Friday, May 11, 2012

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

I've always been very protective of my alone time. Even over the last 30 years of owning a store and being married, I've always found time to do nothing.

Events have conspired to shrink that time, even though I'm taking a lot of days off at work.

Linda and I are the family in town when it comes to dealing with Dad's stuff, so that has really taken a huge chunk of time out of our lives. At the same time, ironically, the actual scheduling of vacations seems to have shrunk time even more. There are things we have to do, places we have to go -- just so we can get to a time when we don't have things to do and places to go.

There are legal (wills and such), accounting, taxes and other everyday things that need to be handled, that were never a problem when we were flat broke.

Somehow I've avoided all this little annoyances over the years. Mostly, because I would just say no to most social activities -- but these are things I can't in good conscious neglect.

Anyway, was talking to a young writer in my store yesterday and we were commiserating about how hard it is to find time to write, and I just remembered how I used to have the luxury of having oodles of time to write, or just to think about writing.

Because I didn't know anyone, I was underemployed and broke, and I had no responsibilities.

I know the old Kristofferson line is a bit of a cliche, but it's still overwhelmingly true.

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