Looking East, (or West or South)

Tomorrow I hope to head to the boat and stay over until Saturday evening. (I leave for Dallas Sunday to spend a few days sitting in The Box.) Though generally a good thing (being at the boat not sitting in The Box) I’m feeling restless and a bit disconnected from my own life. I get this way sometimes. I’m sure it’s a mental defect left over from serving endless years sitting in classrooms and dreaming about being anywhere else. When working mostly means flying then working isn’t so bad. (Flying, after all, is about the perfect job for a person with near terminal wanderlust.) When working means mostly gathering papers on my desk, reviewing them, initialing them, and then carrying them over to another desk? Then I have bad flashbacks to Jr. High. Not that Jr. High was any better or worse than Sr. High, grade school, kindergarten or tech school. I pretty much hated them all. But back then I didn’t own a sailboat, one that can (supposedly) carry me away to just about anyplace on the planet that is washed by saltwater. So right about now I’m thinking it’s a good thing Nomad is in a lake. Of course even if Nomad had access to saltwater it would be impossible to just sail away. I’m not exactly sure why it would be impossible though I suspect there are laws somewhere about just leaving all your stuff behind for someone else to worry about. When I get like this there is a bit from J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories that flits through my mind. I can’t say that it actually helps any or that I even know what it means. Maybe Tolkien didn’t either? But it sounds good and tugs at the wanderer in me. So maybe when I get to the dock I’ll pretend that the lake flows into a river that leads to a gulf that opens up on an ocean. We can’t leave just yet but knowing that we are trying to some day does kind of help. 

  “Around the corner there may wait some unknown path or hidden gate. And though I oft have passed them by the day will come at last when I Will take the secret paths that run East of the Moon West of the Sun”