One interesting effect of being both lazy and incurious as a younger fellow is that, having arrived in middle age, I now have a distinct hunger for experience. This is a good if belatedly-acquired characteristic, but like most good characteristics, it comes at a bit of a cost.

Last weekend, I attended the In Your Write Mind conference at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. I grant you that going to a writer's conference is not exactly an adventure by most people's standards, but I aimed to make it one, at least in the lowercase sense of the word, by traveling to it by train. My idea was to use the very fact of traveling to the conference, which is usually a tedious and uncomfortable slog up the Turnpike, into an experience worthy of writing about. I have always had a romantic fascination with travel by train, but except for a trip from D.C. to New York City and back about 25 years ago, my experience with distance travel by rail is nearly nil. I wanted to change that, so I booked a trip by Amtrak. I had vague notions of recording the phases of my journey, and of the conference, in this very blog -- a kind of traveler's journal, delivered in installments. As it happened, I didn't have time.

On the day in question, a Thursday, I worked until noon sharp, then jumped into my car, stopped at a thrift store and bought a second suitcase, in which I could pack the books I intended to offer for sale at the conference book signing scheduled for Saturday. From there I drove to Harrisburg, parked in a poorly constructed garage, and dragged my luggage to the train station in heat so godawful I was drenched in sweat by the time I traveled the short distance in question. (I actually had to change my clothes in the station restroom.) After that, I bought a bottle of iced tea and relaxed on the bench, thinking my adventure had begun. In fact it was only my troubles.

The train never arrived. That is to say, I gave up on it before it appeared. Seems the locomotive blew its motor somewhere west of Philadelphia, and after waiting around for a few hours in increasing dismay as repairs were effected, I began to realize that, factoring in the five hour travel time when the train finally did leave the Harrisburg station, I would arrive sometime around midnight instead of my planned seven o'lock. So I got a refund, dragged my luggage back to my car, and departed for Greensburg in my car, which I had just taken out of the shop the previous day and which I did not want to be using at all.

The trip was uneventful until I was about 45 miles short of town, when I had left the Turnpike for isolated country roads surrounded by thick woods. Then my battery light came on. As my battery was brand-new, installed literally the previous day, I suspected the alternator, but the alternator was also new. Needless to say, this made for a tense final hour or so of the journey, and I couldn't help but reflect on the fact that if the train had showed up on time, I wouldn't have had to deal with this shit.

I got to the hotel, settled in and decided to test the car by letting it sit and then restarting it and driving it locally. No battery light now, so I grabbed food and beer and went back to the hotel. The next morning I went about my writerly business, but realizing my teaching module ("Writing Violence") had been pushed up from Saturday to Friday, I had to spend some hours working on my presentation beforehand. As I did this, I lost a flash drive which contained a lot of backup writing material, and was never able to find it. This bothered me a lot more than it probably should have. So too did the fact that my module was put up against a Crime Scene House tour offered by the program: in the tour, you are shown simulated crime scenes and the forensic techniques used to gather evidence at them. I wanted to attend this tour, had signed up for it, and now had to compete with it. I lost. The previous year, my module was SRO. This time four people showed up. I attended a module afterwards, pitched an unpublished novel of mine to an agent (who requested the full manuscript), ate dinner in the dining hall, went back to my hotel for a few hours, and then returned to campus for a "Ghost Tour" which sounded really interesting. Seton Hill University looks like Hogwarts and its nearly as old: there is a lot of history there, and a lot of atmosphere, especially on a summer evening when the sky is a fiery orange-purple above the beautiful but haunting nun's cemetery built on the hill. The tour, however, proved to me more about the architecture of the main building than a series of ghost stories, and I confess some disappointment.

On Saturday I decided I'd best handle the car business. I had the alternator tested as soon as the nearest shop opened and lo, it was bad: bad at six months of use. Most alternators last the life of the vehicle: I was on my third in two years. And of course the local shops couldn't handle me, so I had to drive 30 miles to Monroeville to drop the damned thing off, taking an expensive Uber ride back to campus. I then attended a lecture by the guest lecturer R.G. Belsky, leaving when my phone rang and discovering my car was already ready to be picked up (if I'd known they worked that fast at the Monroeville Firestone, I'd have stayed in their lobby). I decided to finish the lecture first, but when I returned to the speaking hall Mr. Belsky was on the floor, having collapsed during the Q & A after his very interesting talk on, among other things, the Son of Sam case. It later turned out he was merely dehydrated, but for a time we didn't know if something really serious had happened to the man. Fortunately, the author John Fortunato and my editor Mike Dell jumped into action and in the end, all was well on that front. But it was a jarring experience to say the least.

I also discovered around this time that my friend and mentor, Pat Picciarelli, would not be joining Michael D. and myself for dinner as a storm on the previous night had caused flood damage to his home. As this dinner was one of the highlights of the trip, or was supposed to be, I was again disappointed, but trudged manfully to a panel called "Writing Crime" in which had been impressed to serve as a panelist. Because Mr. Belsky, the guest panelist of honor, was unavailable for obvious reasons, and because Mike Dell was seeing to him at the hospital, it fell upon me and three others to carry the event. Losing the guest of honor is always going to kill off a lot of attendance, and it didn't surprise me that the audience outnumbered the panel by the humbling margin of about two to one, no more. Although the discussion was lively, the cameras recording it malfunctioned, so any pearls of wisdom we might have dropped or been dropped upon us are probably lost to history.

At that point John Fortunato (a Tony Hillerman Prize winner, by the way, and all around good guy) drove me to pick up my car. When I asked if there were any reason my car might be eating alternators, which cost like $500 - 700 to replace, the mechanic said dryly, "Your car has 192,000 miles on it." I guess that is as much as an answer as I'm likely to get, but I'll nevertheless have to have my own hometown mechanic find out if there's a faulty voltage regulator or some other goddamned thing that has gone wrong and needs fixing.

