around ... I'll be around.

You drive and you drive and you drive ... you drive for eight or nine hours, then pull into a motel. You unload what you need from the car while your (roundly) pregnant wife puddles into the room, turns the heat up to eighty and slow-scrabbles into one of the twin beds. When you eventually take yours you'll crawl in diagonal so at least one of your feet doesn't hang off the edge, and dreamland will be the same as waking land, or driving land, where the sky chokes on its own shadows and cries foul murder against your windshield, over and over again, not so much weather as cheap-theatre grief, and all the other drivers speed and bunch and squeeze over and around you, like they're in a hurry to end up dying in heaps. And then the next day you get up early so you can do it all again.

And then you're home, dealing with garbage and recycling and dirty clothes and cat shit and you wonder what that was all about.

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.
-- John le Carre

* * * * *

So I'm back. I'll be posting about my holidays all week, a couple days worth at a crack. Also, while I was gone there was a piece in the Whig about my cigar-tin stories; the online version is here, although the code is a bit wonky and it doesn't have the artwork. {Mom -- I'll mail you the original piece from the newspaper.}