I Know This is Indulgent, But It's the Post I've Got...or...Woo-hoo! 100th Blog Post!

I miss being here, I really do. The blog, I mean. I think it about it when I'm driving sometimes. Outside of my car, though, I don't think I even have thoughts about it. I can afford to spare some mental space for it when I'm on my way somewhere, but outside of that car life is much the same blur that has characterized the last year. Seriously, just running and running and running. One of the strange sensations of this chaos-life sometimes presents itself in the hour or two of rest that follows a particularly bad run of crazy busy-ness. Early last week, for example, I remember I was in an intense rush one morning. I had cleaned up the apartment some, but I knew I could not afford to lose any more minutes to anything but reading and writing. I looked into my sun porch, where we keep our plants. I had just bought a new pot to replace the smaller pot for an orchid that I'd bought to replace the one that the cats broke. For a few days the orchid had been hanging on in this pot in which its roots had no firm hold. But this was no time to re-pot the plant. That, I thought, was a bridge too far this morning. I stood and gazed at the plant, then made up my mind to get the F out of the house and deal with it later. Sorry plant, you'll have to make it just one more night.

For the next homogeneous like three days, however, my attention was transfixed on any and everything that was the world of my work. I drove three hours a day to school and back. I picked up a substitute gig despite knowing full well I didn't have those hours to spare. I drove M to Hartford, Connecticut, getting in at one in the morning, and then took an eight-hour bus ride back at eight that morning. I read for as much of that ride as I could, then M's dad picked me up at the bus station, we talked for a half hour, and I borrowed his car to go to class. Good; done; class done. I drove back to his house, he dropped me off at the bus station, and I read for the two-hour ride, then got a cab home.

I got in like at ten-thirty at night, and I wouldn't have to be anywhere or do anything until twelve-thirty the next day for a home tutoring job I picked up. M was sleeping. I brought in my stuff, undressed, and sat on the couch. nytimes.com, gmail, facebook, talkingpointsmemo.com, easily distracted, back to facebook, politico, back to gmail, nytimes again. An hour or so passed like this. It was its own trance, but a domestic one. The running was over but in this ritual of getting home and right into mindless web surfing, I didn't really know it. You know, no recognition that I was off that treadmill.

I got up from the couch. How it came to be that I left the couch when I did I don't know; not a decision, really, more like something that just happened. Now up, I walked to the sun porch to feed the cats. Standing on that tile floor, looking at the orchid across the room in its same little pot, I paused. "Oh". Not that I said anything, but looking at that orchid again, I felt such powerful, if exhausted, connection to that last moment I had raced out of the house that I knew with my whole body that I had landed. It was as if I had dived into water when I asked that plant to wait and had only now come up for air. As if that was the last time I remembered making a conscious decision, and returning to that place somehow allowed me to wrest my being from the zombie I'd had to become for the days in between.

I relate this, in part, to say that this is something that I've felt before. This snap back into wakefulness, this back-into-regular-time-ness recognition wherein you know you've just been gone for a few days. It happens sometimes.