I was due to start work yesterday, fresh from seven weeks away.
It’s not that I was nervous about going back to work… but a bit hesitant about diving in and trying to drink from the firehose. Didn’t matter, in the end, as I came upon a jury duty summons while sifting through the pile of mail which accrued during our holiday. So I sat there today, reading, working on Keaton’s last video, thinking. I thought a lot about the trip; how lucky we were to be able to take it, how smoothly it went, how it managed to change my perspective just a bit. To a degree, I think I was wanting to run away from normal… run away and take shelter in the little family we’ve built. Being there, hidden away in a box just the four of us, was blissfully awesome. To function so highly together, to enjoy our own company… something about it was almost therapeutic. Sorry, I could talk about it for paragraphs. I’ll stop.
So I whiled away the day at the county courthouse. I met a woman, I figure she was about 300lbs, although I’m not sure how here weight is relevant. She was complaining bitterly about the whole thing. “I don’t know why they keep us so long,” she lamented. “They ain’t never gonna pick me, my husband is a convicted felon and my dad was too.” This left me, not being a guy who runs with many felons, lacking a proper response. It’s so tempting, to slip into some least-common-denominator type conversation. I could’ve said, “I watched a Dateline about felons once,” or, “I learned about felonies in Civics class,” y’know, to establish some common ground. Instead I just found myself slightly sad that she was registered to vote. For new readers, here’s the part of almost every paragraph I write where I go back and dilute my own writing by playing devil’s advocate: In the end I shouldn’t be too critical though, I don’t know that woman – she could be a heavyset saint who just keeps bad company.
Being on the road and not writing regularly felt odd, good-odd, but I like writing. Double-down then, back to the keyboard and blank page and trying to bang out some good reading – things have been mundane. Stupid brain turns vacations into “being behind” upon return. Fix this and get back to that and do this so that can be all ready. First-world problems… flowing like the clean, potable water which flows unabated from the five taps in my house’s central plumbing. Malaria? They cured that, right? That one president invented a vaccine, I think.
Goodnight.
Also written on this day...
- marking the hours - 2010
- no cohen yet - 2010
- better in the cubicle than on the road - 2007
- no shirts, no shoes, no problem - 2006
- the ghost of blogging future - 2005
- the boob bible - 2004