Zodiacal Alignment

Some sort of perverse zodiacal alignment has prevented me from posting for a few days: Yesterday's lightning trip to New York -- which occasioned six hours of crack-of-dawn and long-post-gloaming travel to get two hours' useful work done that could have easily been done by phone -- has combined with today's marathon session (with concomitant loss of productivity that will have to be made up) manually configuring and moving files to a new Mac Powerbook, to make me, in President Clinton's immortal words, "goofy tired."

So tired that I'm not even going to apologize for that last sentence. The fucker parses. The proof is left as an exercise for the student.

This new Mac is seriously wonderful. The old laptop was balky and prone to kernel panic -- the result, I theorize, of faulty RAM. I bore with its idiosyncrasies for three months knowing my employers had ordered the new one. The Cmd-S buttons were worn to a nub. You know how a new computer smells, the same way a new car smells? Stick the nose right down into the keyboard, take a big whiff, go ahead, nobody will think you're strange... Mmmmmmm....

I would like to commend to one of the fruitier rings of Hell the drunken dullards who made last night's dinner easily the worst in my memory. Fresh off the plane, I was beginning to succumb to this goofy-tired state and dying for some pub-grub and a beer. I bellied up at some farm-implement bar in Whistling Nowheresville, Suburbia, and asked for some chicken wings and a tall, life-giving Sammy Seasonal. No sooner had my order been placed when these three cigarette-punishing drunks sat down next to me -- the last places at the bar -- and began exchanging the sort of guffawing idiotry that only a fourth or fifth Long Island Iced Tea can produce. The dullard closest to me, plowed nearly Witty and Charming Part II, had completely thrown any concept of Personal Space to the very same wind to which he was three sheets; at every sally and jape of his idiot brethren, he reeled backward in laughter, leaning his nauseating torso against my eating arm. Absolutely the last straw came when his crapulent eye spotted a clean ashtray just north of my Ranch dressing, and he extended his lava-spewing cancer-stick directly across my plate, unsteadily hovered over his target, and mashed the filthy thing into a foul-smelling but completely undead roach that continued to spew its vileness directly across my dinner, the precise opposite of mist on a morning meadow.

Check, please.

Now.

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Plowed nearly Witty and Charming, Part II... You do know Dan Jenkins' Ten Stages of Drunkenness, don't you? From Baja Oklahoma...

1. Witty and Charming
2. Rich and Powerful
3. Benevolent
4. Clairvoyant
5. Fuck Dinner
6. Patriotic
7. Crank up the Enola Gay
8. Witty and Charming, Part II
9. Invisible
10. Bulletproof