Little Fish, Big River, Bigger City

I woke up around 3 a.m. last night thinking it was time to get up for the gym. I always marvel how utterly wide awake I can be in those moments but then, after a long struggle to fall back asleep, I'm as groggy as all get out two hours later. I'm sure there's a huge scientific explanation for why I wake up in the first place, why I feel fully rested at 3 a.m. and then why I feel fully utterly exhausted two hours later after even more rest. Whatever, I don't care about the scientific explanation for it...all I care about are the big ideas that are in my head when I wake up at that hour.

Yea, I wake up with some cool thought and it's just sticking right there in front of my brain taunting me to try and forget about it. Today's 3 a.m. thought was all about learning. I thought about how I can take each day of my life and actually learn something. In a sense, I could create my own "dream curriculum" and pretty much attend the classes of my choice at a very cheap but very good university...The University of Scott!!!

I'd attend U of A (University of AxL) except the classes don't interest me much: Sleeping 101, Napping 202, Snoring 305, Picky Eating 102 and How To Be Cute 403. No, I'd rather set up my own schedule at my own school.

As I laid awake in the wee hours, I thought about all the cool things I wished that I could take back in college but they weren't offered: sailing, golf, P.E. for the heck of it, astronomy, model boat building, surfing, adventure reading for pleasure, guitar, becoming an author, bicycle maintenance, dog walking, etc. etc. etc.

For some reason it dawned on me that I could make more headway by simply laying out my days as if I were attending college again. I can simply schedule my "classes" and at the end of each class, assign myself some homework which has to get done. I would still have time for a day job if I go to night school. Luckily, the Dean is really cool about having a wide array of classes for those wishing to attend night school.

With the help of Outlook's Calendar system, I've now set up a full schedule for the next two semesters. This really rocks as it's got some advantages over the way I've lived my life "on a whim" for the last couple of years. I was happy to just float along and chill with whatever happened to be floating in my proximity. After floating for a bit though, I kind of felt like I needed to take a rest and find an island and set up a camp rather than continue to dog paddle incessantly. To find an island, I'm going to had to swim a bit and of course I needed to navigate to the nearest palm trees I could see on the horizon.

Oh man! There's the bell and I gotta run because it's time for my 1:00 Screenwriting Class followed by my Small Business Plan Class at 3:00! I'd love to hang out and get pizza tonight but I've got to cram for my electric guitar recital on Sunday. You gotta love this school, huh? I wonder if it's true that the diplomas are made using fingerpaints...

Oddly, the act of writing a book about a cross country bicycle journey is almost more difficult than taking the journey itself. Once I was out on the road and my wheels were in motion during my ride, it was impossible to just sit in some strange place and do nothing for long. The road was always calling and I knew there was an end that I had to reach and see: that place where the asphalt stopped and the Pacific Ocean began. Along the journey, I had imagined that writing the book about it all would be the simple part. Not so. It's much more difficult when you're sitting in a comfortable apartment to just let the task slide as little daily things pop up all around you. When you're on the road, you have nothing but the option to ride. There are no distractions and no other purpose exists at the moment for you. Another thing that kept me going on the ride was knowing that people were reading this with the expectations of being taken on a grand journey, day by day as I made my way and posted to my journal. I simply couldn't bear the thought of leaving people hanging out there wondering where I was, what I was doing or how far I had gone.

In the middle of the last night, I woke up to the thought that I should take everyone along with me on the journey of writing a book. While it's not nearly as exciting, I believe it is just as full of lessons. Every journey is a learning experience in some way. So, from here on out until I finish the book, I'll be posting a lot about the process that I'm going through...what goes through my head, how I tackle each obstacle, how I struggle through distraction and maintain a desire to accomplish yet another goal.

So, here's where I am. I'm working on the rough draft and have finished the Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and I'm midway through Chapter 3. I've discovered that an agent wants a proposal which I had no clue about how to write. I found an outline for a proposal and am working today on writing one up. In addition to giving an agent and a publisher an idea about what your book is about, the proposal is also a personal business plan of sorts, an outline to follow so that one can finish writing in a semi-organized matter. Here and there, I've taken some time to read reviews and research in bookstores about other books concerning riding across America. Oddly, the criticisms were somewhat the same. It seems that books of this type are criticized for two reasons. First, an author may end up writing too much about the technical aspects or "how to" of a ride. This bores the readers looking for insight into the emotional aspects of the journey. It lacks the reasons behind going, the personal epiphanies which come to light and the soul-searching questions that get asked and answered. Second, many criticisms concern books that go the other direction and lack any sort of "technical how to" of taking on a ride like this. In light of this, I'm going to attempt to balance the two out and write as much about "how" I did this technically so others can possibly enjoy the same type of ride without the painful mistakes I made in addition to writing about the deeper stuff of self-discovery one achieves when taking on something that is far beyond their capabilities.

