With apologies to Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.
Ten after three in the afternoon now. . . Dove-grey skies, occasional sun through New England clouds. . . Twenty yards from the squalor of this flat is the two-lane blacktop every benzedrine-bent trucker in this state has to barrel down a thousand times a day. We’re planning how to get my technical advisor out of the combination bed-and-breakfast and goat farm just down the street without him having to pay his bill. After that, my attorney suggests that it’s going to be a very heavy day: she’s advised me that blogging may be light or nonexistent, since we’ve got an old 1990 sports coupe with a trunk full of dangerous intoxicants and nonlethal restraint technologies, and are preparing to venture into the belly of the academic beast, where students riot for the slightest provocation. She’s a dangerous woman, hell in a long skirt, and where she’s from, the locals have given her the simple and fearsome title, “La Gringa”. In the kitchen now, she’s half-bent already and rummaging through my refrigerator, mumbling about fraternity pledges and enormous bats with human faces. And now that’s it: my attorney has suggested that it’s time to go, and advises that I should have as fine a time as possible, and making bail — barring any unforeseen circumstances — should not be a problem.
Today is my thirty-fourth birthday.
I don’t feel quite as old now. I have only a year on you.
34 ! Bravo.
Will you still be blogging at 43?
🙂
I haven’t read a lot of Hunter S. Thompson, but I’m familiar with his style, and I think this is fantastic!
Ah ha, there WAS something I wasn’t getting about this post. I knew it.
Happy Birthday, Mike–a few days late. You can return the favor to me tomorrow, though I have 30 years on you. If I can dig out the Beatles lyrics, I’ll sing them to myself on my blog.
And thanks for the mention in the IA discussion. It’s brought some traffic to my blog.
Perhaps we can form a new Special Interest Group at 4 C’s: Scorpios in Composition.
John
I’m going to use Mike’s blog to wish John a Happy Birthday!
John, you need to get a regular commenting feature on your blog so we can all come over and bug you 😉
Seriously, you have so many individual entries I want to comment on but I need it to be easy!
Happy birthday, Mike and John!
Oh, and I second Cindy’s call for a comment feature on John’s blog.
Michelle, Francois, Cindy, John, Rachael — thanks! John, I’m all for the Scorpio SIG, though knowing my Scorpio temperament and the way I’ve sometimes reacted overquickly to folks at IA and KN, if the Scorpio stereotype is true it might be a, uh, high-spirited meeting.
And Cindy, thanks for the compliment re the Hunter S. Thompson imitation. That bit about the combination B&B and goat farm down the road is true, by the way, which might give an entirely different (even weirder?) tone to those famous first lines from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “We were just outside the goat farm when the drugs began to take hold. . .”
(And, of course, with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, there’s yet another Johnny Depp reference. How strange. 🙂