Well, I'm Pooped

Well, it's Saturday, Holy Saturday, the night before the biggest day in all of Catholicism. In my house, growing up, while Christmas was more spectacular, the Resurrection was the deal that set everything apart, made man God with a capital G and all that jazz.

Been a long time since I was active in that faith. I've spent more time active in the Human Condition over the last 45 years than any organized religion, though, as I've said before, where I grew up being a catholic kid and an altar boy meant feeding old people, taking them for walks, painting houses the church was giving to poor families. And my mom always said, Ignore the ignorant in the church and just do good. That's what it's about, not the damned rules and all the other nonsense.

Mom was very cool. Devout, but cool.

Anyway, so it's the Saturday evening before Easter and I'm pooped. I have been working on a complex cover story for a couple of weeks now, and I promised it to my boss today. I knew I was lying when I made the promise. I'll have it for her Monday, about noon. We go to press Tuesday evening. Gonna be close, but some stories just need some time to steep a little. Too many ideas, too much interplay among the people you're quoting and then that desire to write a piece that will have a chance to send some ripples out to change the world a little. Not so much ego as demanding of myself that I do work worthy of the scope of the story.

So while I've gotten all the dozen interviews done, and while I've read hundreds of pages of court testimony from maybe 5 story-related trials, and while I have maybe seven years of background on the subject, it's still not ready to come out. It's like an egg in the huevera of a chicken. I don't know if you ever saw a laying chicken cut open, but she'll have one egg ready to drop, another behind it that's about three days from dropping, another behind that which won't be an egg for a week, another behind that.....it's a procession of maybe 1o things that are pretty likely to become eggs in various stages of growth, but only one is developed and is an egg and is ready to go. (I'm tempted to get political here and tell the people who think a fertilized egg is a human to go look at the insides of a laying chicken and then report back, but I'll stay away from anything so clear and to the point here...).

Anyway, so my egg, my story, isn't a story yet. It's a very complex zygote but won't have a life of its own till it comes on out tomorrow. If it does. I mean, if I pop an aneurism tonight, well, that story will never be born and that's all there is to it. So long as it depends on me it's not a person, I mean story, yet. And even then I wouldn't call it a person, I mean completed story, for at least a couple of years, until it's standing on its own without any of my help.

Let's get off the politics and back to the pooped. I've been trying to work the story idea into a story and the way I do that is with physical work: Wash kitchen floors, wash windows, cut lawn. Problem is, with all the rain we've had, the lawn, in large places, was maybe up to my knee. That's like what? A foot-and-a-half? More?

And I was not going to have anybody mow it with the riding mower because then it would need to be raked. So I did a couple of the sections Wednesday, Thursday, yesterday and today: two 80' by 50' sections, a 40' by 40' section, three or four 20' by 20' sections with the electric push mower. I was having to do maybe 10 feet at a time, back and forth three or four times, then empty the bag. And the bag was filled with maybe 35-40 pounds from each little 10 foot by 2 foot section. Know how much that weight came to? As Madeleina would say on YouTube: Do your homework! Do your homework!

Yes, if you do the math it works out to be several tons of cuttings/rain/dirt and maybe 12 hours to do those little patches. And there is another acre to go--though the riding mower will be fine for that as my wife/ex-wife Chepa says she loves to rake and has volunteered to do it. HA! It's another Lucy/Charlie Brown deal about to go down, I'm sure. She will never be here for the raking.

So now I'm sitting here stalling. I ought to do one more section, not as high, that's 90' by 60'. But I'm not looking forward to it. It's not as high but still gonna be a pain in the neck, back and everywhere else.

Screw me. Grow up, Gorman.

Okay, okay. I get your point. But how old do I have to be to get to have some (misogynist comment coming here) good looking woman in a bikini walking around in front of me while I mow, you know, to keep me interested? Does anybody ever get that? (Could be cute guys for the girls as well, and cute guys for the guys for gays and cute girls for the girls for the gay girls and so forth for the transsexual community and any group I've left out). I mean, wouldn't we all do better work if someone put that carrot on the proverbial stick? Why doesn't someone have an agency with a name like: Enthusiastic Work Help! or Work Can Be Fun.com, or whatever. Maybe a dog with a good cheese cake running in front of a person trying to lose weight to keep them running long enough to earn it. Or whatever.

But no! That would be too fun. Instead you just get editors who are gonna scream at you because the story is late. Or you eat the cheesecake and gain 10 pounds and don't bother to run at all. Or you just look at the lawn and think: God damn. Now that's a creation worthy of the Creator of Everything! I mean he/she put it there, so who am I to cut it?

I told you I was pooped. Forgive the wild ride/rant.

Have a wonderful Easter/Passover/holiday. I hope you all get 100 times the love that you put out and that the whole world feels the ripple effect from all that love.