Getting caught up on things.

Think about that for a second or two longer. There are a couple meanings in there. First, getting caught up on things might mean catching up on tasks that need your attention. Some might be the everyday tasks: cleaning, fixing, renewing, cancelling, paying, calling, etc. Others might be self-imposed tasks: creating, signing up, purchasing, researching, etc.

The other meaning plays right along. You get caught up on things. You gotta have this new gadget, or you gotta learn about this new process.

I went to a meeting of local podcasters tonight. Now, I gotta get the equipment so I can start a podcast. I gotta learn some new things, spend more time playing around, etc.

I want more time to relax, but I get caught up on things. I get caught up on how the house should look, I get caught up on what I need to be doing, I get caught up on things but I forget the people. I gotta find time to get caught up on the people.

Once, when I lived by myself in a trailer (but not in a trailer park), I feel asleep on my plaid couch while drinking my home-brewed beer. When I woke, the trailer was filled with strange colors, several of which were new to my eyes. Colors without Crayon equivalents.

I thought that my homebrew may have been a little off. I looked for the bottle to take another sniff (and possibly the last swig), but I couldn’t find it anywhere near the couch. I knew I had not moved from the couch where I had last drank from a bottle, which I placed on top of a TV that didn’t work, prior to stretching out horizontally, the late summer sun just above the horizon.

I tried to turn the TV on, but it still didn’t work. I thought maybe with the strange colors and the missing bottle, it might be a portal into a new dimension or something. No such luck.

The strange colors, it turns out, were from the late evening sky, right before a big storm moves in. The sky had turned into a post-nuclear fallout sky and the surroundings were abnormally quiet, which probably woke me up.

My bottle, it turns out, never reappeared. To this day, I still think about my bottle.