While I typically prefer not to paint with an overly broad brush, one of the traits generally attributed to those of us who’ve grown up in households afflicted by alcoholism or some other form of dysfunctionality is an unbridled addiction to excitement.

Speaking strictly for myself, I can attest to the fact that there was a time when living my life required having, as Meatloaf once so aptly put it, “everything louder than everything else.”

I remember those wild drunken nights, the blue-collar barroom heroics, the friends who’ve died or disappeared, and the unshackled drama of it all, and I can honestly say that I don’t miss a single bit of it.

To see me sitting here out on the patio at 2:23 on a Monday afternoon, writing these words with my feet up on a cull wood coffee table after spending the morning putting up posts for a broken stockade fence, one might easily be tempted to remark, “Oh, how the mighty have fallen!” And in my younger years, I’d probably have shared that sentiment.

It’s a sure bet things are a lot less exciting these days; but there’s a certain sense of satisfaction that only comes from fixing a fence or knocking together a coffee table on the floor one’s own workshop.

As I near the end of this afternoon’s writing, a Monarch butterfly dances across the garden, a young rabbit suns itself in a threadbare patch of grass beside the wood pile, and the words begin to come with greater difficulty: indications all, perhaps, of just enough excitement for one day…