The musings of a madman...

  … and we’re back!        It should be noted that I spend roughly a third of my time alone with my dogs.  Wife Person™ leaves for work at 7am, and twenty minutes later I take Ava to my mom to drop off at school, from which she will also be the one to pick her up.  I am out and back before I clock in by 8am.  I am in the house by myself until Wife Person™ returns at about 4.  Carve out the eighty minutes I spend exercising before waking them and I’m alone with the boys 11.5 hours a day five days a week and there went 57.5 of 168 hours.      It is further noteworthy that middle-child-by-birth-order life has already instilled me with the social awkwardness that allows one to become their own favorite company.  I say that to say that social cues have and likely will never be my thing, and that working from home will prove to have done nothing to fix this. Anyway…      Despite my normal isolation and my absolute comfort with it, so long as there is music, a podcast or some combination of

       When I was a kid I only travelled outside of my home state a VERY few times, and never outside of the time zone I was born in until I was an actual adult.   Never set foot on a plane until I was 20.   Everywhere we went was driveable distances.   It became such a “thing” that even in adulthood, I will sooner drive out trips that many people will fly. Kid me, having only been to Williamsburg and the beach in VA, then Atlanta after that – outside of visits to grandma’s family down in the sticks in SC – used to think that the lines one saw on a map would be visible out in the world as you travel.   Like there would be a white line marking the exit of one state and into the next.      Adult me, as soon as the constraints of being a broke child were off, got the fuck out and around the country even if to be inconvenienced by the habit of driving instead of even CONSIDERING flying.      One such trip transpired and the young age of 21… I rented a car because I was driving an abs