I'll admit it right now: I was out of my league almost the entire time on this ride. Looking back, I'm actually not even really sure how on earth I made it. Ignorance, in this case, did not turn out to be bliss. However, ignorance did serve a purpose. By not researching what it takes to do this sort of ride, I went off with a happy go lucky attitude that it would be a piece of cake. In many, many, many ways it actually was a piece of cake. I'm not sure that I've ever been happier as when I was riding along and it hit me that I was really, really, really doing it. I was in the middle of making a long-time dream come true. On the flip side, had I known how often trucks would rush past me, how often drunk drivers would nearly take me out and how incredibly cold the entire ride would be, I may not have ever even started.

Here again, I find myself in the midst of something beyond me. I love writing and maybe that's enough to finish this first book and get it on the market somehow. Heck, I don't really love biking all that much and I was able to do something pretty big with it. However, I continually find myself thinking that I don't have what it takes to write a good book that people will buy and enjoy. I'm trying to remind myself that if I don't try though, I won't find out if I do or don't have what it takes.

So, here's today's process for those who wish to follow along. I'm sitting down and ignoring whatever else in life pretends to be pending. The blinders are going on and the earplugs are going in so that I can focus in on the task at hand for a few hours. Today, I'll unpack the items I mailed home so that I can make lists for the "technical" aspects of the book regarding what I took along, what was needed, what I couldnt' do without, what I thought I needed but sent back, what I hauled the entire trip but never touched, what I never possessed during the ride but wished I had. Once the "lists" are done, I'll be going through my journal entries back to the beginning and expanding on them to create more chapters. I'm also going to give myself a deadline of March 31 to complete the rough draft for editorial review. This means I'll have to write every day...a lot...in order to get it done. But if I don't put a deadline on it, I'll simply drift in and out of writing with no urgency and no purpose to finishing. So there it is, I've thrown out a goal and a date for public viewing yet again.

There is simply something so driving behind doing it this way. It's one thing to have a goal in your own head where it can sleep for as long as it wants. It's another to say one out loud, in writing so that if you don't go after it, by default you become hot air. I usually try to put something in this journal each time that makes someone go "ooh" or "aha!" or "wow" so my apologies if this little entry really does nothing much at all. On the other hand, perhaps it sheds some light on how you might take something on of your own. It's a bit more of the "how to" of goal hunting: state the goal, focus, break it down into easy to chew chunks, put a deadline on it, force yourself down the path to get rolling and then simply stick with it bit by bit, day after day. Yea, it's that simple.

A lesson from the road: a continual thought that struck me time and time again while riding was how amazing it is that just tiny, miniscule little efforts consistently applied can take someone so far. I'm not really sure how many times my little legs pushed each pedal around it's tiny circle which turned the wheels mile after mile. At some point I'll calculate it all out to get an estimate of the number of pedal strokes it takes to ride 3,674.3 miles. The point is, one can't just push a pedal once and have it take you from coast to coast. You've got to push down on the pedals again and again, thousands of times so that the little "doable" efforts add up to the much larger "seemingly not doable" goal. Okay, time to go and pedal the keyboard for a bit...thanks for bearing with me and best of luck if you decide to take something on of your own. Let me know if you do because I love hearing about people who wake up and start to go after stuff they've always dreamed of. That's what makes writing all of this worthwhile for me...knowing that I made some small difference in the world somewhere, somehow...and kind of like pedaling across America, I know all the little stuff eventually adds up.

You gotta love the imagination of children as there's just something about it that is heartwarmingly uninhibited and entirely lacking the fear of foolishness that we seem to gain as we evolve(?) into adulthood. This morning as I was walking AxL through my neighborhood, we stood at a corner. I asked him if he wanted to go left, straight or right at an intersection. He chose to go right. After walking a few steps, our day was made. Well at least MY day was made when we happened upon an entire half block colorfully filled with recent artwork by what appeared to be two young girls. I would like to think that "KS" and "Elsie" were a couple of bored housewives who took it upon themselves to bust it out and go nuts with every shade of sidewalk chalk but I fear that kind of thing just doesn't happen in this day and age.

