

All about midlife madness, when one finds oneself suddenly adrift between raising children and going it alone. Empty nesting? Perhaps. Mistakes? Probably. Travel and adventure? Definitely!
I'm in Virginia Beach this week for work, staying in an oceanfront hotel with a view, as oceanfront implies, of the beach and a wide expanse of ocean. But the very special thing about the view from the balcony is the Monster Truck made of Christmas lights set up on the beach. I see my friend, Mr. Monster Truck, every time I look out the window.
I see him out of the corner of my eye, Mr. Monster Truck! He's out there, waiting for me. Monster in the morning. Monster in the moonlight. Monster is my constant companion this week in my hotel room.
I am currently reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake
Okay, so they say that cockroaches will survive the apocalypse. Hopefully, my laptop and I will too, so that we can write it all down, my laptop and I. Just in case anyone ever wants to read all about it, once we come out the other side of dystopia and into some new rebirth of the world.
There is a balcony up there that was originally intended for employee lunching, but there is no lunching taking place in the buzzard fecal zone. It is kind of apocalyptic up there - all gray and gloomy, covered with dripped and crusted gray buzzard feces, fallen gray feathers tumbling about in the wind. And you can look out at the gray skyline of Washington, DC and wonder if buzzards shit over there, too.
Maybe buzzards will survive an apocalypse. After all, someone needs to clean up all the devastation, along with the cockroaches."If trouble comes when you least expect it, then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it." ~ Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Sometimes, like this morning, driving around the Beltway on the way to work, I look up and see a mackerel sky spread out above in the blue heavens. That is to say, the cloud patterns resemble the scales of a mackerel, with rows of white, and blue sky showing through.
Dream: Down on a beach, in the water. Standing on a crevasse in a rock, water swirling below in rosy tones. Fantastic creatures in the water, like the tiled floors of Pompeii with pink jellyfish and blue and yellow fish, some with long swords on their snouts, some in flashy schools, and ray, there were rays with stinging tails, and sharks and eels and all manner of oceanic life.
The water started to rise. Scary. Pink jellyfish flocks so large and tentacles so long; sharks’ teeth so big; water creeping up the bare toes.
Suddenly, the water began to recede. And the creatures with it. Enough so that I could step off the rock and down onto the wet sand, which began to extend out into the ocean, with glistening rocks and shells and seaweed and whatever creatures hadn't kept up with the receding flow.
I walked on the wet sand toward the shore. Lots of other people were there, including my children.

