I'm scattered these days, and if memory serves, this happens every year at about this time.  

The Thwarting Of The Exercise Schedule is in full swing with Viv working long hours at the studio as the big holiday movies are being prepared for release.  This means not only 14-hour workdays for her, but for me as well as I shift much of my own evening work to daytime.

Amy's school year is on track and moving along at cruising speed, which means some of the district services she requires for special ed are just coming into view behind the caboose, with bureaucrats pumping their rusted handcar almost interestedly while signaling ahead at us about their lack of money and personnel.  Locomotion, manning the switches, managing the arrival and departure schedule, it all has a way of taking a toll on me.

And yard work.  Yard work?  What yard work?  I don't see any yard work.  Ahhhhahahahah.

With the holidays just around the corner, I can feel the excitement of the approaching Annual Family Dysfunction Festival down at my parents' house, Stately Denial Manor.

Halloween was last week, the house is full of candy, and I am full of excuses.

*****

To help me through these times, I turn to music.  Currently programmed on the cd player is an endless loop of happytime music including, the Ray Bryant Combo (It's Madison Time), Marvin Gaye, Louis Prima and Keely Smith, Big Sandy and his Fly-Rite Boys, and Count Basie.  The trouble is I tend to listen too closely and drift into conducting the Basie band, singing lead with Big Sandy, or busting my sweet moves to Marvin.  My mojo, she gets a-workin' and Little Stevie here doesn't.

And yet, and yet, there is a still small voice within that says if I don't get my time to work that Old Black Magic with Keely I'm gonna go nuts.  Most of my work, my Good Work, the writing and photography, requires commitments of uninterrupted time, time that is eaten away in small and medium bites by the hungry teeth of a happy suburban life.  Being nibbled to death by an immediate and relentless future made up of small blocks of time can get under my skin.  And so... I dance! 

And sometimes I get a short journal entry in.

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