I set out to write a recap of my trip out West, but instead spent the last half hour staring at a blank screen, wondering why, on a spring JetBlue flight from Oakland to JFK, I would chose to wear the corduroy pants that now stick hotly to the back of my legs. I also wonder about my feet; from the sitting and altitude and lack of cabin pressure, they’ve swollen slowly against my shoes’ toe boxes, until I imagine they threaten to spill, as old-fat-lady ankles, over the tops.

My brain is swelling up, too. Maybe in sympathy, or because I’ve for too many days traded sleep against caffeine in a Faustian bargain of attempted productivity. But mostly because so many stories from the trip – from funny vignettes to grand sagas – are pounding against the inside of my skull, jockeying to get out, that they’ve bottle-necked at the brainstem, unable to make it down and out through my fingers and onto the screen.

It’s giving me a hell of a headache.

So, until my feet are normally sized and my pants cool and dry, until I’ve slept more than a few hours and drank less than a morning triple espresso, the stories will have to wait. By which time, in all likelihood, they’ll be superceded by some other cockamamie tales of more recent misadventures, leaving this trip completely unrecounted.

Which is a shame. Because most of it was pretty fucking great.