The Futility Of Being A Modern Traveler

A guy I knew ages ago had me read a short story he penned called The Futility Of Being A Gopher.  If I remember correctly, it’s all about a gopher who goes about its business in a hobbity burrow.  Once you start to feel for this gopher, by sheer virtue of having spent five valuable minutes of your life reading about it, and again if I remember correctly, an alien spaceship crashlands into Earth, said portion of Earth including the gopher.  Gopher is teats up, or teats flattened given a spaceship is on top of it.  The End.

I was 19 at the time and had no use for such pointless bilge.  The gopher was to start its epic journey towards Z’ha’dum or Mount Doom or something that rhymes with Oom and save the planet from a threat we were blissfully unaware of, thus shedding a limited gopher-shaped body to transform into something bigger and more heroic.  Super Kryptonite Investi-Gopher or Gophero, the sworn enemy of mutant carrots everywhere.  Now that I am in my 30s and think back on that story, my friend may have been onto something.  I’m sure there were some other clever, post-modern metaphors in there, but the most obvious one stands out: Life is out of your control, and crap happens when you dream about the great plans you just made.  Or that the gopher was doing it all wrong and could be Herr Commandant of the Underground Resistance if it had simply armed itself.  The futility of being a pacifist country gopher, as it were.

Chippy The Attack Gopher (don't ask)

All of this is to say that I’m terribly frustrated today.  I was supposed to be in New Orleans tonight, but will not leave Ohio until early Sunday.  See this horrible monster in the Southeast that doesn’t even have the common decency to dress in complementary colors?  Thanks to it, I will putz about my house – rearranging the folded clothes and plowing my driveway yet another time – for an extra 36 hours and lose an important day of Carnival.  Even more irritating is that I haven’t spent any meaningful time with D in three weeks and he has been down there waiting for me.  I really don’t know how much longer we can handle this financially- and emotionally-burdensome business travel lifestyle.  Something has to give.

Could be worse, could be gopher pancake under an alien spaceship.