Hazardous Duty

I’m leaving Wednesday morning for a business trip in the upper Midwest.  Just in case the frost on the grass here for the last few days wasn’t enough, I’m going to where the highs for the four days I’ll be there range from the low 50’s to 40.  Rain and/or snow showers every day.  Bonus.

I like going and seeing new places, which business travel has afforded me, but I also hate being away from my family.  I generally end up sitting in a hotel room, reading until I can’t stand myself anymore and then watching whatever dreck is on TV in between.  It’s BORING.  If you’d ever sat for two or three days listening to people in my profession talk shop for 7-9 hours a day, you’d know what I mean.

This time, though, I think I’ve got Dys talked into letting me take the laptop.  So on the bright side I should be able to blog and stuff while I’m there.  And since she’s most likely going to be working every night, it gives me the opportunity to ask for volunteers for hazardous duty:  Seeking willing blab partner.  Anybody going to be bored and/or hanging around online Wednesday, Thursday, and/or Friday night?  Wanna shoot the shit?

Monday Music

I am placing the blame for today’s MM squarely upon Vix’s shoulders.  In her defense, she couldn’t have known when she twittered it that this song by a couple of willowy young ladies would turn out to be so autobiographically applicable to my old bald noggin.

Tegan and Sara, “Nineteen”

(The non-live version, with lyrics, can be found here.)

This surprisingly captures a double handful of fleeting moments of utter despair from my Lost Summer of 1996, between the time Dys flew out to meet me for the first time in February and when she moved in with me in September – those long months of trying to figure out where we were both going:  individually and maybe, just maybe, together.  At the time, I can assure you, it was hardly a foregone conclusion, and in the intervening time I walked a long and dark road, straying occasionally along the edges of psychosis.

For the record, I wasn’t nineteen.  I was twenty-two.