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thousands of vehicles as they hit that uneven spot. Not all of the road signs are mounted on posts. Some are laid right out there in the road for you to see, if you will only pay attention.
    And now we’re back to metaphor, which is fine, because if we can take a lesson from a thing, we should. And if we can turn sightseeing into insightseeing, well, that might make a little progress toward a better world. On the other hand, sometimes the best thing is to just let the road unroll, let the wheels carry you body and soul, let the miles flow around your head and through it, let those towns and those Townes songs cycle through, and rather than worry about fitting everything between square corners just roll and roll and roll on, knowing that the end of the road will arrive in its own fashion, in its own time.
PRIORITIES
    Back home on the farm I’ve been running behind. That in and of itself isn’t news—running behind is a way of life for me—but there is some waxing and waning, and lately it’s been all waxing, and I’m not talking about reshaping my eyebrows, although based on recent trends toward mutant overgrowth I might add that to the list.
    I’d like to point out that I’m not complaining about being “too busy,” which has become the leading American form of humble-bragging reality avoidance and is usually more a reflection of privileged pursuits woven with a perversion of priorities than it is of overwork (and let the record show that I include myself in the allegation). But in this case I’m referring not to the “busyness” itself but rather the behavior that lands me there. Specifically, fits of manic optimism in which I resolve to write three books, a magazine article, and an album of original country music songs featuring the kazoo, split a winter’s worth of wood, clean the granary, build the kids a clubhouse, mow the lawn, distill three pints of artisanal chive blossom vinegar, floss my diastema, pay the electric bill, plant cucumbers, take the kids fishing, write a love note to my wife, write a thank you note to my wife, locate the power steering leak, answer all red-flagged emails, adjust my deer stand, clean the gutters, take that one thing down to the pole barn, take those forty-seven things out of the pole barn, put eighteen new strings on three old guitars, replace the batteries in the headlamp I use to close the chicken coop door after dark,figure out why the guinea pig is acting so weird, figure out why I’m acting so weird, get those one-cent stamps to bring my postcard stamps up to speed after the latest rate hike, figure out why our internet is acting like it’s powered by an off-kilter guinea pig, stack the wood I haven’t split yet, read that one book in the stack of all the other books that got there because they were that one book I hadn’t read yet, learn once and for all how to spell the word privilege, lubricate the treadmill, make more time to clean the gutters since I left it too long, churn the compost, finish that dealio I told that guy I’d do by Sunday, this being Saturday, call the bank to see that the check for the health insurance cleared, and, and, and …
    Deep breath.
    You know what’s astounding about that list? It represents any given manic Monday. You know what’s even more astounding? The fact that it takes me clear into Thursday before I realize: it ain’t gonna happen. Because it never does. Never has. Not even close. Hope blooms eternal, despite all well-established evidence to the contrary. And so about twice a year I get fed up with all this random mental meandering and I become very firm with myself. I sit and I whittle everything down and I make a list. It’s a ruthless process, and it yields a short, tight set of bullet points. No trivialities. No distractions. Lean and mean. From here on in, I really mean it, and I prove it by putting a headline above the bullet