Grab a paddle...

...we're headed down the stream of conciousness.

The weather changed overnight. I drove down the kind of road you only know if you grew up on a city's fringe. Back in Missouri, it was highway EE that ran between Springfield and Willard. Then it was Rock Quarry Road that ran between the University of Missouri campus and the townhomes we lives in off Nifong. In Mississippi, it was that road that ran from the Resevoir up to Lakeland. One would think I'd remember what that road was called, but for the life of me I can't. I've blocked out so many of the days that I lived in the Magnolia State, it's like it never really happened. In fact, as I let my mind wander, the only clear memory of Mississippi was looking at a dead guy's ever-graying hand as he lay beneath his SUV. That was the first of too many dead people I've seen since then.

It was 1am and the humdity in the air was the kind that made the outside of my windshield fog up. It had been sunny all day long. Despite the fact I couldn't see weather in the air, the darkness couldn't hide that autumn was sniffing at Upstate South Carolina. I drove the speed limit down State Park Road toward home where I would toss and turn in bed. I finally got up at 2am and wrote for a few hours about a subject that's been kicking my noodle for the past few days. It may end up being a subject here someday or it may remain in the My Documents file until it's time to kill this laptop and start writing in comp books again.

Despite not having a summer to calll my own, I'm looking forward to autumn. With it comes a trip to LEAF (come on, you know you wanna go...), football weekends, and the death of the necessity of paying attention to yard work. While I was gone this summer, I paid two kids to mow the lawn. By the end of the summer, their version of their duties involved showing up whenever they needed $30. I mowed it myself today.

I read something the other day about a study that explained why teenagers are generally more selfish than adults. It has something to do with the evolution of the brain's chemical makeup. Apparently, as adults spent eons sheltering their children until reproductive age, they turned kids into selfish nits who don't give a damn about other people unless it suits their own self interests. I'm not so convinced of the science, but it would at least explain why my yard hadn't been mowed in a couple of weeks. That and the fact I'm lazy and hate yard work.

That said, I want a bigger yard. I found myself idly searching online the other day for homes in some of my favorite cities. As I searched, I narrowed my quest to properties that were two acres and larger. It's not so much the grass I want as the freedom from hearing my neighbor's phone ring. I've spent six years in this house planting vegetative buffers and I'm still lacking the privacy that would allow me to walk outside naked.

In other news, I'm finally going to get a DVR. I'm also going to buy a wall-mount TV for my upstairs office. Hopefully that will be enough to satiate my technology jones and keep me from buying a new cell phone and satellite radio.

That should do it for now. Too much time at the computer has turned me into a zombie. Fortunately the wife made pasta for dinner, so I don't have to eat brains again. Of course, if those kids show up to mow, I may have a little snack and see what selfish tastes like.