And you may ask yourself: Where does this highway go?

Highways don't go anywhere.

Not a single day.

Different days at different times.

i had this epiphany when i was about 12 or 13, but i'm having a hard time putting it in words

in the meantime here's another talking heads song about life

Lifetime Piling Up

I have tried marijuana
I get nervous every time
There will come a knockin' at the door
Why is everybody makin' eyes at me?
I don't want to know
Excuse and pardon me
Stay for a while
Maybe we'll never
meet again

I can see my lifetime piling up
I can see the days turn into nights
I can see the people on the street
Open those windows up
A hundred floors below me
Pilin' those houses up
Pilin' them higher, higher, higher
I can feel them swayin' back and forth
Building it higher, higher
This tower's learning over

I got bad coordination
Stuck a pencil in my eye
I can hardly wait to get back home
Why is everybody gettin' paranoid?
I's only havin' fun
Scum-bags and superstars
Tell me your names
I'll make a bet, you're
both the same

I can see my lifetime pilin' up
Reaching from my bedroom to the stars
I can see the house where I was born
When I was growin' up - they say that
I could never keep my trousers up
I remember days and crazy nights
Are there any pirates on this ship?
And if they sober up - they'll have us
Home by morning

Cry, cry, cry
It's just you and I
Like an automobile
with no one at the wheel
Spinning out of control
We're all over the road
In our sexy machine
All the passengers scream
Scream, scream!

I can see my lifetime pilin' up
I can see it smashin' into yours
It was not an accident at all
Open your window up - I hear you laughin'

Goin' one, two, three, four, five
Goin' from the bottom to the top
Maybe I'm holding on too tight
And now I'm growin' up
I got a funny feeling
Pilin' those houses up
Pilin' them higher, higher, higher
Building that highway to the stars
And turning the music up - Hey!
I got a winning number

I think maybe my last day in my office. I had a whole series of goodbye parties, and another one that day, but stayed late by myself because I knew that actual leaving for the last time would hit me hard and I wanted some privacy. Sitting there in my chair at the center of it all, where I had accomplished so much and learned so much, packing up the last of my effects -- the cards from grateful students, the framed newspaper articles about me and my center, the gifts and doodads.

I was six months pregnant and knew that not only was I moving far away in a couple of weeks and therefore that it was unlikely that I'd ever see my office or the wonderful people who had surrounded me or passed through in the past three years ever again, but that a whole new phase of my life was starting, that I wouldn't ever again be the person I was right at that moment -- and I liked that person.

It was tough.

My window is open, djjd - can you really hear me laughing?

I have laughed today - laughed a lot. But this is always a sunny muddy manic kind of day for me.....

Like soz says.... I liked that person that I was on that yesterday.

I like the person I am now too but it is a different person. I would never go back. I wouldn't trade a single day of it. I wouldn't trade even a moment of it. No regrets.

But sometimes I miss that other girl and I wonder what her life might be like now.

Had a day with the then-gf a while back -- eight years in March, now that I think of it. Eight years.

We were living in Chicago at the time. We had moved there on half a whim the previous August after living together in Santa Cruz, CA for, mmm, a year and a half or so and bumming around Europe for a couple of months.

It wasn't going well. Chicago was dismal that year. The worst winter storm in 30 years with streets unplowed for weeks and the Blue Line failing so regularly I'd taken to walking a mile from the bus to work, the bar on the corner full of outspoken racists, the gf and I wasting a lot of time and energy into putting together a production (script, cast, space -- the lot) for a local theater group with ambition but no training, artistic ability, or sense…

Anyway, neither of us had any idea what the hell we were doing with ourselves. So we bought some plane tickets to go back to Santa Cruz for a few days and take a break from the frozen, dog-****-and-cigarette-butt-filled snow piled in front of our door.

Back in CA, we scored some psilocybes and went to a big, grassy field at the edge of a wooded ravine to eat them.

I'd shroomed in this field before, which was why I picked it. We ate among the redwoods and hiked the ravine a while, waiting for them to kick in -- thinking, as one always does, that the shrooms were bad and hoping that they weren't, in fact, poisonous. As we edged our way out of the ravine, the skies opened up, as they do in the spring in that part of the world.

