Wait for it...

I was up in Vermont for a little bit, and had a pretty good routine going, if only short-lived. Get up between 9 and 10, coffee, toast, and eggs, and if time, some reading (non-fiction, to get the brain working). At 11, off to work - either landscaping and gardening, or painting - for a couple of hours. Then lunch (maybe sausage and an IPA?) and reading the papers for an hour, before going back to work for another two. Then home to shower, have supper (been using that word to describe the meal between lunch and dinner), check email, watch Family Guy, and have dinner. The rest of the night writing and reading. As Depeche Mode says, enjoy the silence.

(I realize that's only four hours of physical work, plus the chunk of writing I do that gets paid for, but bear in mind... we live in a society where one of the biggest problems is a 10% unemployment rate, and one of the biggest initiatives is to create (make up) new jobs. Many of the jobs available now exist with the purpose to convince us to buy more things, which is why we need those jobs in the first place.... All I'm saying is that we could all be working four hours a day (or much less), and I'd like to practice that life whenever I can. Smoke it.)

Anyway, over the weekend following that routine, I spent a couple days transcribing my handwritten notebooks from the past six months. Came across this, from some time in May: "Two sort-of poles: the wonderful earthly delights (as Bunuel describes them) of adulthood, and the anticipation with which I used to look forward to going to punk rock shows in junior high and high school...." My point at the time - "There is pleasure in each, but not a total pleasure..." - is not quite as important as my realization on this Saturday in September: that I don't get the same pleasureful anticipation that I used to, especially from driving over to Burlington, VT to see my favorite bands.

The kicker: as I typed this up, I found myself in the midst of one of these bouts of anticipation - just like when I was 15 - because I was excited for the following day, when, with Ryan D and Travis (high school co-conspirators), I would go to Winooski to see Pennywise, a favorite punk band from high school. How much of this feeling was willed by typing those words and how much was genuine, I can't say, because it all occurred to me at the same moment. It doesn't matter too much; it's the sensation that counts. In any case, we had a blast. I'll stop analyzing the connection between the youthful anticipation and the actual (awesome) experience it preceded, and instead default to a quote from Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life, which I'm sure was on my mind back in May:

"...You are under the spell of a past moment - a moment of love, for instance; the woman you love is about to reappear, you are sure of it, you already feel her kisses... such passionate expectation is in effect the prefigurement of the situation to be constructed."