Meditating, washing dishes late at night in the dim overhead fluorescent light. Normally, washing the dishes would be a chore, but I'm relishing my work, taking my time with scalding hot water and the business end of a scrub sponge. Tonight, after spending all day on the couch playing hockey and feeling sorry for myself, I am finally doing something productive.

My wife is in the living room, laying in the warm glow of crappy television and drifting off to sleep. Between the bank fucking us out of $300 and partying Saturday away, we've had a long weekend. Tomorrow we'll be back off to work and school, valiantly fighting through another week to get to the good bits at the end.

For some unexplainable reason, there's a Neil Young song stuck in my head. I haven't heard it in many years, and I'm reduced to humming because the actual words disappeared into the dark tunnel of the past. I guess that, in my quest to eliminate all the bad memories, I've also lost some things that weren't so bad. I wonder what else is in the bottom of my soul that is too water-logged to float back up to the surface. So much difference between the naive high school me of yesteryear and place I find myself so many years later. I wouldn't want to go though it again, but it's good to be here.

I get my wife off the couch, and we go to bed drowsy and happy. I still have prune skin on my hands from an hour spent in soapy water. I've never felt so clean.