Apologies and the Traffic Report

It has come to my (admittedly fleeting) attention that I haven't been a very good friend lately. Many emails have gone unanswered; many phone messages have gone unlistenedto and worst of all, I totally forgot to go to a birthday celebration on Sunday night. So, friends, I'm sorry and I suck. Don't worry, it's not just you: I'm also busily being a bad daughter, bad sister and bad dog owner. I am, however, being a really goddamn good museum employee and also, I think I might be being a good parent, but it's difficult to tell, because my children are pretty much never home. When they are, though, I'm doing a lot of shouting from the kitchen about things like homework and responsibility and duty and good citizenship and, naturally, the dishes, and while it's just vaguely possible that they aren't listening to me, deeply absorbed as they are in such vital occupations as World of Warcraft and watching Fun with Dick and Jane, still, according to the 1952 Dr. Spock, quantity shouting = quality parenting. Things will shake down soon and perhaps I can resume what tattered remnants of my family and social life remain. At least I hope so.

Either that or I'll die of being too busy and in that case I want whatever eventual mythical inheritances are coming my way to go to my kids, because I saw some street kids walking depressedly from the Rescue Mission towards the park, and it put me in a tizzy of worrying about my children, who may yet wake up one day and discover that achieving Level 40 and the resultant fire breathing horse in World of Warcraft does not a useful job resume make. Then I thought about how I had nothing to leave them if I fell over and just died, as sometimes seems likely, particularly in heavy traffic on the Smoky Park Highway Bridge (which bounces alarmingly when you're sitting there at the red light) and I nearly sobbed at the thought of the two poor waifs with noone to buy their frozen junk food or wash their dishes or hear their sadness over the clothes that they must have that their evil parent will not buy. That proceeded into a small Shakespearian frenzy over who would be more likely to kill me for some mythical inheritance: my brothers or my kids? Ah, the time honored question that all mad tyrants are prone to - it is a poser.

I have come to the conclusion, by the way, that there is no good way to leave downtown Asheville at 5:00. No matter which way you go, you will sit there in hot traffic, trying to take blog notes and discovering that stopping and then going 10 feet and then stopping again in a standard shift car is really, and I do mean really, not conducive to taking blog notes. Or much of anything else, really, except wondering what the hell Ms. S.D.A. means on the vanity license plate on the white minivan in front of you and hoping that the rapture comes within the next four minutes. When the rapture comes, the traffic will improve. In the meantime, it's probably better to go have a beer at 5:00 than try to go home.