Well friends and neighbors, my days in Atlanta are numbered. Before too long, I’ll be packing my things and heading to Arkansas, again. It’s times like these I can’t help but remember the ol’ saying a cousin of mine once told me. “Man plans, God laughs.”

I went to the store today to buy some groceries, and barbecue some chicken tonight. Growing up in Mississippi, if there’s anything that was bred into me, it was how to barbecue. That and knowing how to clean and shoot firearms are essential lessons growing up there, or at least they were for me.  I opened up the grill, made sure it was working, pulled out the grill itself and sprayed it down with oven cleaner.

While I was at the grocery store, it rained something fierce.  So much for grilling. Everything is still soaking wet.

Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I can’t help but link this story to what has happened to me in life over the past few weeks. I was all set to move back into my house in Florida, one that I’ve been renting out for years now. The place needs some renovating and updating, and with a new remote job that seemed to be going well, it looked like the perfect time to move back into my house, do my renovating and updating, and either stay there or rent the place out again once the work was done.

Everything’s working out perfectly, right?

I got laid off from the job, so now I have no way of paying my own mortgage.  So much for going to Florida.

In addition to “Man plans, God laughs”, I’ve also heard, “Everything happens for a reason.” Every time you hear that one you’re usually wondering, how the hell could this be happening for a reason?

A couple of days after I’d just gotten the ax from Corporate America, I was talking to a friend in Connecticut that I’ve known since our college days in Florida.  As it turns out, he’d like me to help him open his music venue in Connecticut in a couple of months. He’s in a band himself, and has gathered up quite a social scene from what he tells me.

The thought of working in a place with live music playing all the time is sounding a lot more appealing than keeping the grind of corporate life going, not to mention slowly killing me from sitting in a chair all day.  I’m really starting to feel the undesirable effects of lower back pain thanks to my hours upon hours of working away in front of a computer.

The change of events took me in completely different directions, geographically and just about every other way. So, will this just be another short-lived chapter of dreaming that things could be different, like my stretch in Boulder years ago? Or, will this truly be a new direction, one that finally gets me the hell away from a life that is just slowly extinguishing me over time?

It’s truly a time to focus on putting out the proper energy into the universe. Is God laughing while I try to grill in the rain? Or, is he (or she, whatever your belief may be) just steering me back on course? Stay tuned, let’s see what happens next.