Here comes the super copter
Here comes the noise it makes
The demon was an idea
The demon is awake
– soul coughing

If you stare at the skies long enough you are bound to see something.  If you stare at a computer screen long enough you stop seeing anything.  I’m getting there.  My deadline for Scotland is not all that far off anymore…Just like the last time I planned a trip overseas time is starting to compress a bit.  It’s not the trip mind you, that’s the easy part. (Well almost, but let’s save that shall we!?)  In time you realize as more experienced paddlers once told me, that you simply can’t plan too much.  Regardless of what madness you conspire, reality will put your  “plan” in a potato sack and kicks the hell out of it. At the end you open the bag and realize your plans have become unrecognizable.  No, what becomes compressed and hyper-stressed are the demands of the “real” world.

I’m not sure why it is but you can plan something for a year or more and it has little effect on your day to day life. (Unless of course you are planning obsessively as I mentioned.)  It’s not until the final weeks that the phone suddenly rings off the hook, that home crises arises, jobs come out of nowhere.. heck even the dog’s fleas become more aggressive.  It seems as if the whole world suddenly stomps on your reality like some sort of cosmic pachyderm, squeezing you down to a one dimensional line strung from task to task with no end in sight.  In the end leaving on the trip itself sometimes feels like being shot out of a toothpaste tube. You don’t really recover your equilibrium until mid-way through the trip when you suddenly realize you’re out in the middle of the ocean being  stalked by a black, unmarked helicopter.

“You said what?”

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