The start of a break in short winter or long summer never seems to go as planned. I felt ready this time, but I came undone, first for two days and then for four. Something in body and mind rebels against all the structured stress at last, and I become a natural beast taken to its cave for healing hibernation.

I damn myself for it, and yet I don’t know how the average person makes it through this sloppy vicious world without the chance to fall apart at intervals. I could theorize about it, but it would probably end up sounding self-important and superior.

Days in the cave are not a pretty sight. But god the nights. I told you the dream of three girls and a Woman. Then I fell right back in the swamp of fragmented study and sloth. Toward dawn I tried to sleep but failed, got up a while longer, finally crashed down into the theater of night. This time it started out much smaller and domestic. There were brothers and sisters, and wives who drank a little too much, and virtuous men doing honest jobs. As time went past the roles were filled by people I didn’t know (my own included). It became less a meditation on self like the hotel and the bus, and more of a sweeping family saga, with well-lit pretty actors.

It had a sort of A River Runs Through It quality, except the cast was much larger and the life of the town was more important than wild nature. The ending, the most cinematic part, featured the closing down of the father’s service station, the dementia-riddled death of the grandfather, the scattering of the sons off to school and war and other meat grinders.

And now, woke merely in the olden sense, I have to pull myself back into rough order. Tomorrow is a travel day and the next few will be too. I will see you out there maybe, one or the other of the out theres.