I've been thinking, and that can be dangerous...

...because my mind tends to wander.

I had a shrink appointment over the weekend and that meant driving back to Ohio, 16 hours round trip in a car. It's cheaper than flying and it would give me a chance to run some Columbus errands.  I had a whole list of them but somehow that was the one thing that I forgot when I left the house.  So when I hit the city that I had called home (with great annoyance) I was a bit like a butterfly wafting on the winds.

I was staying with two of our best friends - Mike and Mo, and I did remember to take them the case of Natty Boh and a couple bags of UTZ chips, but I forgot their Christmas present which I left on the Dining Room table with my list of things to do, so I guess it was two things that I forgot to take with me. Thank God I remembered by meds.

So Mike and Mo asked what I wanted to do for dinner and I opted for something that we don't have on the east coast - Der Dutchman.   Der Duchman (aka Der Starchfest) is a chain of vaguely Amish restaurants that serve home cooking.  You can either order off the menu, or you can go through the Buffet and engorge yourself on all manner of things that would appall David Zinczenko into a fit: homemade chicken and noodles, mashed potatos, gravy, sweet potatoes, chicken, beef, corn, cornbread...  You get the idea.  In fact we all ate so much (and the three Sidecars before dinner didn't help) that when we got back to Mike and Mo's, Mike ended up going into a starch coma and headed to bed at 7PM.

Is any of this making any sense?

My point is, and I do have one, is that the whole way out to Ohio gives you a lot of time to think about stuff. And I got to thinking about me because today, I am 50, and its an age that I never considered making.  And let's be realistic, I have, maybe, twenty really good years left the God Lord willing and the creek don't rise.  When you tell people that you are trying to plan for the end of your life they think you are going to do something to hurt yourself.

But when I hit the door at the shrink's office (and this man is very good at what he does) and I told him that I wanted to better plan out the next twenty years or so that the end of my life isn't filled with regret when I am old and feeble in human terms.  That he said, was a sign of maturity, and he said it was a sign of a man who has passed through a midlife crisis, which I thought was interesting, because I am still panicking over all the wasted time in my life and wonder if the mind I lost so many years ago was more lost than anyone thought.

 Back to my point, on the way back to Baltimore, it hit me.  I had forgotten to ask Joe if he thought I was ADD.  Damn.  AND I found my list, so I still am functioning within the maxim of always forgetting ONE thing before a trip. That made me feel better.

Now then, did I leave anything out?