Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

A tsunami of subject matter since my last post has left me increasingly paralyzed, and I’ve stood on the beach pondering how to assimilate it all rather than the sensible thing, running like hell to higher ground.  For those who thought I died there on the beach, I survived, and as I stand here on higher ground, all those events that comprised the wave have receded with the tide of time.  And as I get back into practice, I hope not to use stuff like “tide of time”.

So, instead of trying to assimilate history, I’ll recap the current status quo, and attempt to plunge forward.

What’s not new:

• Still live at Chez Perils in Seattle, married to Mrs. Perils
• Still have the same jerk of a boss, working for my accounting/software consulting company, while having to supervise a lazy and mendacious employee.
•  Still playing my trumpet enthusiastically in the Rainbow City Band
• Still sea kayaking when I can

What’s new:

• I’m no longer trekking to Milwaukee once a month due to the effect of the economic downturn on my client.  That presented a certain amount of economic disruption and a large amount of psychological upheaval as the days stretched on uninterrupted by flying and hotels and bad dietary choices on the road.  I’d been operating on that schedule for 11 years.  After a couple months, however, the subliminal stress that I had so artfully sublimated slaked off, and I quit checking my frequent-flyer mileage account every day, quit logging in to Flyertalk every day, put my suitcase into the closet and began to relish the unbroken chain of weekends stretching into the future.
• I’ve become a Facebook maven, flinging bon mots and Liking and commenting inappropriately, and to an extent participation in that community has supplanted the desire to express myself that blogging used to fulfill.  I’m not unhappy that I participate, nor do I think that it fulfills all the dark predictions that its critics promulgate.  I enjoy the effortless contact across geography and my disparate constituency: kayaking people, band people, blogging people, Ohio State people, book club people, family (they’re people, too, but “family people” kinda clunks).  I find the immediate feedback to posts, comments and even Likes gratifying, and that was something that I always wished I could generate here at Perils.  But I also find that the Facebook model is not conducive to rolling out prose like I enjoy doing here.  And that’s a blessing to the 95% of my Facebook crowd that simply Likes me and only wants me to Like them.

Can’t think of much else that’s New, and I challenged myself to get a post off in under an hour, so that’s it for this post.  Watch this space.