Usually I start writing sometime in the middle to late afternoon, but I got a call for work for the next few nights so here I am, hunting and pecking away at the ungodly hour of nine thirty in the A.M. morning. A call for work. With all the budget cutting and lay-offs and all, I should be grateful to be picking up a few nights. But I'm dreading it. I just got myself adjusted to not worrying about work. Now I have to readjust again one more time all over. I swear, I can find more ways to generate discontent than there are things to be discontented about. It's just the perverse nature of my head. I should be used to this by now.
At the end of yesterday's post I put a link to the song Hiru no Tsuke, which was the closing theme for Outlaw Star. I hadn't heard the song in quite a while- not since Cartoon Network had Outlaw Star on Toonami in the afternoons, and that was eight or nine years ago. It was long enough that hearing it again brought on that odd kind of time warp effect that only songs have. It conjured up the palpable rhythm of the days when Mary and I were newly married, and living in the drafty, opossum plagued garage apartment behind her folks' house. I was carving my way through one chunk of rock after another, sure that the next art show was going be the one that would score me a sale, and launch a profitable career as a sculptor. There was money in the bank, and we were doing fine on what income was coming in. The computer was a new toy. I had found robot-japan on the internet and was blown away at the notion that I was trading notes on Japanese toys with people all over the world. We were having more fun than we realized. But that's how it all too often is. You don't see how much fun you're having until you've had it, and it's over. The song brought it all up in a pleasant mist that still sort of lingers with me this morning.
Even though work hangs over my head like Doom itself. I'll be fine once I get in there, and start moving, but right now it still feels more like a sentence than an opportunity to make some much needed cash. Right now, I have other stuff to attend to. I'll pick this up later tonight when the shift's over...
Which is now. Ten forty six P.M. at night by the computer clock. And working the night shift wasn't so bad. But I still have the song, and the mood it recalls floating through my head. Odd how classical music doesn't have that quality of resurrecting scenes and moods from a particular time and place. I remember clearly when I was an avid classical buff, but putting on Beethoven's seventh, or Mozart's Requiem doesn't take me back to the seventies. Throw on Ramblin' Man, and I'm there. And what strikes me as I'm sitting here is how simple, and how difficult it can be to keep a proper focus on the joys of the present. When you look back everything has that sweet glow of nostalgia, and when you look ahead it's all full of latent potential, and anticipation. The present, in contrast, is always full of the problems of the present. Be here now. It is so very simple, isn't it? But simple isn't necessarily easy. Anyway. That's all I have for tonight. I'm going to take a look at the rest of the Coonosphere, and get some rest.
JWM
You don't see how much fun you're having until you've had it, and it's over.
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The present, in contrast, is always full of the problems of the present. Be here now. It is so very simple, isn't it? But simple isn't necessarily easy.
You definitely hit the long ball today.
Looking back, I know I made to here. From here, I don't know I'll make to [where?].
I worry now, as you said, about everything -- including the stuff that will never happen.
A week or a month or ten years from now I will think back on this day and say, "We sure had a lot of cool fun back then, didn't we?"