ironically, i haven’t done anything at all lately that would kill any brain cells, not a single one. and yet clearly, CLEARLY, my mind is slipping right away.
last night i wrote about the joys of camping, and i said i want to try to make a living camping.
I THOUGHT THIS WAS AN ORIGINAL THOUGHT. I THOUGHT I’D JUST THOUGHT OF IT WHEN I WROTE IT.
today i told somebody that i went camping and he said, “oh, again?” and i said yes, again, and i loved it. “yeah, you like camping so much that you’d like to make a living at it,” he said.
i was taken aback. how did he know this? i’d just written these words maybe an hour before; he couldn’t have possibly read them, because he was very busy working.
nope, he read it. ON MY FLYER. WHICH I WROTE A FEW WEEKS AGO. and then i posted it here on this site.
so first i thought about it, and i wrote it down, and then i made many copies and looked them over carefully, searching for typos that might have slipped through, then i re-formatted it and put it up here.
B. (Barnaby) just complained that he’s forgetting things lately, like people’s names. i said, AT LEAST YOU’RE NOT FORGETTING THINGS THAT YOU WROTE AND RE-WROTE ABOUT.
at least when i was writing last night about making a living camping, i had a good time doing it. blithely writing away, thinking that i’d just thought it up, and what a fine idea it was.
when i’m old and in a nursing home and my mind has completely, completely gone (in about three weeks, perhaps?), i think i’ll be quite happy, having all kinds of thoughts that i’m able to amuse myself with, and it won’t matter that they’ll be the same things over and over again, because they’ll always be completely fresh in my mind. and by the way, i’m going to refuse to go into a nursing home. i’d rather float out on an ice floe like the eskimos. do they still do that? i could look it up, but then i’d start thinking about other random things to look up (i’ll suddenly think about making a living at camping, for example, and i’ll try to see if anybody has done that), and then i’ll never get to sleep.
i could stay up late tonight, looking stuff up, writing stuff down, but i want to get up early to swim and bike. and then sunday, SUNDAY, i SWIM BIKE RUN.
time has almost run out for the training. but i’m going to do it anyway.
by the way, the phrase that dad uses to get back to sleep is “i’m JUST resting now,” not “i’m TRYING to rest now.” much better.
i’m sure i’ve already written about this before, but maybe it was so long ago that you won’t remember, but when i had a real job in LA, all i did most of the time was look stuff up. i have no idea what i was looking up, but there were always an infinite amount of things online that i needed to search for. i got a little obsessive about it. pretty obsessive. quite obsessive, if you must know the truth. but the point of the job, mostly, was that i had to sit in the office and answer the phone in case the big boss up north would happen to call, and it wouldn’t look right if nobody answered the phone. he only called about three times, maybe, in the two years i worked there. i was ostensibly the “office manager,” but the only office manager-like thing i really did was order stuff out of the Office Max catalog. i liked that because i could order whatever i wanted, but then again, there weren’t many times when i really needed to order anything because not a lot went on.
it was a political consulting firm, and during campaigns, things were very busy and i did actually have to do some work, but it was all the boring pushing pieces of paper around and copying and faxing them kind of stuff, for the most part. and most of the time there weren’t any campaigns going on, so the three people that worked there (besides me) had very very loose schedules, and lots of times it was just me all alone in the office, looking out on the intersection of the 405 and the 10 freeways.
it was kind of like prison with a view.
sometimes i’d call friends and give them traffic reports. one time there was a truck on fire, and it was interesting watching the fire trucks as they tried vainly to make it through the gridlocked traffic to the fire scene.
most of the time, though, the gridlock was just regular gridlock, because there are too many cars in LA. not very interesting to look at. one day scott m, one of the three political consultants, was talking on the phone to his parents who were driving from monterey down to san diego, and they didn’t have time to stop, so they waved at us from the freeway. they were driving some kind of fancy little car – it was green – maybe a jaguar? with a sunroof, and his mom waved at us through the top, and we saw her! this was something, because we were eight stories up, and there were plenty of cars down there on the road.
you can see the boringness of the job, huh? i can’t believe i was there for two whole years, but i did get addicted to looking things up online, as i said (at least i’m remember things i wrote moments ago), plus i had decent health benefits for the first time in my life, and i was able to pay off almost all of my debt, until i decided to go to massage school.
plus we had the best christmas party i’ve ever been to – it was at a little house at one of those fancy monterey golf course/country clubs, maybe the monterey country club? the monterey golf course? one of the famous ones, and the house was perched right up on the rocks and the ocean was right outside the window and you could go outside and watch the crazy waves and the whole thing was awfully lovely. that party really made the two years of working worth it. and after i moved back here, they invited me to come to the party there the next year, which i did, and once again it was perfectly wonderful.
that second time, we stayed at a hotel in some state park, i believe, which was rustic and lovely, and then i went to san francisco and stayed with a fellow who worked in the office up north (not the big boss), and that, too, was an interesting time, but it’s 11:04, four minutes past the time i was going to have LIGHTS OUT, so i must sleep.
and soon i’ll be saying “i’m just resting now,” so i won’t stay up and obsess so i can be fresh for the swimming and biking.
ok then,
grace in a typing mood for a change.