GOING, GOING...

It was a train that took me away from here
But a train can't bring me home--Tom Waits

True enough, Tom. Tomorrow I'm leaving New Haven on a train -- to the Tri-State area of my youth: PA, NJ, maybe even DE -- but I'll be coming back by car. But the mode of transport isn't all that important, what is important is the feeling of "getting the hell outta here." It's a bit of shaking the wings before real fall sets in, before the school year's many papers to grade begin to descend on my hapless head. Maybe the only thing I like more than "getting the hell outta here," is "staying home no matter what" -- the insular feeling of being holed-up, in hibernation, "some groceries and peanut butter to last a couple of days" and no need to poke out of the oubliette for anything or anybody. That will come soon enough I guess. In the meantime there's an exhilarating sense of ducking out, of running away from the "welcome backs," of going "back to where you once belonged," of saying, summer's gone, and so am I.

Funny too how leaving home these days also means, for those of us who leave the computer behind and aren't pursued by text-messages into the infinite horizon, being "offline"! Think of it -- an odyssey out into a world where text doesn't exist! It feels a bit like stepping outside the module in outer-space with no frail lifeline allowing one to cling on to the great Internet Mothership. Incommunicado. Arrivaderci . . . sayonara . . . as Bugs used to say.