Yeah, no posts this past weekend in Paradelle. A lost weekend.
Not a lost weekend like in the novel by Charles R. Jackson
I didn’t spend the weekend in a drunken state. Maybe that would have been an improvement.
In the novel, the protagonist is on a five-day alcoholic binge. He’s also a would-be writer (he uses foreign phrases and Shakespeare quotes, so he must be). A famous scene (parodied in The Simpsons) is when he tries to pawn his typewriter for drinking money.
I was on a seven-day work binge. Just too much to do last week after a week’s vacation. Do you find that whatever recharge you do get from some time off drains much too quickly when you return to work? It must be my human battery, because the charge seems to be shorter every time.
I was a week without the Internet and did not feel any withdrawal symptoms. I had queued up 15 blog posts on different blogs that I do, so that things would appear “normal” for the week. That worked. But writing anything last week was painful.
This week, this month, doesn’t seem too much better.
But here I am drinking my morning coffee and typing, trying to write a post before I head out to teach a class and then head to my office to work on a big report that’s due in a week, try to prepare two presentations for conferences this month and do my day-to-day work. Hopefully, I get to finish this post sometime today…
And that’s just work. What about home and family? Spent a chunk of the weekend helping my mom deal with all that being 92 means. (I dread getting old.)
And I ‘d rather be walking a beach, or even working in the yard clearing out the frost-zapped vegetable garden, raking and mulching leaves. But no time for any of that.
I wrote a post here called “Getting Lost” back in July and since then it has consistently been in the top 3 read posts on this blog. I don’t know if it’s the title, the book that inspired it or my tales of feeling lost literally and figuratively. Something connected with readers.
I wrote another post as a kind of answer to that post and I called it “Getting Found: The Tracker” which was ostensibly about the well-known tracker from New Jersey, Tom Brown. Still, that post was also about “finding yourself” – which you can do with a compass, but you can also do by wandering aimlessly in the woods.
Now, it’s an weekday evening in Paradelle and I shouldn’t be writing on this blog. Not because there’s any law against it (I do post full moon posts during the week already), but because I have so many other “more important” things to do.
More important. There’s the rub. Is my homework for my classes and bill paying more important than writing? Yeah, I guess so. If I don’t do those things, bad things will result and my life will worsen. If I don’t write on my blogs… nothing good OR bad happens. My butterfly flutters it wings.
If only I didn’t so much enjoy writing online. So much so, that I would sell my laptop in order to be able to write on it.
Terence McKenna has a kind of spaced-out hippie reputation, but he was a very interesting thinker. This writer, public speaker, philosopher, psychonaut and ethnobotanist was known for ability to entertain and to articulate his knowledge to non-academics.
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, has pieces about psychedelic mushrooms, the Amazon, virtual reality, UFOs, evolution, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History.
by John Major Jenkins (with Terence McKenna) they explore the alternative world view offered by Maya culture.
“Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these courageous couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
