These Simple Days

Again, I've had a long, difficult, unsatisfying week, where my own intentions and plans have been repeatedly put on a shelf.  This week worse than most, it seems.  No maps, no posts, no book writing, with five of us living here the house looks a disaster, and as of right now, I haven't any questions or answers for tomorrow's Q&A.

In self-defense, Tamara and I took a drive around eastern Alberta, visiting the badlands by Drumheller, the dinosaur capital of Canada, and then tooling through the pot and drumlin country between there and Stettler to the north.

Took this picture of Tamara yesterday; she's the smaller one at the bottom, just in front of the world's largest dinosaur's left foot.  For the record, 86 ft. high.  Tamara wasn't impressed; but she did love the appearance of the landscape, of which I'll post elsewhere sometime soon.

It was just a day trip, nothing very special, except that we enjoy each other's company a lot and we don't have any trouble talking continuously for 10 hours, even after all this time together.  I've been working on a story about her and I from way back in 2002, as the next post for Shifting Sands.

I've been enjoying that experiment, and there's evidence of it catching on.  I need a little practice writing non-argument, non-thematic content, but that'll come.  My biggest concern is that a lot of the stories I have to tell make me sound either irrational, like a fool, or contains too much of what my daughter calls my "assholicity."  It's a pity that in retrospect, so many of the moments when I stood up for myself, or went to war to die on a some hill or other, ends up after so many years with my thinking, jeebs, what the hell did I think I was accomplishing.

It may be different for other people, or maybe not.  Of course, other people quietly put those stories in a mental closet for permanent storage, in the hopes that the key to that closet might be lost as soon as possible.  I can't say exactly why I'm not doing that; or why I want to roll stuff like that out.  It won't be to make myself look good, I can tell you.  In fact, I'm very conscious of that.  All the stories I've told so far are fairly neutral, being things that happened to me, as they might happen to anyone.  I'm telling these in the hopes of building some credence for when I write a story about some moronic thing I did, or when I caused hurt to someone, or in fact failed as a human being.  I figure I'm bound to tell a certain number of those stories, before I tell even one story that puts me in a good light.  The last thing I want to accomplish here is my own self-aggrandisement.

Yesterday, travelling along country roads and highways in those parts, I talked to Tamara about hunting partridge and pheasants with my father, and the canoe trip I took down the Red Deer river, which we  crossed on our journey yesterday four times.  Tamara's not from around here; she spent her youngest years in a place called Hickman, Kentucky, on the Mississippi river, in the 1960s.  So everything we saw yesterday, especially the badlands, was new to her.  Most people can throw a rock across the Red Deer.  It's not the Mississippi.

But ... just now ... not in the headspace to write any story tonight.  I'm finding this post a trial, as I fuzzily await the end of this weekend.  My daughter and son have keys to their new place, and so begins the removal of furniture and other things from our environs to theirs.  They have a far harder weekend ahead of them than Tamara and I; we're given an exemption from these things as the "kids" have plenty of help from their friends, and don't need us old people.  Our job is to manage the grandson, whose in a state of confusion and panic because he hasn't had a proper home in more than a month, as this is the first time he's been old enough to understand what moving actually means.  I didn't encounter what Julian's encountering now until after I'd finished high school.

No, I'm writing this post in support of the fiction that I haven't died, and that I'm still in possession of my faculties and self-will ... neither of which seems, at the moment, remotely believable. There will be no Q&A tomorrow.  I trust I can get my wits together to return to work on my book, so that for the first time in four weeks, come the 22nd, I'll have a preview to post on Patreon.  And maps to post.  And blog posts.  And my sanity.