were on the way; I bounced into the Badlands, took in landscapes that grabbed my sense of otherworldliness and doubled it, then I got spit out on the highway by a Texas Roadhouse.
Looking for a place that would be a bit more friendly to my kind (what the fuck kind of person am I anyways, I only know one other guy like me I think he's crazy, we are good friends, sup Joey), I pulled into the Texas Roadhouse. The greatest place for a hot meal, for the uninitiated and those FROM Jersey (relax, it's a joke Jersey people....how did you find me anyway?), and immediately I noticed a high concentration of Bikes, like big boy bikes, hogs if you will.
As I opened the doors to that South Dakota Texas Roadhouse, I swear I saw the America I had always read about: 300+ bikers in full leathers, with patches depicting skulls, bones, needles, and naked ladies, all em' packed three rows deep at the bar, Johnny Villa, right in the middle. Sometimes you wonder how you got somewhere, how your life turned out the way it did, why you never married that girl you fell in love with in college (have a great honeymoon), how you ended up in an ER in Colorado, and in that moment in South Dakota, why I was having a beer with a massive biker gang. Well, it turns out I was at Sturgis; it just so happened that I pulled into the right place at the right time, and found myself in the largest biker rally in the world. I was hand in hand with people I had heard were "bad people" for much of my life. Duke & corporate America ain't exactly the crew that tells you about the soft and human side of biker gangs, usually, the views are pretty binary. Well, these were good guys, and we shared a beer and talked over steaks, an upgrade from the Salt Lake City crew. That night, the main attraction was semi-professional female bare-knuckle fighting; knowing I had a weak stomach and strong conscience, I passed and listened to Allen Watts in my motel room while finishing my diligence on an ML startup out of a major university's research lab.
The next morning, I woke up, turned in the car, flew to Dallas, got stranded there for the night, and then flew home to DC. What did I get up to this summer? I have no clue, but I'll tell you one thing, I didn't waste my life on no goddamn couch.
Dedicated to everyone I called on my long drives (AJ, Mo, Nader, Alec, Joey, Zach, Joe, Huston, Ellen, John, Brooks, Jermey, and many more)
-John