Reboot

When I started this blog life was very different. July 2019. My father was alive, my father and mother-in-law were alive. My brother-in-law was alive. My job, while not the greatest corporate culture, was tolerable and I felt respected, the job itself, getting easier and allowing me more time.

July 2019. I was 53, about to turn 54 five months later. I started to daydream about life after work and Satori! was born. The word itself rattled around in my head from when I read in January 1991, “Satori in Paris” by Jack Kerouac.

The French-Canadian, Lowell Massachusetts born Kerouac, aged 43, travels to Paris and Brittany to search for and understand his French roots. He died just four years later, an adult life of drinking and hard living catching up to him.

I read the book at a crossroads in my life, as my enlistment in the active-duty US Navy was about to end and uncertainty awaited me. My short engagement in 1990 had crumbled, my career about to be altered, my mother facing surgery, these were all on my mind as I took my last voyage on the submarine USS Louisville (SSN-724), a high-speed deployment to the Red Sea and the coming Persian Gulf War. As I read Kerouac, writing a few years before I was born and 20 years my senior on the timeline, I couldn’t help but be left with a melancholy feeling of life’s weight and heaviness on this man, who if you would have asked me when I was reading this, I thought he was 60. 43 years old, worn out and feeling his mortality closing in. 24, feeling worn out, my mortality feeling like it was closing in.

I didn’t suffer Kerouac’s fate. I stopped drinking, cleaned my life up, married, became a father, worked hard, continued my education nonstop, and avoided one fate in exchange for another: a life of excitement (and the rollercoaster of uncertainty) for a life of security (albeit perceived as boring from the outside). I’d make the same choice 100 out of 100, but in July 2019 I was starting to think about mortality differently, not in a “…better to burn out than to fade away” ethos, but from a human fragility point of view, I wasn’t going to live forever and what did I want to focus the last decades (God willing) of my life on.

The original purpose of this blog was to highlight the ongoing restoration of a 1973 Alfa Romeo that I planned to restore and take adventures within upon retirement. A funny thing happened on the way to the forum: My job changed radically in 2021; the old job morphed into a Chief Operating Officer role with a “growth company.”

Growth, a synonym for “your life is about to go on pause.” You sacrifice all your time, all your mental health, to grow a business for its primary shareholders and the growth of other’s wealth.

No one put a gun to my head, I knew what I was getting into, but it consumed me. The company changed at its core. I did it for as long as I could, June 2024. I hung in there to protect the team below me from the unraveling above me. No time for the car, barely enough time to eat and sleep, Satori was on hold.

December 2025. Much has changed. I’m about to turn 59, I’ve left the company I was at for over 30 years and joined a new one where I feel respected and appreciated. I’m able to do what I love and do it in a reasonable amount of time. Retirement? Not that far away, but not quite yet.

So, is Satori! still relevant? The short answer is yes. The same feelings exist I have to shrink my horizon, focus on fewer things, bring quality time to my personal projects, be intentional with how I allocate my time. The Alfa? 5 years have killed enthusiasm for that project, but some other motor vehicle awaits restoration, inspiration will come.

I’m going to use this blog as a time capsule to look back on and explore, hopefully in a much later time. If I don’t make it that long, it will give my family and friends something to explore from my shadowlands, the inner world I mostly live within as opposed to the facade the outside world sees.

My horse racing blog, The Turk, is alive and well and you can find that here. I have a Substack where I get introspectively religious, and you can find that here.

My social networks (IG my primary and Facebook) are locked down hard on privacy settings to keep prying working life associates’ out of my personal life. In retirement that will change. For now, if you’re in you’re in, if you want in, ask.

Thanks for reading.