Brain in Bag

I’m beat. I had grand plans, during today’s drive up here from DC, to put together a post about the methodology section of my prospectus, basically trying to reason out the question: how am I selecting my texts? But it’s late, and it was a long drive, even with the relatively unclogged roads and smoothly-moving traffic. (Aside: my most frequent mental grumble to other drivers on the freeway is, “Maybe if you weren’t tailgating that person in front of you, you wouldn’t have to ride your brakes all the time.” I’m a fairly aggressive driver myself, but I don’t tailgate. I mean, religiously: I drove big trucks, and I know stopping distances. And I figure the fact that I still hold a Class A CDL entitles me to pontificate some — but of course, on the interstate, that’s a mindset different from no other.) The girls are happy to be back home, with Tink nestled in my leather jacket after suffering the trauma of confronting my dad’s 18-year-old foul-tempered and very heavy feline grande dame, yclept Gertie (Tink held her own and hissed; Gertie made noises very much like Gollum’s in the new LOTR movies), and Zeugma is now sunning herself in the kitchen under my jade plants’ grow lights after two days ago being so terrified by my dad that she found a way to climb up his closet wall and into the slim gap between the ductwork and the ceiling that let her escape into the tunnel between two ceiling joists.

Yeah, it was one of those holidays.

Anyway: I’m happy I won’t have to deal with tomorrow’s traffic, and I’ve got Willi Boskovsky’s wonderfully elastic-feeling Vienna Philharmonic recordings of the younger Strauss on the stereo, but as far as thinking and writing goes — well, I haven’t unpacked yet, and I’m feeling like I’ve left my brain in one of my bags, so this won’t take long.

Here’s my difficulty.

Brain in Bag