Yeah right. Am I happy? Am I having fun, yet? Are things going, and well?
Sure, why not. I am my own happy meal. I sit, endlessly gnawing at my leg, and one day it may finally come off. Until then my life is a set of oscillations between despair and boredom. Gnawing helps pass some of the time.
Most days when I wake up I don't see any reason to keep breathing either, other than that I'm doing it because the alternative is worse. Pointless. It all seems pointless. But that may be a personal thing.
I expect that my level of exuberance may be due to getting here at the end of February, in time for two months of heavy rain with nothing to do. I lasted through the wettest April on record in Western Washington, followed by the warmest and driest May on record in Western Washington, while still not being able to go hiking let alone backpacking because most trails are not even close to being melted out until mid-July, oh happy days.
As William Least Heat-Moon said in "River-Horse", the price of life is death. I'm feeling it.
Coffee helps. I haven't brewed a real cup since February when I personally made my last cup of Café de Loja. (How short a time it has been since I forgot the name of the grindery, which, no, has just come back to me: "El Tostador". Well, no loss either way — El Tostador will be there when I return to Cuenca, whether I remember its name or not, and because coffee.) But I have a large-size container of Walmart's best Syntho-Feine in crumbly form. Coffee crumbles. I sleep next to them.
Mornings, I fill my mouth with those crunchy bits and push them down my gullet with cold water as soon as I get out of the car, and then wait. When things go well my mood lifts. This is no substitute for coffee but at times it works. Sometimes my bowels also start dancing.
Then I both feel better and feel better while running for the bushes. I leave the valuable part of my effort in the forest as a thank-you to the trees, and take away the white paper puffs and donate them to one of several dumpsters in need of them.
Am I happy? Am I having fun, yet? Are things going, and well? Sure, why not.
I have only five months to wait until I return to Cuenca, where I was endlessly bored, and where lunch was good, and cheap, like the coffee, and the season was always spring.
Time marches like ants on a string, but ants never sleep, do they?