Paradise Preoccupied

Kansas is sounding good to me this week. Utah or Nebraska or Iowa … anywhere land-locked with a reliable electricity supply and Internet connections that run continuously for a few hours at a time.

The lack of both here had me ready to pack up, lock, stock and snorkel gear, and run away to somewhere, anywhere, no matter how boring or flat. I’d had it up to my none-too-patient-under-any-circumstance eyebrows with an island work ethic … now there’s an oxymoron! … that allows for outright lies to substitute for customer service and finds any inclination to hurry a distinct minus.

“Hang loose” may be the theme song for the arm wattle that flaps when I wave these days, but as a mindset it’s beyond my scope. I’m a problem-solver, not a sit-back-and-waiter, so when things go wrong, I want answers and I want them NOW.

What could a week like this one inspire in me, then, but a powerful urge to flee? I’m introspective and self-critical enough to notice that I simply may not be hardwired to survive the slow pace of Seychelles incompetence and slovenly performance. Perhaps, after eleven years on this island I’ve had enough, reached my breaking point and need to look at moving back into the real world … the world that works and works fast, puts up with little that doesn’t meet perfection, that demands the best, the fastest, the sleekest.

Ummmmmmm.

But, then again …

There’s the gun thing.

No such thing as school shootings here. (The crazies tend to drink themselves into early graves to which they go alone.) The very concept is so foreign that I’m being asked to explain how such a tragedy could possibly happen … me! as if I have an inside track to the mind of psycho America.

I left the US BOJ (Before OJ), so have missed what must be the strangest period in the country’s history and have no clue, no clue at all, how or why a VA Tech could happen.

You know? Now that I think about it, I guess I’ll get the candles out, put pen to paper occasionally, and stay put.