The next flight took off late. Real late. So late that we didn't get off the ground until we were supposed to be touching down in Burlington. I'd arranged to have a taxi pick me up in Burlington. By the time we'd touched down there and luggage made the trip from plane to terminal, the driver, bless her heart, had waited 90 minutes and was practically bouncing off the walls. Talking in a way that began to get me worried, repeating strange statements -- in particular, one about not taking her photo -- with an intense, distracted air, me wondering if she'd maybe been in a delicate emotional state and this long wait had been the drop of water that caused her cup to overflow, provoking a psychotic break that might send us off the road into a ditch, me huddled in the passenger's seat while she babbled feverishly up until the moment the vehicle wrapped itself around a large tree trunk.
But no. She slipped an Etta James CD into the player, good music filled the taxi, nighttime Vermont slipped by outside, light snow coming down, visible in the illumination from the headlights.
At home: outside -- ground thinly frosted with newly-fallen snow; inside -- a cold living space. Got the furnace cranking, began settling in, fell into bed between midnight and 1 a.m. The problem: my body, functioning on European time, woke me up at 10 a.m. Madrid time -- 4 a.m. Eyes wide open, me knowing sleep was over for that night. Got to my feet, stumbled around doing things that needed doing. Daylight seeped around window shades around 7 a.m., an hour earlier than it does in Madrid.
Drove into town. Caffeine. Gym. Groceries. Then returned home, where my eyes were met by a scene of, well, chaos. Seven weeks of mail scattered about, clothes etc. boiling over from the body bag. The place looking as if everything had exploded. Don't know how it got that way, don't know why I didn't see it before driving into town. And though I tried cutting into it, creating a little order, I seemed to make no headway. So I did what I've come to do when faced with the 3-D world not cooperating: cranked up the laptop, escaped into the virtual universe.
That mode of escape is something I've engaged in a lot these last weeks. A whole lot. It's that damned Second Life -- so much fun, so interesting, and I now have so many friends in that little virtual world that it's easy to log in and immerse myself in it, forgetting all about the time until hours and hours have gone up in virtual smoke, leaving me staring at the clock, wondering what the hell happened. Coming back here has taken care of that -- can't really do the Second Life thing with a dial-up connection. Or, well, the version of it that I can do is so limited -- can't move around, can't even really walk, can only chat or do IM -- that it takes most of the fun out of it. Which leaves me with no option but living normal life -- nothing to complain about, I know. Packed with mysteries and adventure and things to enjoy. All I need to do is refocus.
(From time to time Second Life makes that refocusing easier -- the grid goes wacky, finally goes down, everyone gets tossed back to real life and has to remain there until technical chaos in-world has settled down.)
Anyway. Blah blah blah.
Back in Vermont. For now.
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Stream, December -- northern Vermont
España, te echo de menos.
rws 7:05 PM [+]
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