yes, i’m home. been too busy the past couple days to even think about the writing down i said i’d start (how many writers a day, do you think, devote how many pages to writing about how they’re going to write about one thing or another?), so have another glancing blow, a stone’s skip instead of a sinking-in. i’ll get there, i will, i promise.

but i’m home. and back-ways-first, i’ve learned a few things. like they hand out co-cola in the welcome center to Mississippi, and put up bulletin boards misspelling the name of their own state to say “our children can’t read–shame on us.” i appreciated the co-cola–it was by far the nicest welcome center of any state we saw, and even came with rocking chairs if we wanted to set a spell–but maybe they should be handing out books instead. or, if that’s the trouble, really, collecting them. free co-cola for coming in, but a whole 2-liter if you leave us any literature in your car on your way through. i am completely rambling right now. little wonder i haven’t sat down to start this yet, innit.

since my return i have spent a lot of time carrying boxes and things-like-boxes, and putting them in and taking them out of my car. as paul says, “it’s moving season.” i keep finding bruises in odd places, like right that spot on your upper arm where a corner leans of a barnes-and-noble box full of books that you have to hold bruise-tight to hold onto at all.

i have also spent some time spending actual time with–and a lot of time stewing, pointlessly and existentially, about–annabel, whose baby-daddy left her (that’s all he gets to get called right now. i used to like that boy. i’m not going to even go so far as to say i know enough to know i don’t still like some things about him, but when your way of handling parenthood is to throw up your hands & quit your job & move back home with your mama to read books all day & leave the mother of your child (it isn’t “ren” because the conversations they’d had about him marrying her and adopting the older one hadn’t yet come to fruition) with 2 tiny mouths to feed and no clear way of going about it… yeah. you’re certainly not her boyfriend anymore, you’re not a friend, and you’re certainly not a collaborating parent. baby-daddy’s as good as it gets.) while i was away. we have a wednesday-night plan to bid farewell to the cable she can’t afford to keep by sitting up with ice cream the last night before it’s cut off to watch trash ’til it’s gone.

i don’t really want to delve into the stewing, but it has something to do with how worn down i get by watching good thing after good thing after good thing go shockingly, inexplicably, violently wrong–you just blink, and the whole world you thought you understood isn’t there anymore, and you’re left trying to rebuild structurally viable cities out of whatever’s at hand… mismatched legos and mini-marshmallows, maybe? and you cobble something together, and then you blink, and it happens again. and we wonder how we end up with insomnia.

enough of that for now–it’s a pretty one-directional train, & y’all who’ve ridden it already know where it goes, & the lucky few who haven’t & don’t will be happier if i shut up now & refuse to play tour guide. in utterly random news (countermeasures?)l_stboy offers this:

Interesting “top life tips” from a slightly annoying man who wrote a couple of interesting books: “Rules for Living from Nassim Taleb” here. I like #4, #6, #2, #9.

i like #1, too, but i’m not as good at applying it as i’d like to be. the part where i’ve been far too little skeptical of a few things that rate at best “small and aesthetic” on a more global scale keeps getting in my way. big believer in the virtue of “imperfect, foolish, and human” over here, but i do wonder sometimes when it stops biting one quite so hard in the ass. maybe the virtue of getting older & wider is that more padding dulls the impact?

clearly, i am tired, and still gloomy from last night’s unhappy dreaming, and should step away from the keys & go put the laundry away so i can find my bed so i can make my bed so i can lie in it literally instead of only metaphorically (which i think i might have done about enough of, actually).

oh, but one more thing. i should add, with no further embellishment, that i had an unexpected gift this weekend for which i am very, very grateful. to return for a moment to the land of metaphor: imagine that books were things you could only read once, and after you’d gotten to the end of each scene it disappeared forever. and imagine that you had a favorite book that you had once lingered on every scenes of trying not to turn the last pages til the last second, because you loved it so very much, but your reading of it was long, long ago, and you’d long since accepted that the story was over. and then imagine that you found, behind the couch, perhaps, a lost scene that had fallen out of it, one you’d never read, one that was a perfect scene for encapsulating the best parts of the story, with character-development and weighty glances and humor and vulnerability and intellectual stimulation, and just for that hour or two of lingering, you had the whole thing impossibly back in your head through the window in your hands. it was like that.