By the time we got to our rental car we were soaked through. We had outer-layer clothes inside, so we changed and sat up front trying to plan the next move, until the melting-wax-quality of the rain on the windshield made it apparent that the mushrooms were in fact pretty damn good. We waited out the storm, anxious to return to the field. Or, as it was soon to become, The Field.

The trip that followed was perfect. As soon as we got out of the car, we were greeted by a small gaggle of Santa Cruz dudes on off-road unicycles. It's sort of a local hobby -- I knew two people when I went to school there who rode unicycles everywhere. (They were both unbelievably fit. If you really want to shed pounds and build up your cardio, dump the clown car and get a unicycle.) Still, when you've eaten psilly-cibes and the sun is coming through the clouds on the central CA green fields and redwoods and eucalypti and madrones and early-season poppies and Monterey Bay is turning from gray to blue in the middle distance, it's easy to think you're imagining the the unicyclists. But I recognized the guy in front -- he worked at the University -- so all was right with that odd little world.

Later we came across a big dead oak on the western edge of The Field, opposite the road and adjacent to the ravine. It had been standing a couple of years before -- I'd climbed it, in fact, and spent part of an afternoon astride it's fat horizontal trunk-limb with old friends George and Pauline -- but now it was laying down on the ground and the wood had become oddly spongy. The gf and I dubbed it The Tree and were happily sad about it, and thought about Shel Silverstein who'd died not long before and were sadly happy about his life, and I had to convince her what that she would survive the two foot drop from the fallen trunk to the grass.

After I'd talked her down some hippies showed up in a VW bus. Santa Cruz is one of those places where hippies (pseudo-hippies, anyway) still show up in VW buses. They had a dog. They walked out into the middle of The Field and stood in a wide circle, alternately facing the middle of the circle and over toward the now setting sun. We were northwest of them, so we caught them in profile as they looked southwest toward the fiery Pacific. The dog ran happily around the circle, pushing his nose into everybody's hands. The hippies looked like they were singing -- or chanting, maybe -- but the wind was running toward the sun and we couldn't hear anything. Eventually the gathered together, joined hands, and then walked back to the road and drove away.

We wandered down to the old cattle fence to the south to get a better view of the sunset. Somebody had built a house on the other side -- this was new. Around the house was a new fence. It seemed strange, standing at this old fence looking across a new fence at a new house. We wondered why The Fence Builders felt the need to Build so many Fences. Cows mooed in the distance. The cows belong to the university, and as part of the charter granting the land to the university, it is stipulated that this herd must continue to live there in perpetuity (or perhaps it's 99 years). It is a good thing, but today the cows sounded angry. Maybe because it was muddy. They are The Angry Cows.

Laying down in The Field in the dimming twilight, we look up at the ferns towering over our head. We are in The Lilliputian Forest.

It gets dark. We wander up to where the second group of hippies had gathered earlier and I trip over something, barking my shin. I swear and look back. It's a piece of granite, bright in the dark grass (now that I'm aware of it). The rock is flattish and oblong, roughly the shape (at least the bit sticks about a foot or 14 inches out of the ground) of a Zulu warrior's shield. It's buried upright. I show it to the gf, and she promptly finds a second one, and then another. All in all, we evenually find a dozen or so of these pieces of granite, buried upright, sticking about a foot out of the ground, marking out a rough circle maybe 20 feet in diameter. Definitely the work of university students. Pretty ambitious, though. We wondered if The Circle People who'd earlier observed the sunset here were the same Circle People who had built The Circle.

In the middle of the Circle was a small pile of fruit -- a couple of bananas, a tangelo, an ugli or a star fruit or some other thing that would catch a stoned eye in the produce aisle.

An offering.

We are Hungry. We sit on the stones and talk about whether it would be wrong to take the fruit. After a short and dispirited debate we come to the conclusion that it would be honoring their offering ("She offered her honor, I honored her offer, and all night long it was on 'er and off 'er," quoth Marx) to partake of part of it. The Tangelo is good.

Somewhere in this serious of minor nonevents, we talked about a few things.

Point: we hated Chicago. Chicago was Dying. We had been miserable there for months, we were very happy where we were. The only problem was that all our Stuff was in Chicago. We had to get our Stuff out of the Dying City and put it Somewhere Good.

