I read an article on the flight magazine about "chowhounds", folks who seek out odd little restaurants for curious "food experiences"--holes in the wall with exotic foods rather than gourmet places. I feel that way about travel. I always want to see the Arbuckle Mountains instead of the Rockies. I want to visit the Hocking Hills more than Beverly Hills. I want to drink in things that are odd, like the buckle your seat belt signs which remind me of Burma Shave signs in West Virginia, like rushing creeks with little whitecaps that appear and disappear, nameless and unknown. I feel sometimes like a little creek, bubbling away, surfacing, disappearing, dodging around cut rock; or maybe a Fall leaf, so ordinary, so one of a multitude, but capable of turning brilliant orange, and then being gone.
I arose early this morning and drove to Columbus. I broke all gender sterotypes by actually asking for directions to the airport once I got there. I rode on an extremely crowded but thankfully non-stop plane to Dallas and arrived at my office just after noon.
Somehow, at the end of the work day, I suddenly began work on my nanowrimo November novel. I am having fun already. Word count thus far: 5,337 words. If I keep going at this pace, I will finish by November 30, even allowing for sloth. I have thus far stuck to my intention, though--I am writing a plotted, long bad poem, a paean to things discovered, things lost, thing we learn from our mutual distance, things we never learn at all, all set to a cheap Cormanesque-without-the-violence-vamps-o