Backpedaling

I wonder if Laura Ingalls Wilder ever felt this way. I'm having a little sharer's remorse. Like shopper's remorse, minus the receipt.

I woke up this morning and in those few seconds when my brain is downloading from the server or coming back down from whatever version of "I quit the varsity cheer squad" dream I was having, I had that fuzzy thought, you know the one: "Did I do something stupid last night?"

Luckily this question was not answered by my sitting up and banging my head on a bunk bed not belonging to myself or by Mom asking me whose Mustang GT was stuck in our front yard. Parties out in the country often end with a sports car stuck in the host's yard. The driver having given chase to the nearest corn field (or winter wheat, depending on the season) when someone bellowed,"The cops are here!"

Anyhoo, a little off course. That's how I ride.

Note: I did not say "how I roll." For some reason the co-opting of this gangsta talk by striped-shirt, shloopy moussed-hair white boys has hit me rather hard. I was fine with "What up dawg?". And "Back in the day" seems to do its job without stepping on toes.

But white guys seldom roll. They shuffle, they sprint, the giddy up, they hustle, they walk this way and they even electrically slide sometimes, but they don't roll. Even Justin Timberlake can't completely un-Caucasian his treads -- he moves, he dips and looks like the bastard child of Lance Armstrong's mom (or Debi Gibson) and Michael Jackson when he dances, but every so often I can just almost see him counting out the steps -- five and six, seven and and flip that fedora.

So I woke wondering why anyone would want to read all this. I write for a living. All my jobs have had an element of turning in a paper and waiting for the comments to come back. Why give myself homework? Why try to make new observations when everyone else does it in a more drole and succint fashion?

I dunno really. But sometimes I do have days when I wanna run in the house, fling my lunch pail and breathlessly shout, "Ma, Pa, come quick, you'll never believe what I saw in the holler on the way home from school."
So C'mon Half Pint, let's go and knock all the Nellies off their fancy pants bikes and steal Willie's candy while we're at it. Or at least find some mischief to report from in town.

P.S. Today wasn't one of those days, hence the internal monologue. Tomorrow -- back to the gutter.