No, this was the work of children alright. The squares making up the sidewalk were filled to the brim with flowers, sunshine, trees and best of all, a creative honesty that makes the mind reel. One square was "K.S's Restrant" which shared half of its square with "Elsie's Restrant." It even said "THANK YOU!" to all would be patrons. Next to that were two squares, each containing renderings of smiling girls that put the Mona Lisa's tiny grin to shame. I spent a good ten minutes looking at all the unabashed joie de vivre displayed for full on public viewing. It was hard to pick a favorite out of the many choices: do I go with the airplane and city motif bearing the verbage, "ROME IS WEIRD..." or do I go with the ever-beckoning square that simply says, "If you love someone, step here!"

Sometimes I wish I could still understand the mind of a child like I could when I WAS a child myself. You see, there was this "thing" stretching for nearly the entire block and I simply couldn't figure it out but I'm sure it had a perfectly acceptable explanation if I saw it through childlike vision. It appeared to be either a one hundred foot long pink, peach and purple phallic symbol or else it was a rendering of a happy giant worm. I decided to keep it rated-G by figuring it was the latter. So now what?

Yea, you guessed it...I'm inspired by all this and my creative juices are flowing. I'm going to take a risk of sorts and live on the artistic edge for a spell. While unpacking things in my new apartment, I ran across a box of pastel chalk which was left over from having a telephone sporting a blackboard which is now a forgotten casualty of a long gone yardsale. Oh no...you're not going to.... Yup, one fully grown man and his zenlike dog, currently living in San Francisco, decided that life was just too darn short to never have done artwork on a sidewalk. So there we were, an unlikely pair, boy and dog...I with chalk in hand and AxL with treats in possession, sitting on Sacramento St. in the 3100 block. We had smiles on our faces as I colored like a five year old fool trapped in a thirty-eight year old body while AxL munched away wondering why I'd gone off the deep end.

I drew with all my heart and scribbled with all of my soul for a good while before I finished with a materpiece that kicked ass over most any cave paintings. There are now crude stars, dolphins and stick-dogs chasing stick squirrels about. Sailboats are now floating across concrete oceans to palm tree asphalt islands splayed across the formerly dull gray expanse in front of my building. Seeing as it's really hard to put into words how doing something like this can make you feel, I'll opt to just dare you to do the same to see how you feel. You'll probably feel quite a bit younger, in fact you might even be giggling to yourself as you imagine everyone who might walk past your masterpiece admiringly. I doubt that the MOMA will be calling and begging me to do an original installation anytime soon but that's cool. I think that smaller independent works like this have even more meaning.

So, now it's time to ask, "what if?"

"What if, what?" you say, perplexed and stymied.

What if the whole world had "sidewalk chalk art day?" I say. What if all the grown ups took 20 minutes out of our day to just sit down with kids and dogs to make some simple art. What if all the leaders and generals stopped thinking about blowing up the planet long enough to scribble out some tulips with the children of the country they want to bomb? What if it all started from the off chance that AxL decided to take a right turn at an intersection? What if "KS" and "Elsie" inadvertently inspired all of us to set aside our grown up lives full of conflict and strife long enough to feel the joy of simple art? I don't know that it will ever happen. In fact I highly doubt it, being the jaded person I've grown to be at times. But wow, it sure is nice to dream about, isn't it? I can only hope you dare to dream and draw a bit, too. Sidewalk chalk...if you love someone, step here.

No, no, no...not THAT kind of proposition, puh...lease...no, I'm talking about a book proposal. It might help to refer to the first definition from Webster's: "to form or put forward a plan or intention."Aaaah, there, see? THAT kind of proposal. (phew!) Here's how it all came about. As many of you know, I've done this silly bike ride and told everyone and their brother that I'm going to write a book about the whole crazy thing. I did the ride without really knowing how to even change a tire before I started. Now I'm writing a book without really knowing the first thing about writing a book beyond how to type. I contacted an agent based on the referral of friends recently. I find it only fitting that when he politely asked via email for a proposal that I responded in my childlike manner reminiscent of the movie, Big, starring Tom Hanks.

There's a scene in Big, where Hanks aka "Josh Baskin" is running around FAO Scwartz with a laser tag game on. He bumps into the president of the toy company he's working for and the president alludes to the fact that you have to walk around the store because you can see things that "you don't get on a marketing report."