Point: there was a second point, but I've since forgotten it. I suspect it wasn't very important.

Point: we were a Monkey Pair. I've no idea how this came up. Probably something to do with climbing around on The Giving Tree and eating The Fruit that The Circle People had left in The Field, I dunno.

Anyway, we ate The Tangelo and made our way back out toward the road. We climbed through the stile (an honest-to-god stile, on the pretty crooked mile(s) of Empire Grade) and into the rental car, which lit up like a red chevy spaceship. The radio sprang to life, tuned to KPIG (107oink!5, Freedom, CA) and playing Johnny Cash ("Delia's gone, one more round, Delia's gone"), drove down and picked up some tangerine juice at Shopper's Corner and burritos at Tacqueria Vallarta next door, and then back to the little motel on Riverside to warm our sodden feet in the tub before heading to Tampico Lounge to drink $2 Anchor Steams with Deborah, the world's greatest bartending grandma.




It didn't seem all that significant at the time (outside of the heightened importance that happy fungi lend to everything, like that tragic Christmas tree on Y2K), but some crucial decisions were made that day.

We got our Stuff out of evil Chicago and we're still a Monkey Pair. We even got hitched in the Year of the Monkey, though we didn't know it at the time.

Somewhere in a music box I bought her that plays a tune that makes her cry, the wife keeps the map we drew of The Field at the bar that night. It's in there with a couple of rocks I've given her, penguin like, and an anklet. I think I'll have her get it out when she gets back into town.

when I was 14 I got in a little trouble with the juvenile authorities. My father had long deserted us and I lived with my mother who was a nice enough woman but not a good mother.

I was sent to live with my Aunt and Grandparents in Va. where I had always spent the summer. I did not want to go and my mother promised me time after time that I would return in a year. One day I came upon a letter my mother had written her and learned two things.... my mother had been sending allowance money for me and I never saw it and my mother wrote "I do NOT want him back.... please keep him and I will send more if I must".

I learned that day that even those who love you can't be trusted and that you will be betrayed eventually by those you care about, so what does that say about just regular people?

A2K is the closest thing I've come to to being a joiner. I'm good company and have many acquaintances... but I'm a loner pretty much.

That was a nice little story, pdog.

Bear, I will never, under any circumstance, betray you.

We are brothers of the keyboard.

Wow, p'dog. That is indeed a great story, well told. Thank you. You're a lucky man to find such a partner in crime and thought and passion.

A knock like is unbearable, Bear. It hurts to even think about it from here; I can't imagine what it must be like from there.

And I'm going to think about it every time I wonder about my other girl because it is really a good thing that she learned that the world is bigger than just her.

That sucks, bear. I'm truly sorry.

The day my husband blacked out, had a small seizer and came to with no memory of what happened. Thus started the saga of VF and the wonderful word of implantable defibrillators. Did you know it's really scary seeing someone getting shocked out of the blue, knowing that meant their heart was going dinky dau?

That and the realization he'd had a massive heart attack months before and should have been dead. And the fact if I hadn't been home when I shouldn't have been, I wouldn't have seen what happened, and he would have surely been dead years ago.

Realizing I'd literally saved someones life.

Made me take a hard look at what was important, our own mortality.

I have never been the same person since. In most ways that's good. In some ways I wish I'd been spared. There are things I wished I'd never gone through, but I can't help that now.

and that's just from my experience, not the experience all this was happening too.

Life can be very scary.

Oh no, Bear. That is horrible. It brought me to tears.

People you love don't always betray you. It happens sometimes...but not always. There are some that can be trusted. I've known both in my life. If only it were easier to tell the difference...

June 6, 1990.

I had been practicing law, and man, did I hate it. I came home crying almost every night. I would rage about this and that. I hated court. I hated preparing. I hated that my nights were filled with unpaid homework (for a job that paid surprisingly little). I hated being yelled at by judges. I hated a vague feeling of incompetence, although I knew I did a better job than one woman and that my boss liked me. But I didn't feel like I knew what I was doing.

