It’s a beautiful Sunday night in Illinois, and Jen and I have just enjoyed a wonderful pot roast, complete with some gravy I whipped up from the resulting stock. A nice night to relax with some hot chocolate under a warm fleece blanket with a fluffy kitty curled up my lap.. It’s a good time to reflect, recuperating after two and a half hours of exercising yesterday. A time to finally write up part of the outline I wrote while riding home from work one evening.

What is it like to feel satisfaction and know true contentment? To let the world and its ills flow past, through, and beyond. To smile in the face of adversity, of pain, of loss. To have that strength, to embrace absolute insignificance, to reduce any problem to a shadow of nothing. To eschew derision, find compassion for the hateful, and love the enemy that inspires progression beyond simple reaction. For years, I’ve felt on the verge of understanding the world–beyond the components that comprise the shapes and senses, past anthropomorphic callings of mental stimuli and instinctual urges.

A lot of you are probably wondering how the honeymoon on Hilton Head Island went. I’d be remiss if I didn’t say anything, but I can bring up a few highlights. We had the hotel practically to ourselves for the 22nd and 23rd of December. I’m unsure quite how that happened, but it was highly enjoyable to wander the halls with impunity and have the hot tub to ourselves. I quite enjoyed Hudson on the Docks, though there was certainly a bevy of exquisite sources of victuals dotting the island and surrounding area.

I have necessarily been incommunicado for the first two weeks post wedding–not because of our honeymoon, which remains a week away, but to recharge. Too much socializing, an unceasing onslaught of novelty, and a hospital visit consumed every vestige of current powering my scarcely animate carcass. This of course, requires copious explanation. So far as memory serves, the revelry began on the 28th. Aside from checking into the hotels, setting up the dining hall, trucking to and from Bloomington to snatch my mother from the wretched clutches of Amtrak, relaying sketchy directions to visitors, and generally contributing to increasing turmoil all before 5pm to attend the rehearsal and accompanying dinner, I maintained most of my composure.

Always scheming, scarcely dreaming–is it bits, or bats, or both? Wind around a wrinkled walrus, best amend your tale of woe. ‘Cause it’s simple, as a pimple, for anyone to see, that the crazy isn’t lazy to the dreaming and the me. But don’t listen (there’s a siren) to the babbling I make. Every time I cough or chortle, I’ve most likely made a mistake. Or have I wandered oddly off the road into the trees?