TL;DR: Surprise! I'm taking a break from my career to ride my bike around the world.
According to my mom, who would know about such things, my first words were, "Bye-bye."
I've been leaning into that sentiment every since, traveling whenever I can, seeing the world, having A Look Around. I even did a doctorate in cultural psychology to support my habit, and have plied my skills as a social scientist to check out six continents. (Antarctica, consider yourself warned.)
But the pandemic put the kybosh on all that. To cope with my newly clipped wings, I took to the road on my shiny bicycle and explored all the nooks and crannies of the Bay Area. Channeling the inimitable Dervla Murphy, who rode her three-speed from Ireland to India in 1964, I found myself thinking, "f I went on doing this for long enough I could get round the planet."
I wasn't the only one with this idea. In 2018, Jenny Graham smashed the women's record for fastest circumnavigation of the world by bicycle. News of her radness finally percolated in my direction. I got ideas.
Then, on September 9, 2020, the unthinkable happened: The sun didn't rise in San Francisco. The smoke from several wildfires was blocking our star.
Here's the view from my home office at about 11 am that day:
To my astonishment, my virtual meetings continued to grind on, with no one mentioning the apocalyptic hellscape outside. Ever the pointer-outer of elephants in the room, I kept saying things like, "Um, y'all. The sun hasn't come up yet." And my colleagues would look at me with mild pity, then return their attention to The Important Business At Hand.
The absurdity called to mind Auden's poem about Brueghel's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (AKA "Where's Icarus?"):
(Thank you for indulging my liberal arts education flex. Now back to our regularly scheduled blog post.)
I realized a few things that morning:
I can't take for granted that I will have a world to ride my bicycle around much longer,
Most folks will deny and repress the end times even as they knock on their door, and
I need to get the hell out of Dodge.
And thus began my dreaming and scheming to to have a look around this glorious and suffering planet of ours.
On this blog, I will share my pilgrim's progress. I will also share my location and route, so that you can join me for dinner, a ride, or however you want to participate. Please email me at conner.alana@gmail.com if you get a wild hair and want to meet.
For everyone's safety, though, please do not share my blog, route, or location on social media.
I am not sponsored. I am not fundraising. I'm just a burned-out social scientist having a pedal around our burned-out world, while we're all still up for it.