Well, Irritable and Discontented, Anyway.

Restless: Never or almost never quiet or still; always active or inclined to action; seeking change.

I think that it's possible to be restless without hauling around the irritable and discontented baggage that frequently accompanies it. Don't get me wrong -- everybody, more or less, irritates me all of the time. I am intimately acquainted with irritability. I'm not suggesting that I stand atop the Rock of Contentedness, which has fallen on me from a great distance on more than one occasion.

And some day I hope to turn the Winter of My Discontent into some kind of regular contention or contentedness or the like. Of course some day I want to be a rock star in outer space, or maybe thrive in an underwater basketball league, and that stuff's not happening either.

I figure that I spent enough time in dark bars with no windows in the middle of the night, or sitting in front of a television, smoking dope and watching bad TV shows that I knew I wouldn't remember the next day. I'm not sure why I even turned the thing on. I could have pasted a picture of Homer Simpson on the screen and saved the electricity. I could have bought one movie and then watched it over and over again, secure in the knowledge that I wouldn't remember what happened.

For someone who is a little suspicious of change I sure spend a lot of time tracking it down. I don't sit on my ass and stare into space very well. I like to try new things and go to different places. If you gave me a nice cabin on a quiet lake in the woods somewhere, I wouldn't take it. I figure that once I've seen something it's time to see something else.

Do I have some bad experiences? Absolutely. Do I get some bad meals, turning down my favorite dish for boiled intestine stuffed with haggis and minced intestine? Yowser. (I actually did order stuffed intestine in France once and it tasted roughly the way that you might imagine it would taste. I should have told the garcon to scoop whatever was in his slop pail into a bowl and garnish it with fresh mint.)

Garcon! Three bowls of the haggis, stat!