What am I going to do today?

17 days till the arrival of Geneva, our new German sheppie.  The rains have finally let up.  So, what is it, exactly, that I am going to do with myself today?

Well, when you have not had an organized, schedule life for, like, eons — I retired in my late 40s, having had it up to here with endless work hours, IPO shennanigans and corporate backstabbing — you tend to let things slip a little.

For example, you might ask yourself, why do this thing today, when it can always wait till tomorrow or the next?

Wasting time on frivolous pursuits and procrastination, as you gradually sink into complete irrelevancy is a common retiree affliction in Florida.

For many, it’s the land of throwing away a good chunk of your life, as you drive at 80 mph per hour on I-95 going nowhere important in order to do nothing of consequence in the global scheme of things.

I live in a gated community in Fla.

It is quite lovely here, if you can tolerate the suffocating seasonal presence of aged causcasian drones with limited vocabularies who mostly support the orange lunatic.

In other words, other than the scenery and relative quiet, carceral Florida = mind death.

So if you are not the golfing or volunteering or fishin’ type, you tend to withdraw into a quasi monastic existence.

I would enjoy briefly living the life of a very pleasant, self-sufficient Brit who hangs out in the rural mountains of Sardinia with his four sheps.

That does seem like quite the dream existence, except offseason, the time for unexpected setbacks, such as the lighning bolt that felled a German tourist on a hike in Sardinia the other day.

One can easily imagine the howling Mistral wind, deracinated trees, bitter cold, and rain all winter, not forgetting, yes, the wild stormy Mediterranean sea, as you turn into a rugged, mountain man.

Hemingway hair on the chest (I briefly watched a putrid film called Hemingway and Gelhorn on Amazon  prime last night), and all that macho stuff.

You huddle at night, carabine at the ready, shivering slightly, even though you’re under a coarse woolen blanket that makes your skin itch, in an uninsulated damp shack with the tiny wood burning stove and no Internet.

Maybe I’ll go for 10 days in September.

Back to the topic at hand.

What am I going to today?  17 days till Geneva arrives.  Is the place ready for her yet?

The answer is nien.

Ah clarity of purpose, at last; and I have not yet even finished my morning coffee!

So I need to clean up the beams of the lanai that protect the back porch from insects and, yes, alligators.  There is green slimy mold all over them from the rain and humidity.  I have done about half the job already, but rains have interfered with my progress the last few days.

You do not want to be up on a scaffold in the rain and wind.

Especially when, like moi, you’re fat and old.

Good thing that scaffold can sustain weights up to 300 lbs.  It’s disgusting that I have to even consider that.

Okay, so today I am going to attempt to finish the back porch cleanup jobbie, without falling off the scaffold and breaking my neck, stay away from the ice cream in the freezer, go bike riding and maybe swim in the pool if there’s no one there, except maybe an osprey or two.

This evening, instead of watching more third-rate, dated Netflix movies or brainless Amazon prime video rot, I’m going to resume my self-taught course of learning SVG programming, as I’m keenly interested in trying my hand at doing some more animated Arabic calligraphy.

Here’s an example of a doodle I did a while back.

It certainly beats watching partisan political talk shows that obsessively rattle on about the orange lunatic.

Leaving Amerika is a state of mind that does not require physically leaving the US to go live in another country.  That would be lovely, of course, but if you can’t manage it just yet for whatever reason, you can always detach mentally and spiritually by practising Iyengar yoga or bike riding or reading some intense novel or trying your hand, say, at produciing animated vectors.

The key is to challenge and engage your brain in doing something worth doing that has nothing to do with that unserene world you no longer choose to live in. Now some might find serenity boring.  I don’t.  After a 15-year drinking career in every Irish dive bar in lower Manhattan, I can go for this no chaos lifestyle big time.

And that pretty much sums it up for today!