"And I thought to myself, oh, son..."

"You may be lost in more ways than one.  But I've a feeling that it's more fun than knowing exactly where you are."

Recently (since Monday), I've become obsessed with the band Passenger.

Here is a true story:

Last year, my parents were out of town visiting my brother when a mirror fell off the wall in a bathroom on the main floor of their house and crashed behind the toilet, severing the water line and flooding the entire floor.  (That was a fun mess they walked in on when they got home.)

While their floor was being replaced, they lived in a hotel at the Avenue Carriage Crossing mall, and if you knew my parents, you'd know that them living at a mall for two months went about as well as, well, me living at a mall for two months.  But one weekend something was going on in one of the parking lots and my parents went to investigate and my mom won a CD from an FM 100 tent and it was Passenger's All the Little Lights.  She took a five-second listen to the first song, tossed it aside, and didn't think of it again until a few weeks ago when she was in the car driving eight hours to see her mother and had already listened to everything else she'd brought with her.

This weekend, while I was in Mississippi visiting, I was told that maybe I should listen to this album that only came into my parents' life because on two separate occasions my mom was desperate for a distraction.

***

Another thing I did this weekend was read The Alchemist and its nonfiction companion The Pilgrimage.  Of the two, I found the fictional story more believable...but there was a good message in both.  And that message is something heard in nearly every song on that Passenger CD.

I got kicked out of my cubicle for a second time today.  Since it was empty, I started sitting there again, but today I was told, no, really, I couldn't do that anymore.

I don't want to fight that fight.  It's not that important.  And perhaps when we're talking about me living a life in which I cast about for things to write about and it's my cubicle that I deem most worthy of discussing, then we've got a bigger problem.

I listen to myself make excuses and explain things that I don't have to explain and try to find reason in order to make a better story when the story should always come second to the living of it.

Dude.  What in the hell happened to me?