Barn Door Open

Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.
-William Techumseh Sherman, 1870

It's too late for me to get into this. I am far too worn and haggard from weeks-on-end of putting someone else's well-being before my own. I'm not bitching. I know what I signed up for, and the pay ain't half bad.

I'm bushed, however, and barely alive as I hit the pillow. But there's this thing that keeps me from my dreams of Sweet Colleen in her chocolate bikini.
It's this ... uncertainty ... (but we will never call it that) that appears behind shuttered eyes. A reluctant, but compulsive, fingering of the internal GPS for the coordinates as to where I am, relative to the rest of the world. As if it mattered. One guy. In the whole universe.

But tonight we'll start in Singapore and move northeast, over a thousand Phillipine isles and out across the wide, blue Pacific. The globe spins past ten thousand cultures and ten thousand tongues, yet here I am above it all, moving. Moving. A billion lives past beneath my wings and yet I am focused on one Place, the Place that I am. And soon enough, I have found me. I'm right the fuck here, of course. But the World has come to find me.

And then I have to decide whether it matters at all where I stand together, or whether I stand alone.

And in the meantime I pray for sleep.