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The melancholy path


June 01, 2004 - 5:11 p.m.

This past weekend felt like something of a watershed. Nothing in particular happened, but I felt a lot different when it was over and I kind of like the change.

I spent a lot of the weekend in two ways: spending time with Melody, and doing stuff with my house. Both were extremely satisfying in unexpected ways. And no, the entire weekend was not spent in bed.

I was at Melody's on Saturday night... she had given blood that morning, and in the evening, we grilled shrimp and steaks, which she normally doesn't eat. In this case, to replenish red blood cells, she figured some good ole cowmeat protein would help, so she had a small piece of New York strip and a lot of grilled shrimp. We also had some wine, then settled down later with raspberry/chocolate martinis and talked far into the night.

Talking with her can lead down two paths, one very powerfully intriguing and one a little melancholy but equally intriguing. We never quite know which path we'll take until we're already well onto it. In this case, she talked a lot about her late mother's last days, which, rather than being uplifting and inspirational, seemed to be a rehash of every petty, manipulative thing the woman had ever done. Yet even after she was gone, Melody said that she wished life had been easier for her mother.

"And in so being, it would have been easier for me," she said.

She and I are very much alike in that way... a detachment from our families as a result of years of needing to go in a direction in which they were not prepared to follow. I get along with mine OK now, but always as peers, not in a conventional parent/child situation. Her parents are both gone, though both of them seemed "gone" years before their bodies actually stopped running. She's fairly distant, both physically and socially, from her siblings, as I am.

We talked late into the night, fooled around a little, then slept well with cats on us. She had to get up on Sunday to sing, and I went home and did lots of stuff on the house. The chaos is rapidly being cut away, and the house keeps reminding me of why I like living there. I mowed everything, ate weeds, cleaned floors and catboxes, and the house felt much nicer.

I also went to a computer show and picked up enough parts to drastically upgrade my server, which was getting old. However, even after much swearing and many attempts, I could not get RedHat9 to install and launch Domino in a stable fashion. I think I'll have to go back to RedHat8 or move to SuSE Linux or something. What a bother. A nice, fast server, but I can't get it to settle down yet.

But I will.

Last night, driving up to Melody's to stay the night, I got to watch some drunk punk kid narrowly miss getting his head torn off when he flipped his full-size Chevy pickup out on US340. He had blown by me doing at least 80 in the rain, and then fishtailed and lost the truck in the media. Fortunately, he burned off a lot of speed spinning, and only after a full spin in the mud did the topheavy thing roll slowly over and come to rest on its wheels, empty beer bottles all over the pavement. I called the cops and a swarm of EMTs showed up.

I talked to him after he climbed out of the truck. He said, "I am lucky to be alive."

I told him "yeah, you are, dumbass."


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