BRAIN DEAD

This is how dead my brain is. I don't remember what I said in my last post.

I am brain dead because I do "three shows a day" about the new Medicare Rx benefit. My shows are great. Entertaining, informative and focused.

They still all leave the room totally confused. I'm not sure what to do about that. I'm not sure I CAN do anything about that.

So I'm up performing and, in the case of yesterday, driving some significant miles from one small town to another. The upside is the great people you meet in the small towns. And although the foliage is behind schedule, and probably won't have a great peak, there are worse ways to spend your business day than driving around southern Berkshire County looking at incredible views of mountains, fields, leaves and barns.

My weekend did not come out the way I thought it would. I've tried to balance all the pressure at work with taking care of myself, and realizing that a long weekend was in the making had visions of going to to Cape and chilling out. And then I saw I had booked myself for a presentation at a local church on Sunday morning. In that particular case, God works in mysterious ways. Heard a great sermon, reconnected with a friend that I hadn't realized attended that church, and met some wonderful people.

But that , combined with the rain, meant that both the Cape and my second choice, Lake Sunapee, NH were both nixed. But it did mean that I went on the Greylock Ramble Monday a.m. with my faithful dog Moe.

Both of us were a little bit (or a lot) the worse for wear by the time we descended to the parking lot. Covered in mud, tired and aching. We got into the shower together, washed off the mud and went to bed (at 3:30 in the afternoon!) me with a bourbon manhattan, Moe dead to the world at my feet. (He's hardly moved for two days...) For those of you who don't know, Mt. Greylock is the highest peak in MA. The hike was seven miles r/t and the hardest part was that it was extremely wet on the ground so footing was iffy. I think Moe literally pulled me up the mountain. My friends Jen and Lona had brought sandwiches and if it wasn't for them, I would have been carried down in an ambulance. But I was revived by the egg salad and pb&j and schlepped back. As of this morning my musculature is still complaining, but I am capable of doing my schtick out in the community so I must not have suffered too badly.

But what occurred to me as I saw all the rain (and cleaned leaves from gutters at teh end of the street so it wouldn't flood) is WHEN WILL PEOPLE REALIZE THAT WE ARE F---ING UP THE PLANET? Sometimes they barely have time on the local news to give all the disasters that are occurring simultaneously. I suppose I won't blame Pakistan on global warming, but to have that and the tsunami in one year, and Katrina, Rita and Stan to boot, not to mention mudslides in NH, seems like TOO MUCH OF A COINCIDENCE.

And then of course there's the whole issue of "being old enough to remember the gas lines of the '70s." I'm turning off my engine if I'm going to be idle for more than 45 seconds, resisting jackrabbit starts and driving the speed limit (or higher if it gets me to 50 or 55, the ideal speeds.) The young kids don't know this stuff. I've even been known to revert to the time-honored 16 year old's trick of going into neutral at the top of a hill, although I'm not sure if this really has any effect. We were always doing stuff like that when we were teenagers; I'm not sure I've EVER heard a kid say that they were doing something to "save gas." We'd all chip in our spare change to see if we could come up with two bucks to put gas in someone's Beetle. Now that car isn't a symbol of efficiency, it's just an excuse to hit the kid sitting next to you in the car if you see one.

What hath God wrought?