I had been doing EBTs (Examinations Before Trial, AKA depositions) for three years and had gotten good at them. They were okay. I still hated all of the prep work, but it was acceptable and I felt I had achieved a passable level of competency. But I knew that I had to become a trial attorney to really make any money, and the thought sickened me, because being a trial lawyer admits of a lot fewer mistakes. You have to realize, I was 27 at the time and very conscious of how I could screw people over if I forgot something. A 27-year-old who is that unsure of herself should never have that kind of power.

On June 6, I was thrown into the Supreme Court, County of Queens, for a small trial to get my feet wet. It was a case that had not been handled by me before. I knew very little about the matter because there were nearly no notes. The attorney who had been handling the matter had left the firm. It was a flood case, our client was the landlord and some water pipe had busted in Queens and damaged the tenant's property. This wasn't just water, it was post-use plumbing water. As in, it had human waste products in it. Why the matter had not been settled months ago, I do not know. Our client's liability was clear and damages were obvious. All that would have had to have been worked out was the precise amount of damages, but there were clear, readable receipts in the file. It should have been case closed. I was being sent in to try to defend a 100% certain loss.

I got in early and was more or less promptly yelled at by the judge on the case. They didn't have time for this nonsense. There were criminal matters and death cases and cases where liability or damages were not so clear-cut. The judge wanted nothing to do with me or my firm, and demanded that we settle. I tried calling the claims adjuster (they kept the money). She wasn't in. I got someone covering for her. They did not know about the case. I explained it on the phone (this was before cell phones, so this was a pay phone). Begged and pleaded for settlement money, as the damages were a few thousand. I was given $500 to settle the case. Yes, $500. I went back to the judge and my adversary and of course was screamed at again. Went back to the phone and was turned down again. This went on all day long.

I became frustrated enough that I began to raise my voice to the judge. This is a way to get a contempt charge brought upon yourself. I backed down. And then I remembered what was in my briefcase.

I had been carrying around a resignation letter for weeks. I had written and signed it, but wanted very much to finish working over the summer, as I had zero employment prospects and the summers tended to be a lot quieter. I was counting on hopefully finding it all easier to take if the summer could pass by. Plus, despite how lousy the pay was, it was still far better than nothing. Since I would be voluntarily resigning, I would not have qualified for Unemployment. I was between a rock and a hard place.

I called RP at work. We were not yet married. He told me to do what I thought was right, that he knew I was miserable and we would somehow get by.

I barely recall the rest of the time in court. I do know that I was sent to pick a jury and that really terrified me. I had never done that. My office (which I was also frantically calling) told me to stall until the day ended. Somehow, I was able to do that.

Normally, at five, I would have just gone straight home from court. This time, I went to the office. I photocopied my resignation letter and slipped it under the senior partner's door. I had to, big surprise, prepare for another case the following day and so I stayed a little while to pickk that up. I was talking with D___, the managing parter, the guy who had sent me to that hell in Queens where I had slowly twisted in the wind.

B___, the senior partner, came over and told me he wanted to talk to me. We went into his office and he shut the door. "What was happening? What could we have done?" he asked. Well, I could have let him have it. But I didn't hate him, didn't blame him. I didn't even blame D__, although I certainly could have. I was just tired. Tired of the day, tired of begging uninformed claims adjusters for cash or groveling at the feet of surly judges. I was tired of doing things that seemed ethically suspect. I was wary of beginning to justify them in my head.

"B___", I said, "it's not that I don't like you or that I'm not grateful for everything you've done for me. I like this office and the people in it. But I don't like the person I'm becoming."
===============================================
With the exception of a few quick EBTs I did the following year in order to try to make some money, I never practiced law again. To think of it literally makes me physically ill, and it is 16 1/2 years later. I would rather dig ditches, flip burgers or even turn tricks rather than practice law ever again. I will never go back.

Patiodog - that was wonderful.

Bear - Jesus. (lost for words)

I don't know how my response to your quote got placed in the middle of your quote.......

Amazing days, Chia and Jespah.

Thank you.

Learning who you are and discovering what is important is a long, hard road, isn't it?

All I did was read, boomer. Insecure people can be life's hardest road, and biggest threat to each of us, but it is obvious to me, as I read these personal anecdotes, that no one here is insecure.

The writing is also smooth and easily read.