I don't like drama. I really don't. Can't ever seem to avoid it completely, though, can we?
Certain environments seem to draw it out, like there's some kind of attractant sealed in the walls. Call in the warehouse agents and have this building swept for artifacts, because this here is not normal. (Anyone have Gelsey Kirkland's pointe shoes bronzed on the wall, maybe?)
I'm just standing here next to what was once a mole hill before we shored up the sides, fortified the summit, and turned it into an impassable mountain that some poor cartographer is going to have chart now, and wondering how the hell it came to this. Everybody's pissed and a few people's lives have been altered substantially. And can't we go back a few steps and try this all again like reasonable, rational members of the human race?
Yeah, and wishing for that one will earn you a kettle full of ferrets.
Sigh.
The thing is, I know a lot of people who are wading through really hard stuff right now. Grief, and illness, and unemployment. And this mountain here? It's largely man-made, and standing from my admittedly-limited vantage point, I can't quite figure out why it was necessary to add this to an already complicated landscape.
At Picnic Day this past weekend, I encountered this rather remarkable map table made of sand in the Geology department. As the gathered kids formed valleys and hillsides in the sand, cameras used reflection off the surface to measure height, make on-the-fly elevation contours, and project them back down on to the landscape, showing you just where the water would pool when it began to rain. If only people were so easy to predictively model. Cultural geography is so much harder. We don't always take the least-cost-path.
So now what? Where do we go from here? Set up another road block? Plot a new course?
I don't know, man. The landmarks are looking awful familiar around here. Despite what the map says, I think we might be traveling in circles.