Okay...just some housekeeping stuff, things I need to mention, odds and ends for a Friday afternoon.

Item: Sonya and I went to the Arcade again for lunch today. As always: good food, bad service. Though it is getting better. Servant-o-Satan Girl was our waitress again. She's really a good waitress, actually. I'm afraid she's on the heroin, though. She's awful skinny.

Item: I got paid last night, which is nice. It's really cool. I've got direct deposit, you know? So at 11:59 last night I had less than twenty bucks in the bank. One minute later I had a brick o' money, just waiting to be spent. Ain't technology grand?

Item: I'm still running, in case any of you have wondered. No, I'm still not very good at it. I've run an entire mile (or damned close to it) just once. The rest of the time I have to stop and go, wheezing and gasping all the way. Sonya says I should quit smoking if I'm serious about it. She's probably right.

On Monday nights I coordinate my run to end at the Flying Saucer, a bar with a great deal of beer on tap. I've been meeting Ward there to watch Monday Night Football and have a few pints. It's good manly entertainment.

Oh, and Sonya let me open a Christmas present Wednesday night, which was the first really cold night since I started running. What was it? Lycra pants! They're black and oh-so-clingy. They make me feel a touch self-conscious, true, but they're kind of sexy, too. The wife says I look good in them.

And they do keep my knees warm.

Item: You may remember a while back I mentioned Crazy-Ass Bald Woman, one of the regular Downtown homeless that hang out outside my building. Remember? She pulls her hair out, talks to people that aren't there, takes off her clothes in public...you remember? Anyway, about a month ago she got arrested for mugging a county official. A county official that works with crazy people, as a matter of fact. It got mentions in the paper and on the news. Of course, she's back out on the streets again. I've seen her a couple of times this week. She adds a certain thrill to being outside. Just the thought that I could be attacked by this crazy cooze...

It really does make me run faster. She's a nut!

The paper interviewed one of her homeless friends. He said that she used to prostitute herself, "years ago, when she was young and attractive."

I find that rather difficult to believe.

Item:A co-worker of mine has access to some folks in the local radio industry. I mentioned in passing to her the other day that I'd like some passes to the 96-X Fest this weekend. It's a concert being put on by a local station here in Memphis. The lineup is mainly b-list alternahoodlums, but Cowboy Mouth is going to be there, and I'd like to see them.

I get out of an interminable meeting this afternoon, and what do I find on my keyboard? That's right! Two comp tickets to the X Fest.

Too cool.

Item: In the last week two of my coworkers, when confronted with an office devoid of people, have made comments about the "rapture." Isn't that creepy?

For those of you unfamiliar with fundementalist dogma, the rapture is supposedly the time before the end of the world when God will take his believers into Heaven, whole, before the Revalatory shit hits the fan here on earth.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. The coworkers in question are both good Christian folks. I'd figure that if anybody was going to get raptured, these two would be in on it.

Also, how much must a bible story be pounded into your head for you to think of it automatically in a totally nonbiblical situation? Nobody's here? Maybe God took them away!

Um, how about they went to the bathroom?

Personally, I subscribe to the more moderate interpretation of the Revalation: that, if it was anything, it was a metaphorical description of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, which happened about a century after Jesus. I mean, come on! Ten-horned beasts? The ho of Babylon? Four horsemen? I don't buy it.

And I went to a Christian school, too. Though West Memphis Christian did produce a great crop of drug addicts, atheists, sex maniacs and Democrats. I think maybe they were doing something wrong.

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