Chopping wood

I've been chopping wood of late, since the power company took down trees on our street and my friend Greg brought me a maul.  It feels good, takes me back to when I was a teenager and dad and I would go out and chop wood to feed the woodstove.  It was totally a hobby, no doubt, a nostalgic turn, but I liked it, and I like the kind of tired my body gets when I do it.  Ditto for raking, which is one of the main reasons I don't use the leaf blower.

It reminds me of Roy Atwater, the old black guy who I rented from on 15-501 towards Pittsboro just after college, who always said that a good day was when he'd work hard enough to fall asleep on the front porch. I get that.

At some point in time during his poet/prophet of simple living phase, my dad opined that I'd be better off getting a job doing something simple and physical. It was when he said shit like that that I wanted to a) slap him and b) go get wasted, because it seemed so disrespectful to me and the path I had taken.

But sometimes I think he may have had a point.  In fact, there is wisdom in much of what he wrote.  It's just that he was so overbearing in his presentation of it, and he himself never really executed well on it.