First Order of Itinerancy: Recognizing Your Itinerancy

 The first stage of the coping process is to realize that unchecked grieving is priming you for a heart attack. Nothing works better than selfishness in stopping to care for others or, as the case may be, worrying about the commitments and obligations involved in selling your meager belongings, recently acquired in an impulsive move to the West Coast 3000 miles away from your hometown in order to move even further away to a tropical island nation of Dominica, which somehow reminds me of Vonneguts' dystopic Republic of San Lorenzo, to begin a four year journey to earning the diploma of a doctor of medicine that every practicing physician you ever asked when you were a premed told you was an odious, vain, pugnacious, dimwitted, hebetudinous, doltish, thickish, bad, bad, BAD career move.

The second stage of the coping process is to sandwich your head between your hands and run around screaming bloody murder. Nothing works better than bloody murder. Violence is the solution. You may prefer a handbag weighted with paperweights or orange peels wrapped in a sock against the back of the head, but blunt trauma only removes your anxiety. It is a short term solution. The problem will resurface when it eventually comes to in a pool of own vomit and hangs around your backyard late at night waiting for you to come back from work. The best murder is bloody and screaming bloody murder is the closest you can come to bloody murder without steeping your hands in bloody murder. Can you tell I lived in Brooklyn for two decades?

In the end, your itinerancy must be recognized as inevitable. In all fairness, you have examined your options and in that limited exercise of free will made the most rational decision based on the facts: 1) you hate your life; 2) you are not getting younger and 3) that white-collar pit of vipers that you buried your twenties in trying alternately to wrest, ignore, or appease, is going to be your tomb. Indeed, itinerancy must be extolled and exalted, for in motion is the very seed of animal life: En motius es nutus animalus indeedus. For to be in motion is to be an animal, to reconnect with that somnambulent part of yourself that wants to clip your boss on the nose for promoting a ne'er-do-well alcoholic lickspittle over someone worthy, but which you choke down and go sit at your desk like the miserable vegetable you are. Itinerancy sets you free. And that is its biggest uncompromisable virtue. It may empty your wallet while doing so. It may give you bruises. It may sour you on human goodness. But it sets you free. Even in taking giant steps backwards you could be conceived as going forward as, to paraphrase Newton, all motion relative inertial frames of reference is grinding to oblivion and in that we are all like Wall Street.