"What's a marketing report???" asks Hanks innocently.

"EXACTLY!!!" responds the president.

Yea, so here I am, all full of myself that I completed this ride and I'm going to write this amazing book. An agent asks me for a proposal and I respond with "um, well, uh...what goes in a proposal???" You guessed it...I didn't hear back from him. I believe he's probably still shaking his head and muttering "heaven help this guy!"

Ooooh!!! But all is not lost. You see, I'm a virtual genius! In fact, we ALL are virtual geniuses. That's the beauty of living today and being able to access the internet from any computer or public library. At our little, teeny-tiny fingertips is pretty much ALL of world knowledge (and not so knowledge) on every subject. Think about it...basically everything that we as the human species knows information wise, education wise, knowledge wise...it's all there if you dig for a little while. You can pretty much look up ANYTHING your heart desires to look up. So, off I went and lo and behold I found a website with a fantastic page dedicated to writing a non-fiction book proposal. Wow. It was almost TOO easy.

So now, armed with this new information and a recommended book on the way from good ol' Amazon.com, I'm getting ready to write up and send off my first proposal.

So why write about it here? I guess I write here only when I have a point or a lesson or both for the most part. So what's the lesson in this??? Kurttila isn't too bright??? No, while that may be true at any given point in time, the lesson is we can ALL do whatever we wish, reach for any dream, chase any goal or acquire any knowledge easier than ever in the history of mankind. Now...maybe I'm being a bit too melodramatic about all of this but if you just stop rolling your eyes for a minute and really, really, (and I do mean REALLY) think about it for a moment, if you're reading this...you are connected to the internet and you can absolutely research, discover, learn and attempt to do most anything in life. I say attempt because while many of us would like to be major league baseball all-stars, just knowing how to do something isn't ever enough. However, the thing that usually stops a lot of dreams is simply having the dream without really knowing how to chase that dream. Before now, writing a book proposal for me would've been like trying to ride across the country on a bike without a map for lack of a better analogy. With the internet, all one has to do is look it up, print it out, follow the recipe, put a little of yourself into it and voila!!! You are chasing a dreaml!!!

Okay, so none of you are laughing because this isn't so entertaining. Well, for entertainment purposes, let me just give you a small example of things I ran across during my time at Amazon.com while reviewing websites that applied to our Associates Program which allows you to link your site to ours for the sale of products related to your content. During the "heyday" of the internet, I would sometimes spend most of the day scouring through hundreds upon hundreds of applications on every subject and I do mean every subject. There are sites out there that range from how to collect beanie babies to how to perform your own amputations at home. Yep...that's right...got a finger you feel you don't need? There is a site out there telling you how to rid yourself of the pesky thing. You can also learn to make wine, play a musical instrument and one of my favorites, I actually sucked so much at basketball with the gang that I read a site for a full month on how to improve my game. I think it helped a bit but then again I'm a dreamer. There are sites out there that tout why Jessica Simpson' kicks Britney Spears' ass and there are sites on perpetual motion machines. Put them together and Jessica Simpson perpetually kicks Britney Spears' ass.

(Are you laughing yet?) You can learn how to invest and you can buy most anything at Amazon.com and you can definitely bid to buy most anything you probably want or want and don't need on Ebay.com, not to mention you can sell most anything you wanted but found you didn't need.

Yea, the web is serious brain fodder and seeing that I could probably spend a lifetime telling you about all the sites that you can look up on your own, I'm going to propose again. I propose that your exercise for today is that you take the time to look up something on the internet about one dream you've had your whole life but have never gone after it. Start with Google and go from there. Feel free to email me, scottkurttila@hotmail.com, if you think that nothing exists regarding your dream and I'll even pitch in a bit and help you look just to prove my point that the knowledge you need is out there and all you need to do is add the effort once you get the info.

Life is short and it takes time to become a rockstar, an astronaut, a mountain climber, a cross-country cyclist or a cpa. Okay, okay...so maybe we don't all have the dream of becoming a cpa but it takes all kinds, right? Oh, and if you have absolutely no dreams, no clue, no idea, not even a hint at what you should do with your life, why not start by clicking here on the "what should I do with my life?" site? With that, I bid you so long as I'm right in the middle of something I can't quite recall. Oh...right...proposing. I guess that means I need to stop checking out Britney and get back to work.