As I write this, my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I are lying in our hotel room in Rockville, MD, holding our bladders because the water is off until 4 PM. So, not the Ritz. Rockville is the last stop on our latest automobile journey, this one a relatively brief three-week loop through the Midwest, visiting friends and family and consuming various bits of art. The ideal vacation involves forgetting about your actual life, but this time, I’ve found that my actual life is fairly insistently elbowing me in the ribs on an almost daily basis.
For instance, I am lying in my hotel room as I write this.
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve managed to forget about the future for, oh, whole minutes at a time over the last few weeks. It’s been bliss, frankly, those minutes. And then the future shambles by again, bashing me in the arms and shoulders with its bags and knocking me off the sidewalk into oncoming traffic. I’m not sure how I manage not to avoid it, but there it is, every time.
The calendar waits for no one. A week after I return, I host a gig at the Somerville Armory, which means I need to promote the gig, which implies a whole host of activities, including lying in my hotel room writing a newsletter. And then there’s a wedding (not mine – SWMBT doesn’t approve of freelancing) and then Thanksgiving (pie!) and then I’m playing piano for a lovely man, Bill Zolli, in a Christmas show (so I have to practice) and then the holidays, and then, eventually, the heat death of the universe. And all of these things are in those #&@$% bags.
I would love to be able to observe these things as they pass, flotsam floating on the surface of life, barely denting my consciousness. Let it go, the Zen meditation experts say: the human condition is transience. But, dammit, these things matter to me (especially pie, but sure, the gig is important too). I cannot bear to wake up this coming Saturday, the deadline for my newsletter to you fine people upon me, without a solid plan. Thus, lying in my hotel room at this particular moment, typing these very words.
The vacation bubble collapses the way people go broke: gradually, then all at once. And mine is starting to leak.