Stuck In The Passing Lane

Stuck in the Passing Lane is the true story of a man using all the dating tools developed during his twenty-three-year marriage to conduct live experiments on his newly divorced, Baby Boomer heart.

To avoid responding to the signals and attractions that produced Jed Ringel’s first marriage, he walls himself out of his interpersonal comfort zone, diving into relationships with women figuratively and literally foreign to his Brooklyn-born, middle-class Jewish origins. With the unsparing comments of his three teenage daughters as chorus, and his own brutally honest, often self-deprecating self-assessments as narrative, the story follows Jed as he lives everywhere from Russia to Spanish Harlem to New York’s Chinese immigrant community to Singapore, from a relationship with a member of Moscow’s intellectual elite to a barely literate but vastly streetwise Chinatown massage parlor queen, all in his quest for a new “chemistry,” one that doesn’t, in just a matter of time, become, for him, relationship déjà vu.

With stops along the way for a toupee, AA, being robbed outside Lenin’s favorite hotel, a pimping accusation, a life-threatening diagnosis, aging parents, and the death of his rescued Alaskan malamute Kobi who sees him through everything, Stuck in the Passing Lane charts Jed’s struggle to create a new user’s manual for his life.