Cause and Effect

After lunch today I drove the Cadillac for the first time in over two weeks. The sun-drenched cabin was warm and reeked sweetly: cherry and smoke, leather and oil. I forgot how emulous and hostile I get in a V-8, how cavalier and smug. I forgot that the slightest pressure on the pedal forces my spine and shoulders deeper into the dusky hide of the seats, and that the harder it is to keep my head forward, the easier it is to keep my chin up. There was angry music straining the capable sound system, and the knees of my jeans were soaking wet.

Sometimes I feel like my world is made of nothing but water. After I vacuumed up the kitchen sea twice last night, not another drop seeped in beneath the molding. Today I wore knee-high rubber boots to stand on rolls of stainless steel covered in lime green algae and two inches of water. The worst of the sticky algae (directly under the skylights) only comes off with an eight-inch white plastic bristle brush on a five-foot handle. We left it too long this time. My back is aching and my hands are blistered.

And Travis and I were back up at the plant just now, putting every single piece of equipment into manual because the PLC’s went into fault mode and the SCADA called me in a digital panic. The raw water coming in is spring runoff (already!) so we turned the polymer up to compensate. I was wandering around in the pitch-black alley between the plants, waiting for the chlorine to come up, thinking about everything I have to think about, and I can’t get over how very much that is. Problem is, I sense myself sliding a little off balance again, a little morose, a lot stressed. I can't get past certain ideas. I can't get past some conversations. I can't get around the roadblocks.

It might help to get some sleep, sometime, but there are so many things I'd rather be doing.