Trip announcement, 2011 Happy Hour Spot #3 (see #5 and #4), and Cancun coverage still to come.

For now, some thoughts I forgot to publish yesterday:

It’s been a mellow and quiet morning getting out of Philadelphia. I’m currently in route to Atlanta and the sun is rising out the windows across the aisle to the left. I can see the blue and green and orange colors, but it’s still pitch black to my right, out the window that currently faces west.

The man in front of me is being a little inconsiderate: It’s an empty plane and he just reclined his seat in front of me, the two seats to his left open and available. I suppose I could move to one of the two empty seats to my left, but I prefer the window and I’m awake, writing – I’m not reclining my chair and going to sleep.

An empty early-morning flight means there is no one to talk to, yet somehow it seems appropriate, the calm before the storm. The quiet/dark atmosphere puts me in a pensive mood, and I’ve spent the morning reading the papers, drinking coffee and thinking back to the days when I used to look up to journalists.

I wrote a piece for famtripper.com recently about the “celebration” of the Titanic’s 100-year anniversary, as well as commentary on the recent cruise ship disaster and how I can’t let it discourage the lifestyle in which I believe so deeply.

At any moment it could all end, I tell myself, no moment is safer than the next. The papers this morning reported on the sinking ship, the rising tensions with Iran, Romney’s tax uncertainty, a 35.7% obesity rate, nuclear reactor trouble in Washington, troops urinating on dead bodies.

It’s so incredibly noisy out there – it seems the drama drives our world. But I’ve got music in my ears, my notebook out and my pen moving, and I’m on the threshold of adventure, as Jimmy would say.

There are times when I feel like giving in, when I feel like hanging it all up and getting a “real job” and settling down – perhaps find a place I belong and move on to experience other aspects of life.

I had thought this was part of the plan of moving back East, I thought maybe I had found a path where this could be done gradually and gracefully, yet as with most things in life, it hasn’t played out the way I romanticized it in my head.

Some of it is my own fault, chalk the rest up to timing and the cold truths of life. I can fight it all I want, but the restlessness I feel when I’m not on the road points very clearly to the fact that now is no time to throw it all away – I need to go harder than ever.

By the way, you can kiss the fiction funk I was going through goodbye, although I’m not releasing anything for a few weeks, at least.

There is still much work to be done.