Deb and Marty

While attempting to enjoy an unplugging nightcap at the hotel bar Tuesday night I quickly grew weary of my intrepid Colombian bartender’s insipid trip-hop music and equally confounded by his insistence that Pablo Escobar was not an inherently bad man.  Don’t get me wrong, I love me some gangster nonsense but Pablo didn’t do what he did for love of country or its poor citizens as my absurd barkeep might imagine.  Nevertheless, the nightcap had to be had, so I endured his incessant unfounded diatribe. 

It had been a long, last day in Katy, Texas – early flight, long punch walk, whatever.  We’re not getting published with this deal, but the client was overflowing with glowing praise of the firm and that’s a good thing, a very good thing hopefully.  Houston’s a market we haven’t cracked with any consistency as of yet, so with any luck they will tell all their buddies what bad-asses we are and I’ll have a few more flights along the coast in the not too distant future. Regardless, I’m proud of the final product as I am always.

I don’t drink scotch.  Not even my inflated ego will allow a pretension that I'm cool enough for such an endeavor and certainly not top shelf; neat no less.  The guy sitting next to the empty chair to my left was, in fact just that cool – more so even, as I would soon find out.  His name was Marty.

We shared a similar subdued disdain for the ludicrous hypocrisy that is the current government shutdown as well as an unlikely interest in chemistry.  He sported a kick-ass handlebar mustache that I certainly have never had the stones or genetic capacity to pull off outside the confines of my own infinite imagination.  We were instant friends.  Marty had been a miner of gold before he retired and I found his explanation of the process of that craft fascinating.

After some time and tales had passed, his wife showed up and occupied the seat between.  She was cool.  Her last career choice had been less than in every sense and she had become disillusioned with said; primarily because of the lack of structure in the corporate nature of nearly all business in these United.  She told me the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back had been the prevalence of Monday morning butt prints on the glass of the copier at her last job in Reno.  She runs a quilting studio now.  Her name was Deb.

Together, they live in a small town in Northeastern Nevada that I’ve never heard of.  They both have kids from previous marriages.  They both lived full exciting lives before they met each other.  They both love riding Harleys and they both hate the ground squirrels that are eating up the cabbage in their little garden behind their house in Spring Creek.  He is a Marty Robbins fan.  She prefers Katy Perry.  Every year in the fall, they trailer their bikes to a different part of the country and enjoy a weeklong adventure.    They were on their way to Mississippi to ride their Harleys south to north on the Natchez Trace.  

It’s a peculiar thing, the randomness of a person’s life; the arc of which one cannot know from day to day.  I embrace the random, like it’s a drug actually but I don’t, I never have understood why.  It’s even further impossible to comprehend the impact of my beloved random on my day to day.  As I regaled Deb and Marty with the ridiculousness that I so often do around people I know I will never see again in places I will never return to, I became acutely aware of one simple fact – everything they described about their life together is exactly what’s missing in the perfect life that I’ve insisted I construct for myself. Not the details exactly, but that illusive being together thing I’ve never been able to corner. 

As I tossed and turned after, the moonlight danced across the still surface of the hotel swimming pool and replicated again and again and again through the yellowed window shade across the puddling ceiling face.  The silence engulfed me and the muddled light was bullshit.  I couldn’t reconcile the seeming purity of their everyday with the chaotic twaddle of mine. 

I’ve written about at times and have expended countless hours thinking about some sort of path that we all must walk.  My thought and my all encompassing belief is that if I keep walking, I will find the thing.  What I don’t think I ever saw before was the possibility that the thing I’m looking for is the beginning of the path, not the end of it or even any of the early or middle goodness.  Maybe it's not behind me as I sometimes fear.  Maybe, I just haven't made the right first move yet.  Maybe the next one will be the right one, maybe it won’t be.  I have to believe that eventually it will be though if I truly embrace the random, right?

(Right.)

Everything above is a self-indulgent diversive maneuver just to say simply that I randomly met an interesting couple at a bar in the middle of nowhere and had a delightful conversation over a couple of drinks.  Realistically, that's the whole of it.  

Deb and Marty are the truth; just good solid people and I have full confidence that they are having a choice time on this year's ride.  

That's a beautiful thing.