it's pretty amazing to reach your forties, having raised a bunch of children, pursued a career at least adequately to make a living, lived through the demons that claimed many people for death, settled in a big house on a hill, started gardening and feeding the birds, found heterosexual love etc to the point where life appears settled and in a way gloriously typical or nornative, and then to find your personality disintegrating, find yourself driving west with no destination listening to dwight yoakam's "thousand miles from nowhere," drinking mid-priced vodka and flopping in cheap hotels, spending christmas eve as the only guy in the theater watching "walk hard." over these joyous holidays i thought as seriously as i was able of simply driving on, trying to get i.d. in the name of a dead person somewhere in missouri or alberta, and pretending to be someone else so convincingly that i actually did become someone else. i took to referring to myself as "crispin sartwell," i.e. enclosing my name in scare quotes. there is one reason i came back and signed a lease and reacquainted myself with my family and my job: i am a coward.