Peasant Vs. Backpack

Out of nowhere this morning I asked SuperK: "Why do you think it is that I'm so restless?"  For people who have been married a long time two of the most popular pastimes are criticizing your partner and baiting your partner into criticizing you so that you can go totally ballistic at the unfairness of being criticized without the slightest provocation. It's more fun than it sounds.


She plopped heavily into a chair.  The poor woman never knows what's going to come out of my mouth, and I know how she feels.  I don't know, either.   I'm always thinking: "What? What am I talking about?" I could see her furtively feeling around in her pockets.  I assume she was trying to find a small weapon of some sort, either to wing me or shoot herself or go up onto the sun deck of our tall building and start blasting away at birds and airplanes and anything else flying by.


Restless, restless, restless.  Always looking for the next adventure or the next challenge.  A chunk of this can be chalked  up to my alcoholism.  The Book talks about drunks working hard and long on some particular challenge only to get bored and distracted at the last minute and simply walk away.


I've always been embroiled in this existential death match between Midwestern German Peasant Seaweed - gets up, feeds the kids, hitches up the mule and starts plowing, in the rain, in the cold and snow, or on the most beautiful summer day imaginable, doesn't matter  - and Delusional Hippie Seaweed - gets up, straps on a backpack, and heads off down the Silk Road to Tajikistan.  It's a very fair fight between two very closely matched opponents who are actually on the same team, the dumb asses.


I've been in The New City for one and a half years.  The transition was difficult but challenging, stimulating.  I loved the challenge, mostly, but it was a lot of very hard work.  I ripped my life up by the roots and then reconstructed it somewhere else.  I wanted to do this.  I'm glad I did it but, you know, I'm feeling a little established and it makes me a little nervous.  The backpack is calling me.  So I indulge my sweet tooth for change to satisfy Backpack Seaweed, work my ass off settling in and establishing the routine and stability that Peasant Seaweed craves, temporarily marginalizing Backpack, who is now getting restless and beginning to move in on Peasant's nice safe little existence.


"What do you do with your time?" people ask me.  I understand the question - they want to hear times and dates and schedules and tasks.  So much of our lives are consumed with work and child-rearing and completing things that we are clueless when all of that stops.  I know some of them are in the clutches of their own inner Peasants, determined to keep Backpack at bay.  Part of me gets nervous when I hear this.  I feel like I'm not measuring up to some standard not of my own making.


Peasant is on top right now but Backpack is packin' some heat.