The Engineer's Dilemma

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If I don't have a murder to work on I'm about a worthless fuck.



I need to go a hundred miles an hour, or I won't go at all.





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Lately I've been indulging in this fantasy where I quit the whole endeavor and take to the hills with the woman on the verge and build a nice modernist glass and rusted-steel house on the edge of some woods overlooking the sea and a wide expanse of green. A three mile driveway that leads to a rutted dirt road that is a dozen miles from the nearest paved anything. Some dogs to lie around on the deck and wander in the woods and down to the beach. Maybe a wind that comes up in the afternoon, but dies down by nightfall. A kind of old barn that houses the studio, with kilns and potters wheels and big easels filled with gigantic white canvases. Metalworking gear, a whole wall of drawers and cubby holes the woman could fill with fabric and doll parts and found objects. A heavy bag to hit, a little platform to do yoga and meditate.

The house filled to the rafters with books, a kitchen running down the side of the house overlooking the fields. A fireplace or two, a japanese bath, big open spaces and small, intimate nooks, and light and quiet and stillness.

No murders. No phone calls. No wading through the blood and guts, no crime reports, no witnesses to babysit, no testifying, no watching the parade of stupid, violent, thoughtless fuckups.


Just the sound of the sea and the wind in the grass and the feel of a day that is entirely mine to share with the woman I love.



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Sounds kind of nice, doesn't it?




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And to be honest, I have something that very closely approximates my daydream right now. I don't have the modernist house, but I have a house. I don't have every day to call my own, but I have some of them.

In all the ways that really matter, I am living my dream.



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And I'm not fooling myself.



I like the blood and guts.




I don't know if I would miss any of it, I don't think I will if I ever get to leave it behind, but if I have to have a job, this is the one for me.



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When the woman is gone, I realize how little there is of me. I am greatly diminished. I pace and fret and scowl, I can't sit still for five minutes at a time (Okay, that's how I am anyway, even when she's here, but that's not my point).

I just don't feel like anything I think or see or do has really happened to me until I experience it with her, or at least reexperience it through her eyes. Something like that.

It's like I'm missing both my arms, or like my set got tuned to the wrong channel.


I'm not worth a fuck.



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I have to say that I've been really humbled by your kindnesses lately.


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Namaste.



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