People have been asking me,

“What now?”
“Do you miss the road?”
“What’s it like to be home after all that?”
“Have you settled in?”

 

I wanted to leave the blog as is. I like how it ended and didn’t want to push it. Notre Dame should stop playing when the regular season is over and not risk yet another humiliating defeat in a BCS bowl game. I thought of responding individually to the questions, but the number of people asking piled up. So here we are.

I was a shell of my former self when I hit the air mattress on my brother’s floor in Manhattan. I couldn’t get into my own bed until the first of September unless I felt like cuddling with the tall guy who had sub-letted from me. I woke up one morning on my brother's floor to the sounds of my six year-old nephew and four year-old niece playing “roller coaster.” Kiernan was dragging Maeve around in a chair, imitating the roller coaster DJ, while Maeve screamed appropriately. Meanwhile, my one year-old nephew, Tighe, built like a little boxer, had taken up the excitement and was running in wide circles around the apartment screaming “AAAAAHHHHHHH” as long as his little lungs would allow him. Seeing my family was wonderful after three and a half months and yet I longed to be in my own bed. Three days later I was in Kohler, WI.

I had been invited out by Nick and the Kohler engine guys to celebrate the fact that the engine had made it the whole way across the country without so much as a hiccup. I made a representational ride from the main road to the factory, where I was greeted by about two hundred employees of Kohler, all of them excited.

I walked into the factory to take a tour and guys turned from their work with huge smiles on their faces asking for my autograph. They had a look of recognition on their faces that created an out of body experience for me. I was one of them. But I’m the guy who grew up in an academic family; the guy who is pursuing acting in New York. In other words, I’m "white collar," aren’t I? If I think back, most of my jobs have been “blue collar” jobs, but I always felt like I was on the outside of that crowd. Now I’m an insider? I felt like I belonged there, and yet they weren’t responding to me, Lucas, the college graduate dork who got the tractor job. They were responding to the guy who made it across the country on a garden tractor, an unthinkable feat. I represented years of hard, monotonous work in a closed environment paying off. Their engine made it. Their engine proved itself. In a sense, they themselves had made it from coast to coast. And therefore, it was not me they responded to, but a projection of hard work paid off, a sense that what they did mattered. And so I had an out of body experience and was glad for it. I watched as my blue collar, tractor guy self greeted and shot the shit with men and women pounding screws into place on Kohler engines. A truly heart warming experience.

Oh, and then their was Whistling Straits. Matt, Cody, Ryan Ostrom (A Craftsman representative), two Kohler reps, Tom Cromwell (a president within Kohler) and I golfed Whistling Straits less than two weeks after the PGA championship was held there. I got my worst score this summer and experienced about 1750 of the 1800 bunkers on the course and had a great time. A defining moment for me was walking up a hill after playing a hole and seeing the PGA “leader board” ahead of me on the course. And my birdie on a par three.

The next morning, I was sitting on Cash again, mowing grass on the course. Not even Tiger can boast playing the course and then mowing the next day.

I traveled back to New York just long enough to realize I was home and then headed to Chicago where I found Cash sitting proudly at the Craftsman Experience, a new interactive display of Craftsman tools. One can literally garden, change tires on a racing car and pound nails into boards with a new hammer-gun in downtown Chicago. One can also watch videos of a dude riding a mower on highways across the country and see the tractor he road on, along with the shirt, shoes, hat and ear protection he wore. There was even trash from his last trip left in the cup holder. The mirror he held in his hand (before they actually mounted a mirror on Cash) is sitting in one of the jury-rigged compartments. I speak in the third person on purpose. Once again, I looked at the mower and thought, “That wasn’t me. No way. I could not have done that.”

Now I am truly home. Everything I own is on the floor in my room. It’s an overwhelming heap of clothing and swag I picked up along the way. I don’t know what to do with it.

I saw a picture of a highway on an album cover yesterday. The sun is setting in a hazy sky and telephone wires trail off into the distance. I studied the shoulder of the depicted road, the embankment next to the shoulder. Altogether, the scene presented an open road with no end in sight. My heart sank and then throbbed as if I were looking at a photograph of a lost lover. I know this road inside and out. I know every line on her face, every imperfection and every mysterious beauty within.

I want nothing more than to rest and recoup right now. So why is it that I can’t sit still? Why, after sitting still for so long can I not make it through a two hour movie? Perhaps because I was never truly sitting still. For the last three and a half months, I have been constantly on the move, if ever so slowly. I’m walking from place to place, person to person throughout New York, making plans and doing anything I can to distract myself. I’m not really home, not yet. I’m not really here. Something is trying to sink in. The stamp from my journey is imprinted on me, but I won’t look at it. And what does the imprint look like, and how have I changed?

I’m excited and scared. The terrain looks a lot different now. I don’t plan on going back to restaurant work anytime soon, but that means I have to focus on finding work elsewhere. As you know, I’m an actor, and finding or creating work as an actor is not easy. 

I dreamed last night that I was running a race. I knew that I was nowhere near the level of my competitors, but this knowledge brought me peace. I wasn’t competing with them, I was competing with myself. The gun fired, and I ran around the track, finishing somewhere in the middle. Let the winners celebrate their victory; I was a success because I had just held my own among professional runners. I wondered if I could have given even more during that race. I remembered that I had two more races to complete, and I started freaking out because I didn’t know where or when they were being held. I didn’t know if I had time to eat before my next race. I was lost.
And why was I lost?
Simple. Matt and Cody weren’t by my side giving me directions.

The landscape is new, and I’m excited and scared.