I was a little disconnected from everything for the last week and a half. Holed up in the somewhat isolated mountain town of Breckenridge, I did have access to news channels and sports, but it was easy to leave it alone--especially when all they could talk about was some wanna-be child molester and Terrell Owens. In other words, two people who were faking it.

So since there wasn't anything going on anyway, I unplugged from the events and the Internet (when was the last time any of us unplugged from that appliance of ideas and constant communication?) and set to working on a grand opus I hope to finish in the next few months. It was a mix of focus (with the help of much coffee) and then extreme unfocus. And I wore jeans a lot because, well, it's cooler at 10,000 feet.

Coming back to the real world (the one I live in most of the time) meant I had to pay attention to these other things. But I haven't really gotten back in that groove. Somehow the hysteria about Iraq, Iran, the upcoming elections and who to blame or praise for Katrina one year later doesn't hold too much interest for me right now.

Lucky for me it's Labor Day weekend. It's also the first Labor Day weekend since 1996 I haven't employed. So I can't really celebrate my non-working ways. I've been doing that for months.

For a week and a half before leaving town, I was pulling all the weeds in the backyard. I think we're above the yearly rainfall for Albuquerque, and we got it all in two months. So coming back, I found the dried out piles of pulled weeds (looking much smaller than when they were not dry), and new clumps of weeds defying my massive pull project. There is more work to do. But not today. Not tomorrow.

Nope. This weekend is the turn in the calendar. I have a mental picture of a yearly calendar in my head. I've used this for so long, I can't remember when I came up with it, or if it just formed somehow on its own.

The first three months of the year or so go left to right horizontally, but around St. Patrick's Day (or the beginning of spring), the months go south. For almost six months, this is how I see time. It goes downhill. Falling, falling from late March through most of the summer until Labor Day. Then it turns horizontal again, heading to the end of the year. So this is the turn. For those of you who wonder what happens at the end of the year, well, it goes back up to the top again. In one night (New Year's Eve), the calendar jumps from the valley (end) of the year to the top of the mountain.

But this time of the year is, usually, the best weather in Albuquerque. The hot August nights are replaced by something cooler. I don't always leave the windows open all night. I don't wear shorts all the time. My jeans start to come out more and more. I even think, hey, maybe I should get another long sleeve shirt or two. Y'know, for when it gets a little bit cooler.

And so it goes.

I hope everyone took a breather this weekend. I say this because there isn't one for another few months. Not until Thanksgiving, people. It's a long haul to the holiday season. And we've got hundreds of shouting matches coming up across the country. It's gonna get mean and shrill, and we're all gonna have to take it because, maybe, it means something. Maybe we're fighting for the soul of the country this time.

And, then again, maybe we aren't. Maybe we've lost it and nothing we can do will bring it back. I worry about all of us soul-less people wandering around wondering what happened. Why none of this really seems to register, even though we all know it's very important. Has our soul been drained by our leaders? Our capacity to care about anything has been dampened because we've been told EVERYTHING MEANS EVERYTHING, and that kind of constant emotional strain is hard to keep up.

So, like I said, we've got a hell of a four months to go. We've gone horizontal again, which is much harder to tread than the downhill one. It might, at times, feel like we're walking up hill. But it's an illusion. Time moves downhill, because, like water, it takes the path of least resistance and never stops its march.

I'm raising my glass of wine to everyone today. We deserve it. It ain't easy being a working slob in this country. Even when you ain't working so much.

Matt Worley is a little dizzy.