Ruts

So.

You may have noticed that things have been a little, uh, slow here in Yellow Shirtdom. Un-verbose. Shoddy. Downright neglected. This is not good. Quite not good. Thus:

(Sha-da da da duh duhhh, sha duh-da duh da daaaaa!!!!)

Coming to you starting right the hell now, from this very digital space on which your eyes are currently locked...

(Bum dah dah bum da! Bum dah dah bum da!)

It's a small and simple thing that we (I) here at the Yellow Shirt like to do to kick ourselves (myself) right in our (my) collective (singular) ass and get out of this summer rut of worthlessness in which we (I) are (am) currently languishing...

(Kettle drums....)

Ten Minute Writings!

(Da daaaaaaaaaaaaaah!)

That's right, it's a whole week's worth of me sitting daily at the keyboard and grinding out at least ten minutes of whatever on earth falls out of my listless, summer-addled brain. With any luck, by Saturday things in the noggin will have become downright listful, and something worth your consideration will have leaked onto this space.

What to expect? I have no idea! Definitely most of the following: inanity (not to be confused with insanity), rambling diatribes, rants, musings on absurdly broad subjects, observations on ridiculous details, and probably fewer than seventy-three typos and grammatical errors! But no matter what, it will be something, which had better be better than nothing, or we've all got some serious reconsidering to do with regards to how we spend our time (me: writing, you: reading it).

So let's put a bullet behind the ear of this characteristically overwraught intro and move on to today's ten minutes:

As I jogged along the wooded road in a nearby park at nine o'clock tonight, I considered for the one millionth time in the past two months just how much I love summer. The perfect warm night breezes, the earthy greenness of everything, the absurdly late sunsets, swimming pools, and on and on and on. The glory of summer is probably one of the most over-discussed subjects imaginable, but talking about something too much does not make it untrue.

Personally, the double-edged sword of this season is its ultra-casual, meandering nature. It is wonderful to find yourself doing A on a summer evening, (where A = building a deck on your brother's house) and then find that A has blended into B (where B = kicking a ball around at the nearby soccer fields) which wanders into C, D, and E (possible values for these would be grilling out on a half-completed deck, going for ice cream, enjoying old episodes of The Wire on DVD, watching TIVOed World Cup games, or playing Mario Cart for the Gamecube) and before you know it it's 11:30 and none of the twenty-six things (values Ax-Zx) that you were going to accomplish that day or evening have been even remotely glanced at, let alone checked off anything resembling a list, not that you have a list, because it's summer, and 10:15 sunsets are not particularly inspirational with regards to the creation and maintenance of lists. Don't get me wrong, this is an extremely relaxing way to spend an evening, but it will also tend to put other parts of your life in one hell of a rut.

Yes, that's right, I'm blaming the tilt of the earth's axis relative to the sun for the fact that I've been neglecting about 40% of my so-called "Actual Life Responsibilities." Well, not blame, exactly, but maybe partial responsibility. If this rut were a paper submitted to a scientific joural, I would be the primary author, but Summer would definitely be a second-tier contributing research assistant.

Today, I managed to discover some small degree of motivation (it was in the silverware drawer, at the back, underneath the serving spoons - should have looked there back in mid-May) and the result in just ninety short minutes was a remarkably clean and organized living area. In a brief spasm of effort I turned several cluttered workspaces into clean, happy, surfaces of potential future accomplishment and reduced multiple towering piles of "HEY TAKE CARE OF THIS" to one small heap of lower-case sanity. I am going to attribute this brief success to the fact that my air-conditioning was cranked way down and my blinds were closed, thus neutralizing the summerocity lurking just outside.

Is there a way for summer and productivity to coexist? Can these two fundamentally opposed beasties be balanced in some reasonable system of mutual respect, or will I have to run madly from one extreme to the other until the leaves change? Given my personal history, I expect a lot of insane dashing in the near future. Who needs calming, rational balance and disciplined even-handedness when you can pinball wildly between each end of the spectrum? Not me, apparently.

Tomorrow: Baldfaced, grandiose and possibly pretentious philosophy!