Going off on a little three-state motorcycle ramble over the holiday.

One of the reasons I consider a 600-mile sortie “little”:

Almost exactly three years ago, my college roommate and lifelong pal Tom Gillespie and I embarked on a motorcycle trip through Ecuador. We were celebrating our 50th birthdays by testing our nerve—pretty thoroughly, as it would turn out.

I ran across my story about it recently, “Fear at Fifty.” It begins:

Tom hit the dog and went down hard.

He was right in front of me, but I actually had time, as I swerved around the wreck on the wet mountain curve and looked for flat enough place to park the motorcycle, to think: And here I thought getting robbed two days ago in Cuenca would be the low point of our trip.

“Adventure travel” seems packaged and safe until you’re in the pouring rain in the Amazon jungle with an injured buddy and a bike that won’t start, a satellite phone that won’t work, and a 20,000-foot Andes mountain looming between you and a warm bed.

The story is also captured in this video my daughter pulled together from video footage we shot.

Happy Memorial Day, friends. And as Tommy and I tell each other, superstitiously now: Keep the shiny side up, and the rubber side down.

“Golf fans have been left gutted for Tiger Woods after the golf great’s injury woes resurfaced in the first round of the PGA Championship …”

“My Tinder date stood me up and I was gutted—so I got the perfect revenge on him.”

“A Dunedin mother says she is ‘gutted’ by the extensive damage caused to her son’s car after it was stolen by a 12-year-old.”

“Customers ‘gutted’ that popular Cornwall cafe Canteen closed with ‘immediate effect.'”

“A gutted [U.S. Sen. Chris] Murphy took to the floor and demanded that lawmakers do what they failed to do after 26 students and educators were killed in Newtown, the area he represented as a congressman.”

Former CEO Andy Dunn, in the long, wide, smooth wake of a $310 million payday from selling his company to Walmart, is out with a book called Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind, through which, as he tells The Wall Street Journal, he wants to set about “normalizing disclosure of mental illness, particularly in the workplace.”

That notion unhappily calls to mind a passage from H.L. Mencken’s 1920 essay about America’s “Cult of Hope”:

“Unluckily, it is difficult for a certain type of mind to grasp the concept of insolubility,” Mencken wrote, in his characteristically truculent style. “Thousands of poor dolts keep on trying to square the circle; other thousands keep pegging away at perpetual motion. … These are the optimists and chronic hopers of the world … It is the settled habit of such credulous folk to give ear to whatever is comforting; it is their settled faith that whatever is desirable will come to pass.”

As the son of the late Carol Murray, a brilliant and loving woman who had mental illness and died of it, few developments would be more desirable to me than “normalizing the disclosure of mental illness” in the workplace.

Alas, few circles seem less square-able to me than that one. Why? Organizations value, in leaders and workers alike, sanity above all things: reliability, predictability, dependability, repeatability and stability. Can we imagine an organization that would not prize such traits in most of their people? More to the point, can we imagine a company that could embrace their opposite?

Meanwhile, American workplaces are teeming with ambitious people, who, no matter how “normalized” mental illness is, will always find a way to step on the discloser’s back, with a remark, a forefinger silently circling the ear or just a raised eyebrow that says: Boss, you know I love Andy—love him!—but are we sure we can depend on him to make the right call under pressure? Or, Sandy is the best, especially when she’s “on”; but do we really want her managing people?

I sincerely offer these thoughts not as a final word, but as a challenging first salvo, for readers to describe to me how it could possibly work to have a large bank or a manufacturer or an airline or a school full of people up and down the hierarchy, openly disclosing their bipolar disorder, drug and alcohol addiction, borderline personality disorder, severe anxiety disorder, dissociative disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADHD, PTSD and psychosis. And I offer the thoughts in hopes that I might learn about some ways mental illness is already being accommodated in workplaces.

But my question is: Destigmatizing mental illness generally is difficult enough. Normalizing it in the workplace: As humane and sane as that sounds, is it reasonable to expect?

And if we conclude that it’s not, maybe we can start thinking about what else might be done to make workplaces easier to live in for people for whom living isn’t easy.