from the gentle pressure of the road
I have a hard time on the road. I find the differences between home and hotel discombobulating. I can do the whole live-in-the-fancy-hotel thing, I simply feel like I'm in a play or a movie where nothing is real - trapped by aliens who built a world for me to inhabit based on a newspaper or novel they found in my luggage.
Then there's typing on a laptop, doing all the odd things required of you in hotel life: cultivating tiny relationships with people along the way, finding your way around the hotel neighborhood, "settling in", all the adjustments one makes to being in a lifestyle that is impermanant and fleeting, in fact, for me, over at about 7pm today when I thankfully return home. It's living the idea that you will experience all the things you have the potential to experience in a place that desire overloads with possibility. You'll be rested, you'll sleep better, eat better, have time to exercise and think clearly; your mind will relax and get aired out a bit, you'll have insights that will natrually occur in a new environment where you'll freely associate and integrate new experiences with old ones without the limiting roadblocks of day to day life. Oh, and you'll go to museums and plays and movies and eat in fascinating restaurants and shop as much as possible. You'll call and visit friends you haven't seen in years.
In assessment on the way home, I find that I attended a conference, meaning I worked, felt lonely and disjointed from not seeing my family, ate oddly, rested indifferently. and saw perhaps a few blocks of city while I wandered, strained, from place to place finding the things I inevitably forget to bring along on a trip.
Adjustment disorder is now my research topic. I have a certain amount of energy. Most of the time some part of it is going into "maintaining" as we used to say. Maintaining as opposed to acting how I actually feel, which oscillates between shrieking in a loud barking mad fashion from a sense of being overwhelmed, to communicating to the people around me that I love them eternally or that they should die and go to ache ehee double toothpicks and stay there and I'm going to help get them get on that road right NOW kinda thing. Humanity under the hood is not pretty.
The kindly civilized gloss over the top of all this gets a bit thin from time to time, and being in odd places doing exotic esoteric things makes for unpleasant strain I find than doing little odd bits (which I'm doing all the time anyway) with my family and surroundings stable and holding me up, taking the pressure off, reassures me that all will be well, and all will be well, and that in the end all will be well.
Then there's typing on a laptop, doing all the odd things required of you in hotel life: cultivating tiny relationships with people along the way, finding your way around the hotel neighborhood, "settling in", all the adjustments one makes to being in a lifestyle that is impermanant and fleeting, in fact, for me, over at about 7pm today when I thankfully return home. It's living the idea that you will experience all the things you have the potential to experience in a place that desire overloads with possibility. You'll be rested, you'll sleep better, eat better, have time to exercise and think clearly; your mind will relax and get aired out a bit, you'll have insights that will natrually occur in a new environment where you'll freely associate and integrate new experiences with old ones without the limiting roadblocks of day to day life. Oh, and you'll go to museums and plays and movies and eat in fascinating restaurants and shop as much as possible. You'll call and visit friends you haven't seen in years.
In assessment on the way home, I find that I attended a conference, meaning I worked, felt lonely and disjointed from not seeing my family, ate oddly, rested indifferently. and saw perhaps a few blocks of city while I wandered, strained, from place to place finding the things I inevitably forget to bring along on a trip.
Adjustment disorder is now my research topic. I have a certain amount of energy. Most of the time some part of it is going into "maintaining" as we used to say. Maintaining as opposed to acting how I actually feel, which oscillates between shrieking in a loud barking mad fashion from a sense of being overwhelmed, to communicating to the people around me that I love them eternally or that they should die and go to ache ehee double toothpicks and stay there and I'm going to help get them get on that road right NOW kinda thing. Humanity under the hood is not pretty.
The kindly civilized gloss over the top of all this gets a bit thin from time to time, and being in odd places doing exotic esoteric things makes for unpleasant strain I find than doing little odd bits (which I'm doing all the time anyway) with my family and surroundings stable and holding me up, taking the pressure off, reassures me that all will be well, and all will be well, and that in the end all will be well.
posted by Scott at 7:23 AM
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