Mickey Mahan: Riding and Writing the Line
An August morning in 2024, inside a home writing studio filled with the inspirational totems of a long and restless life, Mickey Mahan sits comfortably among his thoughts part poet, part painter, part musician, and entirely himself. Known online as “Seadog Mickey HaHa Mahan,” he carries the air of someone who has lived many lives without ever fully settling into just one.
Mahan’s story does not unfold in a straight line. Instead, it loops and veers through rebellion, spiritual searching, working-class grit, and ultimately, a surprising sense of belonging behind the wheel of a city bus. Along the way, he discovered something essential: inspiration is not something to chase. It’s something to notice.
“I’m a Finger Lakes boy,” Mahan says, grounding his identity in geography as much as memory. Born July 19, 1954, and raised in Geneva, New York, at the northern tip of Seneca Lake, he grew up in a household that blended discipline with unpredictability. His mother, a Syracuse native, worked as a registered nurse. His father, by contrast, defied easy categorization. “He could do and did just about anything,” Mahan recalls. From working as a telephone lineman to owning and successfully running Harman’s Sport Shop for nearly two decades, his father embodied a rugged versatility. He was also an avid outdoorsman kayaking more than 70 rivers across the country and even navigating the Grand Canyon in his 60s. That spirit of movement and challenge would echo later in Mahan’s own life. Still, as a young man, Mahan did not fit neatly into expectations. “I guess it’s fair to say I was a bit of a misfit,” he says with a laugh. He suspects his high school graduation may have been less about academic achievement and more about administrative relief. “I always thought they fudged a few grades to get rid of me.”
It wasn’t until community college that something clicked. A literature class introduced Mahan to the Beat Generation, specifically through a biography of Jack Kerouac by Ann Charters. He had never heard of Kerouac before. But the idea of the “Beatnik” restless, searching, unconventional struck a deep chord. “It really turned me on,” he says. “I got bit by the Kerouac bug.” Soon after, in 1975, Mahan and a childhood friend packed into a 1962 Chevy Nova and headed west. The trip was more than a road adventure; it was an initiation into a way of living defined by motion and curiosity. They traveled to Northern California, then looped back along a southern route. But for Mahan, one trip wasn’t enough. “I couldn’t sit still,” he says. For the next decade, he crisscrossed the country repeatedly West Coast, Midwest, New England, absorbing experiences, collecting impressions, and perhaps searching for something he couldn’t yet name.
Eventually, motion caught up with him. Mahan describes reaching a breaking point that led him to admit himself into a mental health clinic for six weeks. He is quick to clarify, with humor, that he went voluntarily. But beneath the laughter is the recognition of a turning point. “It cleared my head,” he says. What followed was unexpected: a pull toward religious life. Mahan began exploring the Catholic priesthood, connecting with the Missionary Service of the Holy Trinity. This path led him to LaSalle University in Philadelphia, where he studied philosophy as preparation for seminary life. For the first time, he found himself fully engaged intellectually. “I loved it. I was in my element,” he says. Philosophy opened doors that had previously felt closed, and he thrived academically. Yet even here, the path was not straightforward. His “checkered background,” as he puts it, initially kept him from being fully accepted into the community preparing for priesthood. Though he was eventually invited to join, something had shifted. “I decided it wasn’t for me,” he says simply. And just like that, he stepped away.
What followed was a period of uncertainty familiar to many but rarely described with such candor. Mahan worked as a roofer briefly. “I learned very quickly roofing was not for me,” he says. He applied to Syracuse University, earned acceptance into a master’s program in English literature, and even taught freshman writing courses. But again, something didn’t stick. After a year, he left. For the next three years, he lived a patchwork existence, taking jobs through a day labor agency shoveling sidewalks, pounding nails, working in restaurants. One job, however, stood out: running a hot dog cart at the corner of Salina and Washington Streets in downtown Syracuse. “I loved it,” he says. “The smell of hotdogs in the air, the sound of the city it was a great job.” Still, unfinished business lingered. He returned to Syracuse University and completed his master’s degree, only to realize once more that teaching was not his future.
The breakthrough came not through ambition, but chance. Sitting in a café in Armory Square, scanning the want ads, Mahan noticed an opening for part-time bus drivers. The pay was good, training was provided, and he had little to lose. “I found my vocation by default,” he says. What began as a temporary solution became a 28-year career. Driving a bus, he discovered, offered something few other jobs could: an intimate, ever-changing view of the city and its people. “Every time I opened the door of the bus, it was inspiration tsunami,” he says. Passengers came and went, each carrying fragments of stories. The city unfolded in layers its rhythms, its moods, its quiet moments and sudden bursts of humanity. “It was like being given the key to the city,” Mahan says.
It was during his years as a bus driver that Mahan’s creative life truly flourished. He began writing again this time with urgency and consistency. The material was endless. A gesture, a conversation, a fleeting image, all of it became fodder for poetry. Where others might see routine, Mahan saw narrative. The job offered stability, too: good pay, benefits, even a uniform he describes with affection. What had started as a placeholder became a home. “I thought I’d do it until I figured out what I really wanted to do,” he says. “And 28 years later, I was still doing it.”
Mahan eventually retired from full-time driving, though he continued part-time work until the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted everything. When university shuttle routes were eliminated, so was his remaining work. “I could’ve taken more work in the city,” he says, “but I had enough.” And so, he stepped away for good.
Today, Mahan’s days are filled with creative projects. He writes poetry regularly, often alternating between different manuscripts. One project, a collaborative short story effort with a friend, unfolds more slowly. For Mahan, the act of writing itself is fluid and unforced. “Poetry doesn’t take long,” he says. “I write on and off on alternate days.” His current projects reflect both his humor and his philosophical leanings. One manuscript, titled argle-bargle, was inspired by a word his wife casually mentioned one evening. Meaning nonsensical or garbled talk, the term immediately sparked his imagination. “That’s all I needed,” he says. “Out of nowhere, this term was inspirational.”
Another project, words, words, words, borrows its title from Hamlet and draws from everyday observations. One poem, for example, emerged from watching an elderly man carefully carry a banana peel across a bus station, treating it almost like a cherished object. “That’s interesting,” Mahan remembers thinking. And from that moment, a poem was born. He recalls waiting for a bus near a Jewish cemetery early in the morning. Over time, the setting began to speak to him -- the cawing of crows, the shifting clouds, the quiet emergence of sunlight. “It was just captivating,” he says. He began writing poetry right there, at the bus stop. “You don’t have to go looking for inspiration,” Mahan explains. “What you have to do is be awake.”
Around his neck, Mahan wears a collection of objects that serve as both talismans and storytelling devices: a bosun’s whistle, a mermaid charm, a medallion inscribed with “Refuse to Sink,” a laughing Buddha, and even a ship’s wheel bottle opener. Each carries meaning. The whistle, he says, is used “to call laughter from the marrow of tired bones.” The mermaid keeps “the mystery of the sea alive.” The medallion is a reminder to endure. The Buddha reflects his sense of humor “a belly bursting with the Cosmic Joke.” And the bottle opener? “Well,” he says, smiling, “you never know when a beer bottle’s gonna float by.”