Upper right hand corner.

It says, “Don’t read this!”

And yet, here you are.

Reading this.

Welcome to the window I’m crawling out of. It’s on the side of a box that I’ve been in off and on over the years. It’s a worthless box. I try to tell myself it’s the place I go to:

• Rest up after a huge effort toward fulfilling my goals
• Lick my wounds after a particularly difficult time
• (I thought I was going to be able to think of more plausible but untrue reasons to put here. But I can’t. So I’ll just leave this here because I’m probably ((obviously)) just OCD enough that it would make me uncomfortable to use only two bullet points.)

Don’t get in the way. I’m getting out of the box. Through this window. People cheering me on bothers me. Mostly because I hear being cheered on as someone yelling that I should feel happier than I do when I’m going through something and have yet to reach the other side. So don’t get all excited or you’ll just get in my way.

The title of this blog, “When is this dumb parade going to be over?”, is what I asked my dad when I was three-years-old, sitting on his shoulders in New Orleans watching the Mardi Gras parade go by. I was over it. It was hot. Humid. I was little. Exhausted. The costumed humans on the floats that were slowly crawling by scared the shit out of me. Some old woman passed candy up to me. Put it right in my sweaty little hand. And I think I drank some beer. I’m not sure about that last part.

What I am sure about, however, is that it’s good to know how to end a parade that you want to end. Even if everyone else is still having a good time.

So, here you are.

Still reading.

And you’ve just learned that my goal is to write about times (**my times, other people’s times, maybe even your times if you feel like being interviewed) when it’s simply time for the dumb parade to be over, and the many ways to make that happen.

**That part in parenthesis in the last paragraph is probably total bullshit.