This means that the rest of the time, we’re passing one another in our home on different schedules, grabbing for whatever time we can get. (from ” The Faded Sepia of River Mud“)
On these days I feel like I’m operating in a different time zone.
No matter how much I try to let myself sleep in or try and make myself stay awake when I come in from standing 2nd shift watch, I wake up around 10 AM. Today is Flip Day in my schedule… I’m on night watch, midnight to 0800 tomorrow. I try and get a few things done around the house, write, drink tea instead of coffee. I know Earl Grey has caffeine in it, but there’s a little less caffeine in tea than in coffee and I find it easier to lay down and relax after tea. These days are me, the dogs, and an ungrateful, sweater humping cat. I’ve been watching this Netflix show, The Diplomat. Other than fish bowl murder mysteries, classic British sit coms, and oddly unending loops of The Mentalist, I like well written political intrigue.
What can I say? Television fiction is the only place I can find palatable politics at this point in the timeline.
It’s raining and snowing today. I’m putting off what is probably a novella knocking around in my head. I’m not often plagued by longer fiction nagging me to write it, but this one’s been going on for months, since taking the Mayor Andrew Broaddus to South Point. I’ve been writing that story in fits and snatches between rounds and reading Driftwood: A Biography of Harlan Hubbard. I want to get some sleep, but I also don’t like to waste one of my two full days off in the week.
I’d like to say I’m being amazingly domestic while Amanda is out doing the Good Work of the World. But I’m slouching in my very tired wing back chair, feet up on a foot stool, Chromebook perched on my right leg, writing. Season 2 of The Diplomat is on the television. This set up is sort of ideal for most of the writing I do; floating in the middle of things.
Crossed into Ohio / Ky part of the river. We’re just south of Cincinnati, the City on Seven Hills.
The heat went out on the boat, but the good guys on the tug topped off our water tank.
I both over thought and under thought this trip in terms of packing. I’ve been off the road so long I’ve forgotten what I’m like and what I will need… particularly base layers, not because it’s cold, especially, but because of exposure. I have plenty of layers, and I’m not worried. But I need to remember this.
For all the unromantic and unglamorous aspects of my job, the romantic in my core can not be denied. I love this job, this work, more by the day. Out here on the dirty sacred river, floating north to South Point, somewhere below Cincinnati, I am reexperiencing my home… my larger home… in a profound way. It’s all beautiful and terrible and lonesome and glorious, this congregation of the river.
Some nights after a cruise I will go to bed without taking a shower wearing the scent of the diesel and river on my skin. Though I try not to wake her, she mutters half-awake and pushes up next to me. We breathe each other in. She smells of ripe peaches and spring flowers. We fall asleep.
