Chapter One: Then Let’s Keep Dancing

I returned all revived and rejuvenated from this past tweakend, and strangely so. So strangely so, when I should have been mentally exhausted. I learned so much. It was the generalized shock and awe, I think, of sitting back and observing, of learning and seeing a whole lot of new shit. Looking back, I think I was all-the-time generally taken aback, intrigued and blinking. Less bored than usual, watching the new interactions with the new people who were so new to me they might well have been green Martians chatting around that outside patio table. Exposure to world-rocking, brain-knocking other-worlds and other-lives of other-halves with their many and sometimes confusing other-choices.

All I actually did was go to Austin and visit Char and Alex.

I didn�t even take a nap like I want to EVERY DAY OF MY LIFE. After all that had already taken place, on Sunday I woke up � safely and alone, thanks to the guard-dog assertions of my apparent new chaperone, OS � and I wanted to go out and get this shit done. I actually wanted to. I watched a little Spike Jonze when everyone else was disco-napping. I paced around and decided I�d try a cigarette. I wanted to go out and rock the light-up dance floor Saturday Night Fever style of the 4th-through-6th street establishments that make up their lives, with my nameless, faceless, tourist self.

And I did, with the abandon of knowing nary a soul outside of my companions who could recognize my sweet moves.

We drove home yesterday in what fortunately turned out to be a gorgeous afternoon. We had our windows down and our arms out and my hair whipped around my face and I let it. Squelched the urge to right it, to fix things back and smooth them down, let the reality of wind-produced personal chaos resign my control.

I came home and tried to explain it all and I think I scared everybody. Char�s house really is a black-hole vacuum. Regardless of my attempts to bring any of it to light, what happens there truly does stay there. Because it�s not like I can ever, really convey what a weekend is like there to anyone, anyway.

Coming home I wanted my own life back and I wanted the ice-cold dousing of the inspiration for a colorful kitsch world like I�d just experienced. Indicative maybe, I felt like I needed to spend yesterday afternoon preparing for the starting of my �own life� again, like I wasn�t at all ready for it. My life that, in my head, would begin with a 6 a.m. alarm and some fiddling around and a rush to ready. I unpacked, I did loads of laundry, I wanted a manicured appearance and wrinkle-free and freshly polished, ordered theme to take with me to the office in the morning.

I fought alertness almost the entire night trying to figure out how the real and the breathless could ever meld and exist flexibly together.

This morning, back at the office, I talked with my cube-mate about the deck that she spent the weekend building in her back yard. Sitting on my desk, talking to her over the divider, I suddenly remembered the support group for amputees that I took someone to last week. Like zap, a lightening flash, I did do that, didn’t I? Instead of starting, I believe I startled my day, jagged and mentally disordered. I called NASA to see how far along my badging was with export control. I made a list of tasks, prioritized by urgencies.