LETTING GO
Again I have the intense feeling of being two or more places at once. Sunday I went out to brunch in Black Mountain with my son Tom and his wife Kathy. We went to The Blue Ridge Biscuit Company where we had southern style huge flaky biscuits with fried eggs, bacon and home fries. In two days I will be eating string hoppers and spicy coconut curry for breakfast.
Then in the afternoon I fell into one of my addictions and watched Green Bay defeat the Dallas Cowboys in a wild card NFL football playoff game. Green Bay barely made it into the playoffs and Dallas was a heavy favorite so it provided the addictive stimulation that football gives me. Although what seeing grown men violently throw each other to the ground in a dreamed up game in which an odd shaped pigskin is moved up and down a field says about me and what stimulates me is a little unsettling. But in any case, next weekend I will be in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka, and while the playoffs will be raging here in the middle of the Sri Lankan night, I will have forgotten all about them and sleep peacefully through the games.
And, thank goodness, after being bombarded with shrieks of pain and pleas for donations from the twenty or so Democratic Party emails I get each day, whatever shenanigans Donald Trump is up to will seem too far away to pay attention to. I am sure Sri Lanka has its own polarization with a recent coup driving out the government and an economy turned upside down by both corruption and government debt, but their tensions will seem unreal to me and American polarization and the coming primaries will seem like distant boys throwing sand at each other in a sandbox. The sun will be hot, the rice fields bright green, the coconut palms will be leaning overhead and I will be at peace.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 