What A Day

Not so much in the "what a day at work" sense. My job is hard and I'm not enjoying it, but that's my own fault and not worth a complaint. My own fault because the only thing wrong with my job is me: I am not productive. I am far too distracted to focus in on the countless arcane details taken lightly by my predecessor on this effort and which I need to fix, far too distracted to organize my questions and gather a quick meeting of experts to address them. It's not rocket science to do all that. I just can't seem to get there.

(It is rocket science just down the highway where they make real rocket engines and sometimes fill the sky with billowing clouds of smoke from engine testing, where deer frolic in the wide open spaces that have been a toxic dump since early in the Cold War, where some of our engineering colleagues used to work before defense draw-downs provided us their talent as a sort of peace dividend. But from talking to them, I never got the sense that real rocket science was, you know, brain surgery.)

I'll report on the Burn over time as I process experiences and try to (re)discover their meaning to me. But the most significant experiences to process revolved around my marriage and my wife (who was there too) and the final recognition that we must, or I must, for my own sake, make that change I've been hemming and hawing about for so long. She didn't ask for that (all those nights tearfully wondering how the hell to get rid of me notwithstanding -- that was mainly venting) and it is distracting (is that really the word I'm using?) to live with her these last few weeks while her heart slowly and thoroughly and irreparably breaks. I love her, you see, and always will. I love her yet cannot be with her any more -- and I guess it is just now that I am letting go of the impulse to try and explain that. It is either understood, or it is not.

Not even always by me. I have a plan of sorts, though, and I can follow that. In the Black Rock Desert, winds come up suddenly out of the south and raise the dead lake bed into the sky, and dust billows down the streets and white-out conditions leave people hunkering down or lurching from fixed object to fixed object if they really must get somewhere -- and that makes this experience of blindly stumbling into the unknown seem oddly familiar.

I looked at apartments today. Don't know yet if I can really afford any of them. It was the rational thing to do, part of the wider plan, implemented without emotion -- without emotion until I was done and drove back to work, somehow feeling heavier, slower, and caked in dust.