Day one. Made it to the Cherokee Forest. I am carefully watching the doppler and trying to outsmart the torrential rain that is hammering the eastern seaboard.
This is a picture of David on his birthday. He looks a little bit like “what did I get myself into again.” You can see the dogs are already thinking this is much better than hanging out in Dupont Circle.
David started the morning listing his ailments: hip, allergies, nausea, there were more but you get the point. I said, “my god, you just turned 43 and are falling apart.”
“I am 42,” he clapped back.
“That makes it even worse.” And at that he was quiet.
As we make our way across the BBQ belt, aka Tennessee, I am struck by a few things.
First, there are many trucks and I admit I will be disturbed when in the future, I look into the trucks and see no one. Who am I going to give the signal to blow the horn? Or flip off if they just almost squashed me? Human interaction is…well…human. As we engineer it out of our lives, how are we going to keep connected? Do they have Chiefs of Connection sitting out there in Silicon Valley thinking about this or only when we are really isolated will someone from there say “mistakes were made”? If Congress wasn’t such a hot mess we could outlaw passive voice and it would go far in restoring responsibility.
Second, being out of the office really does make me think differently. For what purposes are offices designed? When I was starting out, people told me I needed to be in downtown to seem like a legit powerbroker (check). I needed to look onto something meaningful (St. Matthews, check). And I needed very office-y looking furniture, so people took me seriously. Most office furniture has an institutional look about it. I heard Amazon gives every employee a door and two columns for their desk. This is supposed to be egalitarian I suppose but when you think yourself… I need to be creative, do you think “one door and two columns.” Or I need to have a conversation…one door and two columns will do the trick. They say form follows function but when it comes to office furniture it seems like form just follows the herd.
Last and most importantly is how hard it is to find firewood when it is 80 degrees. Last year we left in April and it was still chilly. Firewood everywhere. Now it is 80 and people look at me funny when I ask for firewood. It is for cooking I say. They look at me skeptically. I grown more emphatic “I camp.” At which point they generally yell “Next” at the Flying J store counter and I skulk off. I just realized I am in the BBQ belt. Lots of people are burning wood at their BBQ restaurants. David says we are to eat what he brought but if we must go to a BBQ place for wood we might as well get a little pulled port and beans. It is the neighborly thing to do.
Adventures in LuLu 