<commit_before>---
layout: post-light-feature
title: In the Principality of Ill-At-Ease
description: "A forest story."
categories:
date: 2016-04-15
image: 
        feature: wren2.jpg
---

*1.*

A couple weeks ago, I ran aground in the Principality of Ill-At-Ease, also known as the Horse Latitudes or [Doldrums](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doldrums). I think this is a place that most people working in creative fields visit more regularly than we like to admit. 

I was there after shipping an unusually-large and tumultuous update that took too long by my reckoning, involving a hard-to-digest mix of interesting intellectual problems and grim ditch-digging in support of platform changes. Like a banquet of *petits fours* and asphalt, and you are the only one at the banquet, and everything must be eaten. 

It was a good update in the end, but it was one of those ones where after you do your job and you put it out there, you are a little bit haunted with the question of what kind of reception for your work it would take in order for you to feel psychologically restored (answer: a parade).

After I had annoyed myself and my mate sufficiently with my post-launch horrors and bad-sleep grouchiness, it was getting to be time to do something.

*2.*

I live on the most interesting bus line in Berlin. It is called the M29 and it connects the poorest and wealthiest neighborhoods in the city on a long and meandering trip through the back reaches of the universe, also known as Charlottenburg. The M29 contains everything in life. I packed an overnight bag and I got on the bus, so then it contained me too.

It takes an hour to take the bus from my street to its terminus in a neighborhood of quarter-acre mansions near the edge of the Grunewald, the largest of Berlin's many forests. While the city went past I replaced the passwords on my phone with incorrect passwords, so that the notions and words, and the feelings and the hope of feelings, and all the things that are in there, were not there any more, and I was only on the bus, and who wasn't with me, was not with me.

I got off the bus and began the hour's walk to the forest. The farther I walked, the finer and simpler the houses became, first new-built McMansions but gradually giving way to much older villas in the Prussian style, on increasingly larger plots, until the forest was in front of me and the houses were behind. I went through an empty tunnel under an overpass and was surrounded by trees. A man was camping there, not on vacation. I nodded and he nodded back and I started my long walk.

*3.*<commit_msg>attempting to fix base url image difference w/local<commit_after>---
layout: post-light-feature
title: In the Principality of Ill-At-Ease
description: "A forest story."
categories:
date: 2016-04-15
image: 
        feature: http://www.fenceking.org/images/wren2.jpg
---

*1.*

A couple weeks ago, I ran aground in the Principality of Ill-At-Ease, also known as the Horse Latitudes or [Doldrums](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doldrums). I think this is a place that most people working in creative fields visit more regularly than we like to admit. 

I was there after shipping an unusually-large and tumultuous update that took too long by my reckoning, involving a hard-to-digest mix of interesting intellectual problems and grim ditch-digging in support of platform changes. Like a banquet of *petits fours* and asphalt, and you are the only one at the banquet, and everything must be eaten. 

It was a good update in the end, but it was one of those ones where after you do your job and you put it out there, you are a little bit haunted with the question of what kind of reception for your work it would take in order for you to feel psychologically restored (answer: a parade).

After I had annoyed myself and my mate sufficiently with my post-launch horrors and bad-sleep grouchiness, it was getting to be time to do something.

*2.*

I live on the most interesting bus line in Berlin. It is called the M29 and it connects the poorest and wealthiest neighborhoods in the city on a long and meandering trip through the back reaches of the universe, also known as Charlottenburg. The M29 contains everything in life. I packed an overnight bag and I got on the bus, so then it contained me too.

It takes an hour to take the bus from my street to its terminus in a neighborhood of quarter-acre mansions near the edge of the Grunewald, the largest of Berlin's many forests. While the city went past I replaced the passwords on my phone with incorrect passwords, so that the notions and words, and the feelings and the hope of feelings, and all the things that are in there, were not there any more, and I was only on the bus, and who wasn't with me, was not with me.

I got off the bus and began the hour's walk to the forest. The farther I walked, the finer and simpler the houses became, first new-built McMansions but gradually giving way to much older villas in the Prussian style, on increasingly larger plots, until the forest was in front of me and the houses were behind. I went through an empty tunnel under an overpass and was surrounded by trees. A man was camping there, not on vacation. I nodded and he nodded back and I started my long walk.

*3.*
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