Last Dance with Mary Jane

On my way to the barn tonight, I was thinking of coming home and writing an "opinion piece" about the two horsey extremes - cowboys and Natural HorsePersonShip Persons. It was gonna be good, and I might still write it (unless I forget)... but after I got out to the barn, heard about the latest Barn Drama, and took care of the ungrateful mules, I got melancholy.

I decided it was time to set the goldfish free. (I know, I'm a bad person for introducing non-native fish into a pond, but there's no other fish IN that pond and it hasn't flooded yet, so it's not going to flood and release them into the waterways. Also they're goldfish. Goldfish are cool but stupid.) I bailed out their 200 gal stock tank, caught them when the water got low, and carried them over to the small pond. I don't really know what they'll eat over there, but I don't know what the hell they were eating in the stock tank, so hopefully they'll be ok. Anyway, letting them go was one of those little steps in leaving the barn, and it was twilight and lonely out there and I got sad.

I'm leaving Memphis, hopefully forever, in less than two months. My Mississippi bar review class starts at the end of May in Oxford, so I'll need to have somewhere to sleep down there by then. Then I'll take the bar at the end of July, and hopefully by that point I'll have a job, have found a house to rent, found somewhere permanent to keep the horses, got the cats back from Graham, and he'll be looking for a job wherever I'm at. There are a hell of a lot of question marks in there, but that's how I roll, dawg.

It's terrifying, honestly. And it's sad. My barn friends are pulling away, and I know it's because I'm leaving. I've done the same thing when my friends have moved. It's SO hard to convert a "real life" friend into an internet friend. I have two friends whom I really hope to keep - Stephen and James.

I'm pretty sure that once I get a place in Mississippi, James is going to buy a second horse and let it stay with me. It can live in the field with my evil herd, and he can come down for the weekend and ride with me. We've talked about it and I really think it will happen, and I'm really excited about it.

But Stephen - I'm going to miss him so fucking much. He's my best friend. I really don't know if he'll take the time to ever come visit me. I know him, and he has the best of intentions about things like that, but he's too busy to follow through. I guess I'll just call him a lot.

At least I should be able to keep my Memphis phone. A lot of people in north MS have Memphis cell phones.