Same as it ever was....same as it ever was

And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful Wife
And you may ask yourself-well...how did I get here?"We've all had these moments and yesterday I found myself humming the Eno/Byrne lyrics to myself not once but twice in an 8-hour span.

No one whispered to me to "build it and he will come..."
The second half of PK's school field trip involved a slow cruise on the back of a hay bale filled trailer through a maze that was haphazardly cut through the corn field of a local farmer.

As I took up the rear echelon behind the cavalcade of parents trailing the filled to 4-year old capacity trailer, I was overwhelmed by the realm of the fish-out-of-water senses.

Like many LA natives, I've bought corn, I've shucked corn, I've cooked it, scraped it off the cob, poured it out of a can, souped it up in chowder, popped, buttered, salted, and stood in line at the State Fair for a roasted ear of it dipped in a vat of greasy, yellow, steamy liquid that in an alternate universe could pass for a butter flavored condiment.

But all my experiences of the corn nature, up to this point in my life, were with dead corn.

This was the first time I walked among it as a living entity.

The smell of the surrounding living corn plants, the squish of the hardening dirt/mud below my Sketchers, the fragrance of the fuel oil exhaust from the overworked tractor pulling the trailer, and the utter absence of a visual horizon line beyond the tops of the corn stalks and the end of the trail from whence we came and where we were headed came at me in a rush of FieldofDreams fantasia.And you may find yourself in another part of the world,And it kinda freaked me out, in a claustrophobic, looking up at the sky from the bottom of a 6-foot hole in the ground sorta way.And you may ask yourself-well...how did I get here?Zoned out without a plan
Roughly 7 hours later, I found myself standing inside the downtown municipal building before a panel of selected townspeople known as the Planning and Zoning Commission.

Within 20 minutes of my introduction and a few seconds after I pulled my finger away from the 18x24 diagram resting on the community easel at the conclusion of my presentation, the panel had unanimously voted their approval for the placement of the first of 6 historic downtown walking trail markers that the non-profit group I serve on was proposing to install in the next few weeks.

Unlike most normal folk, public speaking has never been a weak spot in my repertoire of nerve inducting skill sets. Parallel parking in front of a group of sidewalk onlookers, now that'll get me sweating, but getting up in front of a bunch of people to spout off some fact, figures, measurements and humorous anecdotes (hey, I thought they were funny) is a piece of cake.

Thus my first ever public presentation to a representative body in my small town came to it's "what the heck and I doing here" conclusion.

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.