Yesterday I took two planes to get here. I got a little bit of work done at the airport, mostly planning revisions on the thesis, and I got a little bit of writing done on the plane, mostly poems stuff for this poetry workshop I’m taking as my final (and I’d be remiss to note, somewhat of a blow-off) class of my degree (blow-off in the sense that it’s not particularly taxing, workload-wise, but not in terms of the actual work I’m doing, if that makes sense. Doesn’t matter–). I had meant to sleep, having gotten up at 5:30am to go to my job that is kind enough to let me flex early so I can go to said poetry workshop on Wednesdays in the afternoon, but I did not, at least on the first flight. Instead I read A Void (Perec) when it wasn’t too bumpy, listened to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea when it was, and worked on the iPad my brother generously gave me during the last hour or so of the flight when it was reasonably smooth and I had given up on trying to sleep. I transferred at Nashville in the dark and I could not see what had become of the city in the aftermath of the tornadoes and storms.

The second flight, like all second flights, now that I think of it, I paid less attention to the flight attendants giving their schpeils and the pilots talking and read a little then tried to snooze, at least at the beginning, despite the many loud children and also (louder) adults sitting hear me talking and the whole plane smelled like barbecue, which I suppose is appropriate for Nashville. But fairly turbulent again. Thankfully the second flight was shorter, and that my friend Lisa, who’d gotten to San Antonio much earlier, went out to buy the house we were staying in some beer.

On both flights, I got some work done. Nothing productive, per se, but by that I really only mean that I didn’t have the brain power or rather will power to try and wade back into the book work, which I am realizing as I type this is not going to be bad once I start, but the starting it is the small challenge (I have a good life: these are my small challenges), but I got do do some sentence-work, some small, detail work, applying the finer brush strokes to things and sifting them down for organization and this, that the other. In short, I did work, and the work was good and brought me joy in its doing.

Not the worst start to the week, is all I mean to say.

And I’m thinking too, a little bit, about trips, and how I almost always do some kind of a trip journal or trip log or something, and I think it’s because a trip is an easier container to get a hold on (compared to, say a year, or a life, though of course that’s certainly been done well and less well by others). And maybe this log will be my warm up to the day’s writing (for the fuck is the point of going to a writing conference if you do not also write every day), and maybe this will become a warm up generally, a thought or two to get into the head space as much as the fingers space, the words space, the sentences. That would be nice. But I’m still a little sleep deprived and you and I both know that kind of change, that kind of habit, is hit or miss. It’s a good idea, but if I only have so much time… the writing is the important thing. So important.

Barry (the therapist) and I were talking about what I “need” when we met on Tuesday, and it kind of came down to (in a pithy way), “writing and riding” on top of my socializing, which is to say I need regular bikes, books, and bullshit, and really, I think that’s about right.