That evening came the book signing. The parking lot was inexplicably nearly full when I arrived early at the theater and speaking hall just off campus, but I managed to get a space and set up just in time for a heavy rainstorm to ensure attendance at the lecture by Alexander Darwin would be dampened as a consequence, along with the subsequent foot traffic into the signing area. I nevertheless sold eight or nine books, which is not great by any means but not terrible, either. Still, compared to my last two signings it was again a bit of a letdown. I did avoid the parking tickets almost everyone else found out they'd received, however, when they left at the end of the evening.

The previous year, I had stayed in the dormitories on campus, which allowed for a lively evening social interaction with fellow conference-goers as well as students attending the Writing Popular Fiction Program. We ate delivery food, we drank beer, we talked about writing, movies, and life generally, and had a very good time. This year the school refused to rent the dormitories to the conference-goers for some reason, so that was not possible. I ended up in the never-before-seen-by-me commuter lounge with my editor Mike, talking for an hour or two, but it was hardly the same.

The next morning I decided I had best try and salvage as much of Sunday as I could, so I ate breakfast in the dining hall, said goodbye to Sally Bosco (organizer of the conference), John and Mike, and then hit the road. The trip back at least was drama-free, and I even managed to secure a parking space directly in front of my apartment. So ended my "adventure," which turned out to be merely an experience, and not a terribly positive one at that.

Obviously in life, shit happens. Two years ago, on my first night in Montreal, my rental car was stolen off the street, necessitating a lot of improvisation if I wanted to salvage the trip. I was successful, but the stress of dealing with the theft certainly added a dimension to my vacation I could have done without. In this case, I was not really on vacation, but it was supposed to be a "pleasure before business" trip, and by that standard it was more or less definitely a failure. When I came home, after unpacking and relaxing for a few hours, I actually roused myself and took a hike in the deep woods, trying to sweat out the toxins that disappointment likes to hide in the body. I reflected too on the fact that trying to bring a little more adventure and "experience" into a life defined by routine (work, writing, exercise, a little socializing) is no proof from misfortune. Indeed, the more chances we take in life, the more opportunities we say "yes" to, however pedestrian they may be, the greater the likelihood that we will bang our metaphorical shins in the process.

I mention this because, even though it is all quite obvious, I have noticed in myself and others a very distinct habit of using negative experiences as an excuse to avoid breaking from routines, taking chances, etc. I cannot tell you the number of times I have attempted to visit a new hiking trail, or said "yes" to an offer of a getaway weekend, or plotted a day trip or RSVP'd to an unexpected invite at a faraway location, only to meet with some unpleasant experience, or experiences, that soured me on saying "yes" the next time. There are times in such circumstances that I seem almost to be waiting for the other shoe to drop, and feel what might be called disappointment that it did not: the lazy, incurious part of me that I thought faded out of existence in my middle thirties evidently lingers like a ghost in my conscious mind: not powerful enough to be called a poltergeist, too transparent to prevent me from breaking routines, but persistent enough to make me hesitate before even minor deviations from my groove. In a sense this ghost is the "negative Nelly in Sector 7G" who advises me to take counsel of my fears and my social anxieties and my tendency to catastrophize ("What if the apartment catches fire while I'm away?"), and just stay home where it's safe. I have discovered that people like myself, who have social anxiety but for the greater part of their lives never knew it, always look for excuses not to do things, and when they in fact overcome that anxiety and partake in said things, look for things to go wrong so as to justify their reluctance after the fact. The routines that anxiety-ridden people like myself build (and this includes watching TV shows and movies over and over again and re-reading books; even for returning to the same topics of conversation again and again with friends and family) are not for convenience or organization: they exist solely for comfort. In a routine there are no surprises, good or bad, only outcomes which are already known. And this not only discourages deviating from routine, it is the very opposite of adventure, which is defined as "an unusual or exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity."

If you're reading this, the chances are that you are a bookworm, and if so, probably share some of my eccentricities: you may be an introvert, or like myself, an "introverted extrovert" who is both eager to be among people and desperate to avoid them, who enjoys socializing but needs significant recharge time in solitude afterwards. You may have to force yourself to do anything new, and probably experience high levels of discomfort while you do it...even if it is inherently enjoyable. You may have a well-thumbed card catelogue of excuses you can reach for whenever you're offered a chance for a trip or a weekend getaway or those karate or knitting classes or a seat at that concert or ballgame. If so, you have my sympathy whole and entire, but not if you choose to live a half-life in consequence, staring at the world from behind your double-plied living room window. Wiring like ours provides an explanation for our reluctance to engage, but it is not an excuse not to engage. Our terms of engagement are necessarily different, of course, but in the end we are offered the same choice as everyone else: spectate or get on the field. When you come down to the last act of your life, you may find the bitterest regrets lie not in the chances you took that crapped out and left you penniless or stranded somewhere, but the ones you passed up out of cowardice masquerading as apathy.

I had a disappointing and depressingly expensive three and a half day weekend. There was no aspect of it that exceeded or even really met my expectations. I came home feeling relieved that I simply managed to avoid any more disappointment than I had already experienced, and my initial reaction was, "OK, if that's how you want to reward me for trying something different, I guess I won't fucking bother." This sort of pouting is understandable, but like all sulking it is meant to pass quickly, not to become a lifestyle. So despite the discouragement and the expense, I am already planning my next experience, my next "lower-case" adventure. Dunno exactly what it will be, or when it will take place, but the fact I'm not using it as an excuse to withdraw turtle-like into my shell shows at least that I have grown a little in the last twenty years. And if that's all I take away from my failed adventure, then perhaps it wasn't so much of a failure after all.