Wind up toys are decelerating, but clearly I am still tightly wound:

Not much posting beyond the memes of late, many factors there. The blog and IMing are increasingly frowned on at work so I have been keeping a low profile there, I will probably remove the IMing software to eliminate the temptation. I am also long term dog sitting with Paul and Caroline in NYC, so my mornings are taken up with dog rotation, as they need to be fed separately lest doggy jealousy lead to an incident. I like having Zoe here though, and am seriously considering a second dog. They get along great unless there is food around, theirs or mine, and then not so good.

I am also just kind of tired, returning from vacation and trying to amp yourself back up to the pre-vacation pace can take its toll. I only get one week of vacation per year, yup that’s America for you, no mandated five weeks to slide around Europe here. That week is now behind me, and an infinite number of labor’s circumlocutions stretch out before me like the thousand miles of a journey that I am only two steps along. Where am I headed on this journey? I am actually headed to the mysterious land of debt relief. I set myself a goal of necessity two years ago that I would be debt free in five years, and I am making painful but steady progress.

I spent more than ten years as an underpaid academic with no health insurance, and then was out of work for a bit making the transition out of academe and I racked up some impressive stacks on the plastic plates of legalized loan sharking, now a little less than half of my yearly income goes to pay the piper. It makes me feel sometimes that I am just renting this life. But as a friend John told me last year, “You have a nice place, your car works, and you don’t live in your parent’s basement. I think you’re doing ok.” When the resumes start to roll in for any minor position we have in the bookstore I get some perspective on being grateful for the job I have. Missouri’s economy is in the tank, despite what the pro Bush idiots have to say, and for white collar liberal arts folk like myself a good paycheck is hard to come by. Sure, I can always bartend, but that life is even more a somnambulance than this one.

When I first got back to work after my vacation I gritted my teeth and jumped in for all I was worth, turned the crank on the wind up frog just as tight as that spring would get and let it jump like it was from
Calaveras county, but that energy is winding down and I am just letting it. All my playground games are just inventions to pass the time between scheduled moments when I am expected to arrive and depart, I go the way of most men, quietly desperate, bowing to the current calculus of indentured servitude knowing that any Samson like move, while momentarily satisfying or impressive, will just bring the roof down on my own head.

“Awe, buck up little camper. It’ll be ok,” croaked Froggy. “Thanks Froggy, have you met Gunter?” asked Karl, while motioning Mary’s guard gnome to come over and meet his grandfather’s wind up frog. “It’s starting to remind me of the Brothers Grimm around here, if your personal mythology gets anymore juvenile this place is going to be a veritable zoo of animism enlivened junk store trinkets, frickin toy story for the gin inclined” grumbled Gunter, while extending a stony handshake to the tin toy. “Try and get a handle on your hallucinations would you Karl, frickin mad hatter wanabe, not so brillig around here is it?”

“I assume that’s a rhetorical question Gunter, don’t bite the imagination that feeds you.”

“Look, just because I’m lawn art doesn’t mean I don’t have some insights into the whole human thing. What do I do? I stand and I watch. I grimace a little to keep away the riffraff, but basically I have a lot of time on my hands to think about poor saps like you. You’ve bought into that Freud crap about cultural pressure leading to the subversion of desire manifesting as art. You think you need your boring job in order to allow creative pressure to build. You’ve got some Myth of Sisyphus chip on your shoulder about this rock you’re rolling and have missed the existential boat out of fear. Redefine your existence. Get a freakin clue. Stop being afraid of getting wet and give us that fucking cannonball already. Christ you piss me off.”

Gunther is a little ass kicker isn’t he.