You'd think the difference between 'just visiting' and 'moving' would be obvious to an idiot like me, who's just moved my whole house. But still, as our friends observed yesterday, it seems like they're "just visiting" instead of that they're ripping themselves from everything they've lived in and around for the last years. With milestones whipping by me, I'm retrospective lately; part of it is trying to connect the dots and find trends, directions, vectors, a meaning to a rather thoroughly odd half-dozen years or so.

It occurs to me that the seventh year is supposed to be a sabbath year, when fields lie fallow. Maybe I'll get a break here soonish...

But maybe this sensation that something big is just around the corner, that things should start making some kind of grand sense Real Soon Now, is what, if prolonged for another dozen years, drives the so-called mid-life crisis -- anticipation stretched out and mixed with a sense of entitlement could drive a man mad if he lacked character and direction.

I think I'm working hard not to become that man. God help me, I don't want to be that thirty-something sonuvabitch whining and maudlin about how things coulda/should/whoulda been, if only... You know, the ones with spoilers on their sedans and "sport" mini-pickups. The past-date-on-the-milk-bottle fraternity wannabes. Incurvatus in se while lamenting they married too young, but-don't-get-me-wrong-etcetera.

CREDIT CARD DEBT -- IT'S EVERYPLACE YOU WANT TO BE

now i wish i could give
brother bill his great thrill
i would
set him in chains at the top of the hill
then send out for some pillars
and cecil b demille
he could die happily ever after

{Blessed art Thou, Lord God, Maker of the Universe, Who hath given us the command to become one flesh.}

While on the one hand it would be easier to give in to the tempations which lead that way, the love of God compels -- I know that that way madness lies, even if the madness is "normal" by a head count in this world (but not the world to come). I admit I was happy to discover, in a conversation with two other fairly sensible married Christian men, that we're not perfect, but we have managed to get a lot of things probably more right than some other couples seem to. (Yes, I know that observation from the outside can be fatally partial, but nonetheless.) Just trying to be thankful I+we have been made less "bent" over the years of the hammering process, to use the term from Perelandra.

And now, for tea, and to throw out a bunch of schtuff I just don't need. Goodwill either hates or loves us these days.