Hear The Sound Of The Pouring Rain Coming Down Like An Armageddon Flame
I am Routine's bitch.

You don't need any more evidence than this blog. I write posts at the same time every day, five days a week. Then I write one more on Sunday nights, but always the same time on Sunday nights so that my dear, faithful readers will have fresh Bucket to greet them on Monday morning.

OK, so it's not really about you people. I tried to lie, but it's no use. It's the Routine. I've settled into the habit of writing at certain times and so I write at certain times, come hell or high water (more on that in a second). If I were being completely honest with myself (an overrated concept if you ask me) I would admit that I would write and post with the exact same frequency if everyone suddenly stopped reading. This is what I do instead of checking to see if the oven is turned off every 15 minutes.

The irony is if I were being completely honest with myself in the beginning, I never would have started a blog. I told myself the purposeful lie "Yeah, I'm fascinating. People want to know what I have to say". This is the basic lie all bloggers must tell themselves in order to start cataloguing their lives for public consumption. For many of us the lie stays a lie because we write about shit nobody cares about in uninteresting ways. Those blogs die well-deserved and timely deaths. For others the lie becomes self-fulfilling prophecy (don't know if I'd say "truth" so much) because we are able to write about shit nobody cares about in rudimentarily semi-interesting ways, just enough to draw a few suckers in and get the snowball rolling.

But again, this is outside of my general point. I'm writing now because I have to; my slightly abnormal brain chemistry demands it.

Blog writing is just a part of the daily routine, though. Now that the holiday has come and gone, we're back on School Time, one of two basic Day-Schedule Templates I carry around in my head to keep the demons of disorganization at bay. The other is, not suprisingly, Not School Time.

Because I am Routine's bitch, I ran through all the motions this morning. This includes turning on the television at 7 am to catch a little bit of the early news, primarily to check the weather. This was a patently ridiculous thing to do this morning. For those who don't know, it's been raining for a week straight in southern California. It's supposed to rain the rest of the week, too. I knew this. Everyone knows this. But still I had to check.

Before the weather came the general news. Wanna guess what it was about?

Mudslide in Highland Park.

Mudslide in Bel Air.

Mudslide in Glendale.

Mudslide in Orange.

Mudslide in Woodland Hills.

Mudslide in Mission Viejo.

If you don't live on a hill in SoCal, you live in a valley. It's just the way it works. So in these years when we get double or triple our average rainfall, you find yourself perched on the side of a hill capable of sliding or looking up at a hill capable of burying you while you sleep.

Because the persistent threat of earthquakes isn't enough to keep us alert, now we have to worry about giant boulders crashing into our bedrooms and killing us.

So tomorrow, Routine can go fuck itself. Instead of turning on the news to hear about teenage girls being murdered by rampaging landscape, I'm going to hit myself in the face with a hammer several times instead. I may wrap it in a cloth first, I may not. Either way I'll have to consider the long term as I will most likely have to work it into my daily schedule from here on out. Routine is not fickle.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 7.5


Pops
- posted by Pops @ 9:40 AM