“I am old, Gandalf. I don't look it, but I am beginning to feel it in my heart of hearts. Well-preserved indeed! Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can't be right. I need a change, or something.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Funny how in the midst of exhaustion I start to lose the innate ability to sleep.
Sunday night began well enough, with a flight all the way from Elmira to Asheville, NC, during which I barely saw a cloud. XM Radio has mysteriously started working on the panel without a subscription, so the flight included a serenade as I finished my book and watched the Smokies roll past below me.
After landing in Asheville, I grabbed some crackers while they refueled the plane, paid, then jumped back into the Mighty Columbia for my 1 + 42 flight to ECP.
This is when I found the starter had quit. I was already pretty tired after spending the previous evening and most of that day in acute alimentary distress from what I surmised was food poisoning. Might I have been too addled to start the plane? Was this a simple switchology error?
After several tries, I ruled that out. I grabbed my essentials out of the cargo hold, and tramped back to the terminal. Along the way I emailed the attorneys for my in-person email the following morning, inquiring whether Zoom might be an option. When no one responded, I figured my only alternative was to rent a car and drive to the panhandle. It was 8:30 eastern. Google maps calculated my arrival at 3:15 a.m.
So I rented a very expensive Camry, and started down the hill toward home. Peg and I spoke briefly. She repeatedly told me how worried she was about this particular fool's errand. I didn't really see a choice.
Thankfully I found a new Dan Carlin podcast about the Vikings (the Norse warriors, not the football team) that lasted well over five hours, keeping me company for most of the trip with vivid accounts of arson and murder and involuntary genetic mixing that accounts for the fact that most of us with roots in Ireland or the U.K. also have a little Scandinavian DNA in the system.
I made a decision to drive home rather than to Fort Walton, where the mediation was to take place, after finding that business class hotel rooms were running over $300 a night. The speed limit might have been exceeded at times along the way, and I managed to shave an hour off the trip. So at 2:30 my head hit the pillow, and . . .
nothing much happened. Instead, my brain kept working on my two major non-paying writing projects right now, my mother's eulogy and the homily at her service.
These tasks have been rolling around in my head for a couple weeks now, but this week we're at the snorting post and I need to get this done. The process that has always worked for me is to find a theme, cobble together a few data points that seem to fit, revisit the theme in light of whatever emerges from those data points that jumps out at me, and let all that marinate for a few days before I even try to start writing it out. Works for homilies; works for closing arguments.
So that went on until 3:30 or so, and I was up at 6:30 without the alarm to slip on a tie and start driving to FWB for mediation.
Twelve hours later I walked back through the door to the condo, exhausted, hungry, and ready to wolf down a sandwich, watch a little baseball, and talk to P before falling blissfully into bed. All went well until I finally fell into bed and, again, nothing happened.
I read a little Robert Penn Warren. I read the paper. I took a melatonin. And yet I stayed awake for hours, again reliving moments from decades ago with Mom and visualizing how all of those vignettes might fit together in a coherent narrative.
My plan had been to run at 6 a.m., but the combination of exhaustion and more GI issues carrying over from this weekend ruled out that option. So I straggled into the office, closed the door, and finally started writing this homily.
There's just too much on my plate for sleep, or much of anything else. I now have a deceased mother and a deceased airplane, with only the latter likely to return to the fold. No one in Asheville will call me back. I'm constantly in touch with players in the upcoming memorial service. I'm trying to buy Peg another condo (okay, we're trying to buy it together, but all the communications with realtors, bankers, etc. pass across my screen) and running into headwinds. I need to get to the farm to pick up our mail and write this eulogy. The beloved cattle are all being sold because our friend Mike is too ill to take care of them, and the beef market has gone nuts so they're too expensive for us to buy.
Oh, and there's the law practice. The relentless, often corrosive, law practice.
["I don't know how you all work in this world all the time. I think I'd blow my brains out," said one of the parties at yesterday's mediation, addressing me and his lawyer. Sometimes an outside perspective on this world that just seems so normal to those of us in the profession calls me up short].
So for today I'll drive out to tour the site of a nasty real estate dispute in this 95 degree heat, then head out to the airport to drop off my very, very expensive rental car and march a mile in the same heat to where my truck is parked, in front of the FBO. Somewhere in there I need to draft a complaint, a proof of claim in a probate case, and two letters, all due today.
There's a point in the running of a marathon, usually around twenty-one miles, that we refer to as "hitting the wall". All the glycogen that powered your brain is mostly burned up, as is whatever your muscles had been metabolizing for the prior three hours. What follows is confusion, an intense feeling that your legs are made of cement, and a voice in there telling you that you can't take another step. And yet you shuffle on for five more miles, because what else is there to do?
So I'll keep shuffling.
[the disturbing cover art for today's post is Ralph Steadman's "Hitting the Wall", from The Curse of Lono by Hunter S. Thompson]
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