Slow like honey, heavy with mood
I guess Labor Day heralded the beginning of increased labor from work — September has brought tickets, email requests, phone calls, and messages which, for a change, aren’t all on the same topics.
You get that thing I sent ya?
More mystery default graphics being swapped out universally instead of for a single site… A new batch of old sites to redesign onto the new platform… An assignment to find something we can sell to a customer that’s more tasteful than the animated waving Elvis that they currently have… let the fun begin.
Walked our asses and all the skin on my right heel off at Road Atlanta last Sunday. Still managed to walk enough on Monday to go pick out a new tennis racquet. The old one bore the brunt of last week’s stress, and may now end up mounted on our wall as some sort of modern art. Never realized how much stress we could take out playing tennis until we couldn’t play… tonight, heel be damned, I think we need to find a way. Which reminds me: drugstore trip, ASAP, bandages.
Simple moments this week: Kitty in her new collar on the back porch watching another cat run and play in the kudzu on the hill behind us. I grabbed the camera to snap a few cute pictures of her and soon Motley had joined the cat-watching vigil, too. It was sweet, then the cat ran out of sight, and almost immediately the kitties realized how close they were together and started their typical posturing and hissing until Motley bailed out.
Being on the back porch with the cats reminded me of a previous neighbor kitty, the white one which used to sit on their banister, leaning way out to try to see our porch. I have pictures of it peaking around the corner, but it’s long since moved on. I don’t know what made me do it, but I had to lean out and peek toward the neighbor porch. No cat this time. Instead, there is a huge spider web, banister to ceiling, wall to wall, with the proud web-spinner perched right in the center. I couldn’t figure out how to take a good picture of it. Since then, I’ve been spotting cool webs all over the place… in the bushes, even one from a power line down to a fence top, powerfully withstanding the breeze as it swayed back and forth. Amazing strength for something so apparently frail.
Lately, just existing has seemed almost surreal every day. So distracted, but I couldn’t tell you exactly by what. It’s hard to retain focus for long, so work has mostly been accomplished in frantic spurts with periods of strange pacing in between, where I wander around the house and try to figure out what I could possibly do to feel accomplished. It made me dig up my novella, put down in 1996, and set aside after only one submission. I haven’t even managed to re-read it, let alone think of any way to improve it. I think that creative period has passed, along with the silly freedom that was time for role playing. Not sure why the two seem to be linked in my mind, but there is a nostalgia, a feeling of loss that I associate with no real creative outlet, and with banality… and aging.
Changelings …. live in two worlds at once, one mundane, and one fantastic; they must walk the knife’s edge between these worlds lest they fall into the traps that each lays for them: forgetting their faerie nature, by becoming too entrenched in the Banality of the mundane world; or falling into Bedlam by delving too far into the insane realms of the fantastic world.
Upon rereading that quote, however, all my mind latches on is JamesT’s voice repeating “Knife it! Knife it!” I also found and ordered the Serenity Role Playing Game.
Maybe not all hope is lost.
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