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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.}

Comments

  1. Isn't it great to be back? If only we didn't have to endure the getting back bit! Good to see you & C at the cottage - and looking forward to reading all about your adventures!

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  2. You are so mean to me. I don't even know what "slow-scrabble" means. As I recall, my movements were graceful, swan-like. And they were double beds.

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  3. Hehe-diagonal sleeping-tall guy! I always expect to return from any trip a changed person, but I get home and everything is the same, ugh.

    And yes, I will have to agree with Christina and say SWAN-LIKE! From here on out every movement should be described as "Swan-Like" or I will have to go all "twin sister" on you and kick you in the face-sorry, just the way it goes. If anyone even looked my twin weird when she was pregnant(even my brother in law) she made me beat them up-sorry,it is my job. I promise to stop the "freakishly tall" jokes for a bit in exchange. And, congrats on the article in the paper-really fantastic!
    take care,
    merle

    p.s. my friend finally stop being unreasonable and took your advice about stopping smoking! i hope he can stick with it so, thanks for that! if he breaks a rule, i kick him in the face too even though he is a tall guy as well-can't let all those years of dance training go to waste!

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