No post yesterday.  Not because I had nothing to say.  Not because some evil befell me and I couldn’t drag myself to a keyboard.  Not even because it was Sunday, the relatively recently-sanctioned day of rest in our culture.  (And, as you might expect in this space, here we take a detour:  since the Sabbath was Saturday for at least a thousand years among the Jews, one suspects Adam knew the exact day of the week God rested.  Although I don’t have a Bible at hand, so don’t know which of the two creation stories at the beginning of Genesis placed Adam where in the schedule, I believe Yahweh would have demonstrated the proper day to rest, and that this knowledge would have been passed forward from father to daughter and mother to son until we came to the Passover remembrance of, say, 30 CE.  At the end of the week, Friday, Jesus is hanging on the cross between a couple thieves, and then gets put into a cave.  He’s not resurrected the next day—because God was resting?—but he does get the olly-olly-oxenfree on Sunday morning, Easter, and now Christians (but not Jews or Muslims) have a Sunday Sabbath.  My question, and I know it’s been no express train to arrive here, is:  which day does God rest now?  Did he change his whole routine at the resurrection, or is he still spending Saturdays in his pajamas, resting up for another week of holding the universe in existence?)  No, the reason I didn’t write a post yesterday is because I spent 11 hours in the Jeep Cherokee—a black box for those of you keeping score at home—ferrying my friend George back to the southlands, drinking coffee prepared by my friend, Jennifer, at Starbucks and walking with my daughter, Becca, at the Monkey-Around Playground in Concord.

As I’d mentioned, George rode up with Peter Biello on Friday, then spent a couple nights here, sleeping in the bunkhouse.  George is great at fixing things, and spent much of his time pointing out how things could be improved.  That last sentence makes George sound like a know-it-all busybody, and he’s not; still, Godlike, George looks on creation and sees that things could be a little better if only . . . After if-onlying our way through the weekend, George needed a ride back to Concord, where he’d left his car, so we left Sunday morning at 10.

The ride south was physically unremarkable but, as is always the case, intellectually exhausting.  George has spent extended periods of time in government-supported confined spaces, and has a first-rate brain that appears to have piled up hours/days/months/years of unexpressed thoughts.  As a fellow sufferer of tangentophilia, not only as a producer but as a consumer, I enjoyed George’s nonstop rap about assimilation of immigrants (for), speed limits on public roads (against), escaping from jail (for—with illustrative anecdotes), women (for—although they are fundamentally different from men), NPR (for), child molesting and molesters (against) and, of course, ginseng (FOR!)  Also, George likes oatmeal to be smooth rather than chewy.

Arriving in Concord, we stopped to see Jennifer, in all her tattooed glory.  Jennifer designed this website, but is unable to get in to fix my pet peeve about it (the daily ramblings bit on the home page STILL says the first post is coming, when it’s been there for two months).   In Starbuck’s I did a reprise of The Keith Show, something I haven’t done for the past two weeks, and was scared by how easy it is for me to devolve into doing shtick given an audience of more than one.  Ah, back to the Tao te Ching to rediscover how to be quiet.

After dropping George off, I met Becca at a playground my parents used to take her to when she was a little girl.  Hearing how much she loves her job as a researcher at UNH made me very happy indeed.  Hearing how her sisters, her mother and I still drive her crazy made me feel very normal indeed.  Driving back to Pittsburg for the next three hours with Sam (is a dog) as my companion made me feel very peaceful indeed.

Indeed.