Knackered Sees Holiday Chaos with Benzos

     Hey there, Knackered here. It appears the world has risen early and is legging it in an effort to get somewhere else. The streets, sidewalks and even the airspace is an enormous fustercluck of activity.

   Children are huddled at crosswalks.  Road construction is frantically finishing late season projects while commuters vie for their own way around.  Sirens announce yet more emergent chaos and a helicopter hovers overhead on its way to the pad atop the hospital.  It’s the US lead up to the last summer brouhaha of Labor Day.  Whoopee anyway.

   The fallout of all this has a much muted effect on Knackered as he trods through on his morning constitutional.  He is quite happy to be out of the loop on the whole ordeal.  

   Times past would have seen him laying down the rules to a fresh class of wide eyed newbies, while simultaneously obsessing over what was coming down for the last big roll of the summer.  ‘Just being’ never lit up any fires at home.  The resounding need was to go somewhere,  be there, and hurry back for a four day dose of reality.  

   ‘Staying in’ implied the need to be with people; either in their backyard or his. Knackered was never a bbq king of anything, but luckily his wife was and is a master chef and hostess. Knackered was relegated to the ice cream tub on the patio (hand crank, as it was ‘more old fashioned fun’) Attending youngsters always yearned for a turn or two, before returning to the water balloon brigade. An hour later found a sweating Knackered at the back door with ice cream for all.  Good times. 

    Camping was popular until it wasn’t.  Although packing up the house and living off grid was a ‘thing’ through the grade school years, it went out of fashion fast with tweens who saw the prospect of sharing space with the ‘rents’ as just too icky. So be it.  

   Most of the fireworks in town are fortunately blown away by this time, but their owners are not.  Hence Knackered assumes that a number were hoarded (the fireworks that is) and saved for a rainy Labor Day.  Rainy or not, he expects their owners to wait till midnight in order to wage war on the atmosphere.  Little do they know that after years of enduring this assault on his senses,  Knackered has purchased quality ear plugs via Amazon.  Go ahead, he thinks, make my (Labor) Day. Ha!  

   Finally worn down by car exhaust and the suffocating stink of fresh blacktop gunk. He realizes that the school busses have left and the kids have gone inside. They’ll soon be out the back doors fighting over possession of the recess balls. Some things really never change. 

   As for Knackered, his holiday travels will be to his meditation chair.  And the only thing he will be rocking is that late great Bee Gees tune ‘stayin’ alive, (just) stayin’ alive.  Someday, the Benzo bus will stop for him, and he’ll climb off. It gets closer with every cut.  The last thing he needs is any more drain bamage.