Happy Road Trip Day, 2013

Today is 9.0 M.C. (Year 9, day 0 on the Muddled Calendar). I was annoyed last night when my technology woke me up, but then I realized that it was merely reminding me to repeat the Mantra of Good Fortune: If the first words you speak at the dawn of a new Muddled Year are “elevator, ocelot, rutabaga” then the coming year will be happy and prosperous. I muttered the Muddled Mantra and fell quickly back to sleep.

Nine years it’s been since I signed the receipt for the check for my house in San Deigo, joining the ranks of the affluent derelicts, and went to drive around for “a few weeks”. I was thinking maybe three weeks of seeing the US before I moved to Prague. That estimate was a poor one.

A lot has changed since those days; I’m gainfully employed again, in a pretty sweet gig that’s way easier than digging ditches but pays dramatically more. I didn’t invent this system, but I’m not complaining. I’ve got a sweetie to come home to and that’s the coolest change of all. By far.

A couple things have changed only recently; my morning workout and no-beer-till-below-target-weight-for-the-month plan (on hold today) are starting to show results, and I just feel good for the rest of the day after a vigorous morning workout.

Some things haven’t changed: I’m still working on getting a novel published, I still like beer, and overall I have a pretty rosy outlook on life. This blog just keeps chugging along, though perhaps the stories aren’t flavored with such exotic spice these days.

How’s the Muddled Age been treating you? Well, I hope.

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6 thoughts on “Happy Road Trip Day, 2013

  1. I was mightily impressed and mildly envious when Jesse told me about you flippin’ the bird to the rat race and setting off to nurture your Inner Kerouac/Kafka. Part of it was having just visited Prague myself and being totally enamored of the city. And a bigger part of it was wishing I had the balls. Happy 9th! I’m glad you’re still writing and flippin’ the bird.

  2. One thing I learned while clearing ditches during the summer between sophomore and junior year: I’m very happy to have my current job, as much as I might occasionally complain about the office politics.

    • I recently re-read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and was surprised how openly political it was. When I was a kid many of the messages in the book didn’t stick. For instance, religion is good, as long as there’s more than one, otherwise it’s pure evil. From my youth I just remembered Sandy’s delusions and electric fences killing off all the knights in England.

      Somewhere along the way Twain went on a minor diatribe about intellectuals calling their efforts “work” which I had to agree with. Sometimes what I do is challenging, but it’s not magic (there are those in my biz who would liken themselves to Merlin, and those people annoy me). In fact, knocking down those most vexing problems is pretty damn fun. We’re built as pattern-matching machines, as problem-solving neural networks. Abstraction is our pal and elegance its own reward. My job is fundamentally an activity that my brain is hard-wired to take pleasure from.

      So, yeah, I’ve got it pretty good.

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