Lakoff.

Imagine going to work and coming home.  Since you don't know anybody it's just you and your damn cat.  I'm alright, but I'd be the first to admit that just me is a bit much.  And I've never claimed to be a cat person, they aren't nothing, but they're barely something.

People have a tendency to group their lives into chapters.  It's disgusting.  It's so easy.  It's Velveeta cheese.  We like it and sometimes we catch ourselves doing it.  Sometimes we don't catch ourselves and now we're obese with the chapters of our lives and we're not even thinking about what's in the silver package.  We just cut it open and read the words.

I'm guilty of this pleasure.  There is a chapter which I call my lost year, which isn't fair to my lost year, but if you've ever tried being unemployed anywhere near Sacramento, you'd be tempted to do the same.  You'd want to lose that year, that Sacramento.

It's obvious which chapters come up, most frequently grouped in fours:  high school, middle school, college, the mid-twenties when I did a million drug pipes and musicianed my hair long and bang bro-ed (we also would have accepted bang-bussed, or respected inately) chicks with a lack of respect and self loathing.  There were those "chapters."

I like to think of each period of my life as these precious drops of water slipping through my fingers.  Drops of water that I'm going to need to sustain myself through the desert ahead.  I should be angry that I can't hold them all, and that I can't hold them for long.  Just like you should be angry if you ever find yourself in a desert without water because instead of canteen you decide, "Fuck it, I'll just use my fingers."   I should be angry that I've dropped water some near Sacramento.  I should be angry about Sacramento.  I should be angry about Sacramento and my choice of fingers.*

And yet the danger here is that when we're unhappy with a period in our lives we anticipate the end of that chapter, flipping ahead and counting the pages, just skimming ours and not taking in the story.  We can look back with contempt at those wasted lines.  We can be wont for a different story, but really, we just have to accept it and realize that life isn't a metaphor.  It's just some stuff you have to make work.*