It takes a long time and many miles to get away from the tramlines, and then you have to establish the lifelines. I think of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock when I travel, perhaps not in the way that he intended. Simplified, his message was with too much change in too little time, beware of information overload. I applied his advice when I was travelling a lot with a new book each year and when even modest, obscure writers like me were treated to the Book Tour to publicize one's effort. Such a tour is not travel as such, it's a kind of obstacle course. The if-this-is-Edmonton-it-must-be-Tuesday schedule reduces Canada to a series of plane rides and television studios and presents a challenge to someone who has a horror of repeating herself. You'd think with an attitude like that daily change would be welcome, but it's not when it's too rapid and inexorable. As Emerson said, roughly, wherever you go you take you with you, and in a situation like this, that is, cross-Canada travel on speed, you're lucky if you do. So, I thank Toffler (I think I developed this from Toffler's suggestions) because I take my familiar routine with me as much as I can. Of course, I can't get up and swim everywhere, unless I'm in a hotel, but I can have tea in bed and write and sort out the tramlines to be dealt with each day. Or lifelines. See - back to where I started! Establish your baseline (another line) with the familiar and you're set to absorb, assimilate and proceed with the new. So there you are, here I am, back to the blog, back to a wifi that lets me take me with me. Change is good.

I've been preparing to go away to start a new book and I've been preparing for it, reading and culling material I've been collecting for over ten years. And boy, have I gathered grist for my blog mill. I'll take that folder with me; it will feed me/you for some time. I've had hints as I study, teetering on the edge of creation, that this book may be a life-changing experience. Bit daunting, that, considering how old I am and with not much life left to live - but long enough, I hope, to do what I still have to do. Well, all life is change, or should be. Life is a verb, in fact. My blog is not supposed to be a report, but rather a speculation, a spinning out of my thoughts, in short a cobweb-blog. I have always been a tangential speaker and I can still return to the point of departure, the point where I took off on the tangent, without losing my way. I was going to use the metaphor of thread and that made me think of the Minotaur, but I'm not going into that labyrinth today. Anyway, a blog is a kind of tangent to one's life, I suppose, a sidelight and a footnote to the ongoing activity. Right now there's too much peripheral activity, which is why I'm going away. Too many tramlines confuse the thought process. Eastend Saskatchewan, where I'm going, will not have tramlines. Anon, anon.