EBB OF VACATION

Jul 25, 2009
EBB OF VACATION

There are some things I really need to change; besides the stinky clothes I am currently wearing (more on that later). I feel like I wasted the day. Today is the last day of a weeklong Florida vacation and I know I did not squeeze every last bit of fun out of it like I should have. I spent too much of it worrying about the real world slapping me in face tomorrow like a 17th Century European marksmen challenging me to morning duel with a white glove.

My vacations have an arc. Things are all mindless glee and joy until the halfway point. Then something changes in my brain. A slow nag like the initial twinge of discomfort from a mosquito bite (more on that later too) sets in. Like the bite’s growth from minor annoyance to uncontrollable itchiness, the inevitable vacation end starts to bog down my enjoyment. My wife and I packed our last day with enjoyable activities running all over Miami. We checked out of the hotel in the morning and had brunch at South Beach’s News Café, walked on the beach, strolled through the funky shops on Lincoln Rd and even took a fun ride through Coconut Grove but my head kept dragging me into the realities of tomorrow. The phone call telling me I have to be at work for some unpleasant stuff an hour and a half early in the morning did not help either.

I think some of this premature vacation ending mindset is residue from my old job. In between contract gigs I used to take long breaks but I was always on call and never knew how long a vacation I would actually get. Sometimes it was a week sometimes a couple of months. I never could make plans. I lived in limbo with the luggage nearby and when I got the inevitable call I always fell into a deep funk. I knew I had about five days left before I had to jump into Work-Dan mode with several months of nonstop 70-hour work weeks. The Work-Dan of yore was an unpleasant sort to be around. He looked a lot like real Dan but much like the pod people in Invasion Of the Body Snatchers, looks were the only similarity. I glumly stomped around consistently feeling like my soul was being chewed up by something akin to an internal flesh-eating virus.

On Monday afternoon at the near midway mark of this trip I was floating on a foam noodle in the Gulf of Mexico at one of my favorite beaches in the world. 24 hours later, as if to signal the beginning of the end of my vacation, I was being attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes in the Everglades. We were driving down to Miami and I decided to pull over and show my wife the smallest Post Office in the U.S. Unfortunately as I waited for my wife to buy a postcard at the tiny Ochopee mail-shack, I must have riled up a swarm of bugs. The air around me got thick with the little biting bastards and as I physically jumped back into the car, dozens of the hungry parasite-like bastards followed me in. My wife and I swatted and slapped the stubborn stinging bloodsuckers the rest of the drive into town.

I ate and swam my way through two and half days in Miami. Of course I had a great time but could not fight off the ‘ebb of vacation’ disheartenment. Now at 10:00 PM itchy with bites and red with sun, I sit crammed into an airplane seat wearing clothes that have gone through at least five different sequences of soaked with sweat and dried by frigid AC, wondering why I could not ignore this moment until it actually arrived. Besides changing these clothes I think I also need to work on changing my mindset and learn to not worry about going home until I actually am going home.

CLICK TO SEE THE TINY POSTOFFICE