the roads that lead somewhere

I have found it hard lately to write anything particularly enlightening for this blog.

I think part of it has to do with an absence of that breathless excitement I first experienced when exploring the terrain of my new home.

New places suddenly become old places, and you start to know too many things to just gush and wonder and see glitter everywhere.

And roads that once led to new places, lead only to places you have been before.

I am also fairly busy, and since my transition from fluffy lifestyle reporter to "serious" news reporter I have experienced this kind of self-censoring paranoia, wondering what, if anything, is in bounds for me to discuss publicly.

And then there's this sort of creeping cynicism I can't shake.

It's not even that I cover anything particularly gritty. I mean, really, the daily workings of 15 (ahem) professional politicians is hardly the most soul sucking of jobs -- emphasis on the most.

It's not even that I have had any specific experiences that have added to overall cynicism about the world. I would say that in general I am less cynical than I was, say, four years ago when I was extolling the hypocrisy of the U.S. government in tri-weekly dispatches from a corner of the leftist fringe.

But dealing daily with cops and courts, legislators, accidents, evasive PIOs (even nice ones, sometimes especially nice ones), and the never-ending onslaught of (often) meaningless and self-serving press releases has imprinted another kind of cynicism in me.

It's the cynicism that comes with writing things you already know the answer to.

One thing I have discovered over the last few years is that I am best when I am writing about people.

People are always surprising -- and more often than not you cannot know the answer to what makes them tick. I have found that even if I were tempted (for some reason) to write pat cliches instead of really looking hard at someone, I would invariably be wrong about what I assumed.

But my job is not to write about people. It's about jobs, and organizations, about structures and money and who works and who doesn't.

It's about filling space and hitting certain themes, and making sure there's a follow the next day.

And writing what I write all day makes me sometimes feel like I am on rails, heading to and from a prescribed destination.

And the joy I feel when I meet someone or find out something new seems gone from my life. Because these stories are not new. They are the same stories over and over -- someone dies, someone steals, someone screws something up they shouldn't. Occasionally someone "gives back" -- or writes a check.

But I am not looking for anything beyond that, and I am losing the ability to see the good things, and follow roads that will lead me somewhere surprising.

And then sometimes I do follow roads -- metaphorically or literally -- and I feel like I remember what the good things are, and see the possibilities again.

Or at least find carabao, which are cool.