stir crazy, lead feet

Ever feel like the millions of great ideas you have, all the potentiality in the world, isn't enough?

I drove north today on the 101 to Las Virgenes and out to the ocean to go to the market. I know there are three dozen other supermarkets between me and the one at Malibu, but I needed to get away. I've been wanting more and more to get away now for a while; and it's in response, I think, to feeling my own body grow silent, and quiet; I have weekends off like the rest of the people in this city, and I spend them sitting inside my little box, qietly panicking that I do not know what to do with my time; that those ten million wonderful ideas are going to die, stillborn, because I cannot move to act on any of them.

I spend so many hours of my life searching for that brilliant passion, that madness, that intensity of living; or at least, I spend so many hours wondering why it isn't there. A friend calls it her dragon-slaying moods.

The problem, we've both agreed, is that there are no dragons.

I am craving the desert, the mountains, a forest, anything. A different city, a break into a place where every movement is conscious, every second is lived with vividity.

I remember camping in Death Valley last year as summer waned and the high desert air grew freezing at night; and me and two friends got drunk by a campfire and huddled in our tent, in the thunder and the rain, alone in the middle of nowhere, a sweeping vista of mountains sloping down, extending miles and miles, a lavender-grey haze of distant brush and stones, the black-and-white shatter of the sky as lightning, green with electricity, crackled through the air.

Now tomorrow I have to drive to work again.