“So you want to do it?” Mike asked in an over-excited way, like a kid on a school yard planning to jump off the roof and looking for accessories. I smiled, but secretly I almost threw up. Run another marathon? “Uh, no,” I told him, and he looked disappointed. “I want to live.” Mike works with me and he took up running several months back because he doesn’t like his knee caps and liked the thought of heat stroke combined with the kind of hyperventilation that putting one foot in front of the other for multiple miles brings on. Now he has gotten it in his head that running a marathon might be a cool idea. He’s already registered for the Marine Corps Marathon in D.C. I wish him all the luck in the world and hope he survives. I’ve run a marathon before, several years ago when I was younger and lacked common sense, or a cluster of brain cells. One day I will run another one and have sworn to complete the New York Marathon. But it takes a certain mindset to convince yourself that going out and pounding yourself for 26 miles is a sane idea. And it also takes the kind of innocence of that kid on the schoolyard who believes that jumping off a one-story building somehow might be a good idea, and won’t shorten him by 18 inches.

So much to do, so little time to want to do it. Yes, the summer jobs around the house loom. They haunt me in my sleep, calling me and taunting me. “You’ll never finish us. You’ll start three and quit after getting a splinter, sissy boy.” It’s quite frightening to get visited by these ghostly visions on a nightly basis. Lawnmowers that need oil changes. Trees that need trimming. Talking pipes and a belching bucket of plaster that eats a ham sandwich and throws putty knives at me. “You’ll never start us!” A driveway. The unfinished plants by the street. Some plastering in the baby’s room. An upgrade to the backyard spigot. A shower each morning. Grass that makes my neighbors jealous. A cure for cancer made from butterfly bushes. A ladder to the sun. Figuring out what all that crap is on my desk. Throwing out all that crap on my desk. Banishing weeds to Oklahoma. Developing a magnet that will repel leaves and dust from my front porch so I don’t have to sweep anymore.

Dry! So dry! Someone in this great nation please send us poor Floridians a bottle of Perrier. We’re parched. We’re thirsty. We’re drought-stricken. We’re all going to be on fire soon. And well, this is just ridiculous because five miles that way is the great Atlantic Ocean, and a few miles that way is the Gulf of Mexico, so how in the heck can you be surrounded by water but dying of thirst? How can that be? We shouldn’t be the ones begging for rain. We’re tropical. We have rivers, lakes and even water parks. But here we are, desperate and dry. When we want it to rain, we get nothing. When we don’t want it to rain, a hurricane pulls into town like an unwanted house guest who sleeps on the sofa, eats all our food and then throws such a big, fat party that the power gets knocked out and the yard looks like the Rolling Stones played there.

Last week it was little kids and a red rubber ball that got me thinking about childhood, and this week it was highwaters. Yes, highwaters. Don’t know what highwaters are? That’s when your pants are a bit too short, rising up on your ankles so a couple inches of sock peek out to the daylight, wave at the world and cause you no end of embarrassment. If you wear highwaters, you can’t walk three inches without someone remarking, “What time you expecting the flood, dorkasaur?” I thought of this one day while wearing an older pair of pants that looked a millimeter too short for my taste. Fine by fashion standards, but you can’t help but be insecure as the memories of schoolyard razzing comes rushing back. “Mom, why’d you hem ‘em so short!” I nearly changed as I’ve worked too hard in this life for one single reason: to never be caught in highwaters again.

There we were at the Flagler College end-of the year picnic, showing off my little 4-month-old baby to co-workers and handing her around to people who had passed the 43-question test (with essay) we require before you can handle little Amelie. My eyes became transfixed on a group of kids in the corner of the yard, all hootin’ and hollerin’ while blasting a little red ball at each other trying to take someone’s knee cap off. “That’ll be you soon,” somebody said, noticing my gaze as I bounced the baby. I stared starry-eyed and muttered, “yeah.” And then it occurred to me, “no.” He didn’t mean me! He meant that will be Amelie one day. She will be out there playing, whoopin’ it up with the other kids, and by the size of her, beating them up and stepping on them with her massive size 62 shoes that are usually worn by circus bears to keep their snaggly toenails from tearing up the carpet. He meant her, not me! But I wanted to be out there with them … in the mix … whoopin’ it up … gettin’ crazy … gettin’ grass stains on my pants … messin’ up my hair … rolling in the grass until I itched so bad I thought my skin would fall off. Not her. Me! Look at ‘em. It’s summertime. Daylight savings time is back. The air is warm. The grass is thick and there’s playin’ to do. Lots of it. I wanted the […]

I had to check it twice, even three times, just to see if my eyes were deceiving me. They’ve been known to do that, you know. Once I mistook a plastic bag in a field for a rabbit smoking a cigarette on a Harley Davidson. But this was real. This was no fraud of my imagination. The headline on the Internet, from a respectable news source, honestly said: “Geologists Find Ancient Worm Feces.” Life was so much easier when I was just seeing imaginary biker rabbits. Reality is much harder to deal with. THE STORY (as reported by The Associated Press): “Swedish geologists have found fossilized feces from a worm that lived some 500 million years ago, media reports said Wednesday.” The mind takes off like a drag racer after reading that. So many questions. So many things wrong with that one sentence. If you took out the only sane part — “… said Wednesday” — it would be like removing graphite rods from a nuclear reactor, and that concoction of absurdities would quickly produce a chain reaction. Newspapers and computers across America would spontaneously combust!

I’m not cheap. That’s not the reason I tinker and come up with odd solutions to obvious problems. I’m not lazy, either. Most of the time it takes far longer to do it my way than the way anyone else would — throw it out and start over. And it’s not like I’m trying to save room in the landfill. Yet, there I was, cramming myself under the passenger seat of my Jeep, replacing a spring that broke, which causes it to slide forward and back like an amusement park ride. I had created a wire contraption that would hold it in place … hopefully. Why not just get a new spring? I don’t know! And there I was calling my brother to ask if the welder was working. “Whyyyyy?” he asked in his goofy, defensive sing-song, not wanting to commit to an answer until he knew it wouldn’t suck him into a bottomless pit of work.

The headline on the Wall Street Journal technology section read, “Secrets of the tech-Savvy Traveler” and I realized we had lost the war to the machines. Actually, it runs deeper than that. We have lost the war to work. Nowhere are we safe from work. Not at home. Not on vacation. Not even in the bathroom. Technology is such that we can take it with us everywhere, and probably to the grave, where I’m sure we can do it just as effectively, and maybe quicker. “60 Minutes” just ran a piece called “Working 24/7,” and it said Americans work more hours than anyone on the planet, including the Japanese. And the Japanese used to work until one of their feet would fall off.