Escape Motivated Again

I admit I stole and cannibalised this posting from a post I made two years ago. I'm fairly comfortable with this because.....

a - nobody ever read this blog two years ago.
b - the only person I'm defrauding is myself.
c - I'm still escape motivated.

This morning I was in the doctor's room with my son. Unlike in England, they don't acually keep you in a communal waiting room here in the US.

Instead they bring you to a small consulting room and then abandon you; after first raising the expectation that you will be seen promptly.

After a swift weighing and measuring session (my son, not me) the nurse said the doctor would be with me shortly. So I spent an excrutiating 20 minutes with an infant who's literally climbing up the walls before the doctor shows up, makes a few pleasant observations and says the nurse will be in with the big, bad needle shortly.

Another 20 minutes elapse. By the time the nurse comes in and looks at my face she's a bit taken aback. My eyes are wild and bloodshot: I am covered in scratches; I am pacing this small cell like Steve freaking McQueen looking for his motorbike.

And now I feel a bit better because at least my posting has morphed into something a bit different from the last one which followed a comment from my course tutor about how adults are all escape motivated.

To be fair I escaped from the course and the subsequent job I secured at a school.

I remember the tutor's comment and its exact time because I was staring at the clock to see how long we had left until I could escape from the lesson.

I've made a mental note to myself to spend a few dollars on a watch battery; it's worth it to alleviate the neck ache from all that clock staring.

I have to agree with my tutor whose name I couldn't spell or pronounce other than remembering it was a name straight out of the Godfather. I'm thinking Luca Brasi but that's clearly wasn't his name, although it sets me off down numerous confused and overgrown thought paths such as why my wife would have named her former cat after someone who is slow witted and brutish. Hang on, that's according to Wikipedia. Which means he probably had the mental acumen of Albert Einstein and was great company at baby showers.

Whatever the merits of Brasi - apparently he was loyal - I total concur with the escape motivated comment.

No sooner have I arrived in work than I am itching to escape. Unfortunately this means a mindless round of visits to council chambers. After five minutes at City Hall I find myself itching to escape back to work.

I'm the sort of guy who paces around impatiently on station platforms waiting for the train to arrive and then after two hours in baggage class facing the wrong way and nursing a flat hamburger that's taken 80 minutes to cool below the temperature of your average red dwarf, I can't wait to disembark.

Unless it's Doncaster, which is like the British equivalent of Newark. You ask directions and are told 'turn right after the two dead dogs on High Street and left again by the three dead dogs outside Smiths.

I've made some notable escapes in the past, although none of them have involved McQueen-style motorbike antics or years of chipping through a prison wall like in the Shawshank Redemption.

It's funny how that always happen in movies. Spend eight years chipping through the wall of any prison I've been to and you'll be nowhere near freedom - you'll end up in the cell of a large homicidal brute who wants to kill you or do other unmentionable things to you for messing up his nice clean wall.

But there are certainly times when escape is the only option. I'm thinking of a beautiful sunny day beside the Sea of Galilee on a press trip when the organizer insisted we had to spend more than an hour in a museum devoted to the woeful remains of an old boat dredged up from the sea bed.

Cue a bathroom break and a sprint to the great outdoors where I bumped into Lorna who had had the same idea and was whining that the guide was treating us like a bunch of school kids.

On reflection, the urge to escape probably goes back to our childhood when we willed the school bell to ring - and that was five minutes into the lesson.

Of course there are times when escape can be construed as bad form. One is usually compelled to sit (or stand) through one's own wedding even though there's a multi layered cake out there somwhere and you want to get to it before some filthy guest, who you didn't want to invite in the first place, gets their dirty, freeloading paws on it.

Ducking out of funerals is also seen as bad form. So too is drinking so much whisky that the room starts spinning round.

But although there isn't much to be said for funerals, the one silver lining is that as a teenager adults don't pay you a lot of attention at funerals. You are abandoned in a room and the bottle of whisky is standing there too, looking as lonely as you. It's surely only natural to want to make friends