My basil seeds have sprouted! I’m growing sweet basil and two other kinds that are said to smell like lemon and licorice.

Saturday was the last day of job number 1, the kind of fake-smile customer service work that I’ve been in (learning better and better how to pretend to be happy) since before I graduated highschool. I’m not going to say that I’ll never go back. I quit once before, in my last semester of undergrad, and it felt amazing. But when I decided to move away from everyone I knew to follow the only dream that still meant anything to me, I went back to it more or less willingly. Independence means more to me than pride, I guess.

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Clouds blocked our view of the eclipse for about an hour, but we did finally get to see it. There were about thirty people standing around at the lookout looking pissed at the clouds for the entirety of the wait.

And that means, no good long bike rides. We’ve done mild short rides to the store and back, but I haven’t been able to visit some of my favorite routes out in the plains. I am sitting here, reading fatcyclist’s blog posts obsessively, drinking vitamin C and staring at riders in spandex going past outside who are clearly having the best times ever. I am very, very unhappy about this. My jersey and my beautiful black and white chamois shorts are lying useless upstairs.

The good news is that I only have two weeks left of job #1, which is the worst job in the world. My income will be less, but my soul will be weightless.

In the course of listening to the radio archives of This American Life, I heard one of their earliest shows— from back in ‘95, I think—and it was about quitting. How quitting felt like being in love, because you were in love with your decision. The subtitle of the show was “stories about people who quit everything in their lives that they hated, and what happened next.”

I’ve been fantasizing about that process for months. Now I’m doing it, and I’ve been awake since five, pondering the ramifications of my decision.

I’m a crazy survivalist at heart. There’s always a running process in the back of my mind when I’m loading the dishwasher or taking a hot shower that tries to consider how this task will be accomplished when society breaks down and we’re left with steam power and generators. I don’t consider internet and computer-based industries to be solid. Not because of any rational reasoning, but because of the crazy part in my head that insists all of this development and progress is impossibly transient on the scale of galactic time and potential catastrophe. I just don’t trust anything so complex to persist forever.

But I’ve had this uneasy feeling for weeks, that things so good just can’t last very long. I feel like I’m waiting for something to happen.

I love biking. I used to think I loved running, but I didn’t even know what loving a sport was. My bicycle is up there with my phone and poetry books in the category of “most treasured possessions”. She is beautiful. I’m still very much a noob, which means my legs are permanently covered in grease from my chain, and I get dropped by everyone on hills, and my soft doughy ass gets all raw from long rides. But I love it. I’m starting to get why some cyclists are such rabid fanatics with their $15,000 carbon-fiber bikes and their jerseys and skin-tight shorts. It’s a fabulous rush. I’m sitting here all grimy typing this after stripping off my gross sweaty chamois. But fortunately, I have another pair. We are going to bike to the store to get ingredients for chocolate mousse soon. I think this is the best of all possible realities.

And far, far away, the Mountain That Nobody Can Climb. An ogre lives there, and he’ll call the sheriff on you.