Only mostly dead.

This from one of my favorite movies...

Inigo Montoya: He's dead. He can't talk.

Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.

Inigo Montoya: What's that?

Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.

Gone for a bit. No mystery or tragedy involved, just another child of bold Eve and craven Adam coping with the legacy of the Fall. That bit about, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

Slouching after the buck. Keeping the gato in fresh mousies. Keeping the Wolfowitz from the castle door.

Work. Too much of same.

Too many projects converging all at once with no flex or give in the schedule, and not a one of ‘em something simple and mindless that I can just relax into and let my imagination out-of-body itself into restful climes.

Long gone are the days of days of working a stock room, macking on cashiers and hitting the bar around the corner for an unselfconscious pitcher at lunch.

Scaling a ten-foot fence for a 50 lb. bag of fertilizer because a customer was adamant and some idjit had lost the keys to the garden.

Sorting through thirty identical molded-plastic garbage can lids at five minutes before closing because some martinet knucklehead wants his $3.00 sale junk bucket to have a seal as tight as a NASA clean room.

Continuing to make direct eye contact with the security guy and chatting amicably about the quality of the patty melts in the cafeteria (and they were exquisite) while sloooowly moving your boot to cover up the joint your peripheral vision and paranoia tell you just fell out of your pocket and onto the bright, clean, lineolium floor.

Consigned to the crashing steel-on-concrete purgatory of the loading docks on a hung-over Saturday.

Crushing massively on the do-nothing, think-nothing chick that worked the tiny key-making island just this side of Hardware.

Pallet truck races in the aisles and, since I was the word freak with a book forever in his back pocket, getting a little wasted, climbing up into the grotesque, never-gonna-be-sold sofa four tiers up on the massive shelves and reading “Dune.”

Two words: sledgehammering toilets. What we did with remaindered fixtures that weren’t gone be sold. The funnest job ever, and a mighty fine garage band name too, if I do say so.

And jotting all this down, with the memories coming thick and sweet, let me also say I hag a great boss then.

John.

As old as Cheney is evil, with a grimace like Popeye’s Pappy, it was darkly rumored that he had been a Very Big Deal Financial Wheel at a large chain store before the thing-about-which-one-never-spoke happened and he fell from his great, high place and crashed down among us stockroom Morlocks. Lord Jimming it in his twilight years with us hormone cases in the back rooms of a department store, taking orders from preening dolts half his age, John taught me more than almost any other man about how to treat the people who work for you.

Not the mechanics of the job, but the guts of it. How to keep the flack off your boys, but kick ass without hesitation if they start to take their basic responsibilities for granted. Keep a loose rein and lead always by example. I’m quite sure he knew most of what we did, but he also knew we always took care of business, and always would make an extra-extra effort for John if he asked, because he never, ever went too often to that well.

In your life you’ll have a lot of bosses, and in your life you’ll probably be a lot of people’s boss, and I got luck with John early.

And when, like these last many months, I’m sprinting from one complicated and exhausting project to another, eating and sleeping to accommodate the load, I find it very easy to miss those days.

Writers, we are pitiful creatures.

We work every kind of job -- any kind of job -- to feed the spike; make enough to keep body and soul together enough to fool around with a few words enough and see if we can strike sparks with ‘em. It’s a weird calling, this compulsion to fill up blank pages, and when you stack too many work hours one atop the other, sometimes you find to your chagrin that the labor hasn't bought you the space and time to write but has displaced the writing altogether.

And I also just noticed that I’m very close to a Big Blog Milestone, which has added a kind of retroactive-tired to the mix :-)

So I’m off to sleep for a bit: ahead are three solid days of catch-up tasks before the formal work week starts again, so yikes.

But let's be very clear: I am not trapped in Iraq with people trying to kill me behind a pack of lies my own government told to strand me here, or stranded in a coal mine, or trying to live and sleep on an American street, or trying to hold onto hope while desperately trying to dig the people I love out from under a mountain of mud, or living any one of a thousand other every-single-day tragedies that push human beings to the upper limit of the load bearing capacity.

Nah. All I am is busy and exhausted; nothing a shiny, new low-stress-high-cake job and two weeks on a toasty beach with a Libidinous Liberal Lass wouldn't cure.

And if tonight, alone with our thoughts and hearts, or warm next to the person we love, the very worst any one of us can say is that we are stressed and tired then, as the saying goes, we are truly blessed and highly favored.