Yes, I do – I live a CRAZY life. Clubbing til 3am most mornings would be enough for most folks, but not for me. There’s a quick 90 minute power nap after that, and at 5:00 I’m showered and refreshed and out on the racquetball court with my sophisticated Puerto Rican friend Eduardo. I think he’s gay, but that doesn’t bother me because the gay bars are the best for my mid-morning appletini breaks. By noon I’ve wrapped up at work and am hanging out with my girlfriend who always takes some “us” lunch time between the studio sessions for her new album and all the photo shoots. After that there are always two or three early-starting (or late-ending) parties to hit, and in the evening it’s backstage passes for any of a number of sold out performances given by my girlfriend’s showbiz buddies or a few contemplative hours in my private box at the symphony. There’s dinner somewhere in there, prepared as usual by my Vietnamese chef/chauffeur and finished up with a Gurkha and some Louis XIII Cognac, and before you know it it’s time to hit the clubs again. Oh, and I make it to church every Sunday to make up for the 11 hours of debauchery I manage every Saturday.

True story, every word.

But maybe with just a few slight embellishments.

OK, not a bit of it’s true. My idea of a big night on the town these days is seeing Max Payne with Big Carter and then sitting in a Megalomart parking lot for a half hour while my bladder repeatedly expires, revives and clenches up again from the 96 ounce Dr. Pee I drank at the theater. I couldn’t have planned a more boring life for myself given any amount of time, but I love it, every minute. Most of my friends are on different paths now, but the few that remain are good ones. I have my family, and Little Carter is more important to me than I ever thought possible. Rico Suave I may not be, but I wouldn’t trade a minute I’ve had with my son for all the partyboy sophistication in the world.

There have been some huge happenings at work since June, but since my stinkin’ boss sometimes reads my blog (hi, stinkin’ boss!!), there’s not really much I want to say about it out in the open like this.

End of post.

Except I’m drinking a double jigger of black label Southern Comfort and lime right now, so I’ll tell you a little more.

Starting over, there have been huge happenings at work since June. I guess it’s enough to say that I’ve cycled through paranoia and worry and relief so many times that I’m just numb at this point and don’t really care what happens. Except that’s not really true, because there’s still a fair amount of lingering discontent I’m not really sure what to do about: of the five things that really decided me on taking this job back in June of 2006 (the feel of a small company, a super gnarly building, a nine minute drive from the house,  my own office and an ultra-casual dress code), the first thing has been gone for quite a while, three more will vanish by next month and the last won’t make it to January 1st. I also haven’t had a raise in 16 months, but in my mind that’s a fair trade for having a job at all. For those who don’t love me enough to know, I presently sorta-kinda work in the mortgage industry. I don’t know jack diddly about loan origination even now, but my butter is earned from folks who do, and I’m rounded-up-to-a-hundred-percent sure that I would have been standing in a bread line for my butter by now had things not taken an interesting twist around my second anniversary with the company.

Sometime in the June-July timeframe a huge foreign organization bought us up, and we suddenly went from being a hundred-and-something-man shop to a hundred-thousand-and-something-man superentity. Having worked for another huge multi-national for six years, though, and having already suffered through years of trickle-down bureaucracy, this doesn’t pose any real difficulty for me. I already know how to swim in the corporate waters and speak the corporate language, but I guess I will have to get used to hearing that language with a different accent now. But, like I said, even though I don’t really dig the megacorporate scene, I’m fairly confident that the new business has the get-through-it-ness to make it past the current slump… and that that wouldn’t have been the case had we not been gobbled up.

So… unhappy? Yes, about the creature comforts I’ll be giving up. But worried? Not so much now. Until told otherwise, I’m just going to expect to see those checks come in regularly. Until then I’ll do my best work and continue to annoy my boss with half-baked recommendations of automating even more of our processes. I can’t worry about things that are outside my control, so for now Steve Winwood and I will just roll with it, baby.

I just realized I haven’t posted a single whimpering syllable here since the end of July, and that makes me feel like a frog’s heel. Especially after all the crap I’ve given my friends who let their own blogs linger.

But then I realized I’ve been all up on the Facebook multiple times every day since my last entry, and I was all like, “Whoah. What a frog’s heel I am.” I really do tend to wear out expressions like that; I said “nutty scampers” 11,096 times last year, and “that’s no good” a grand total of 154,271 times over a period of about 3 years.

This is the point at which historically I would have said in my best Dudley Doright voice, “I shall give up 75% of my Facebook time and devote myself instead to writing low-to-medium-quality material for my audience of 3.” But I can’t do that because I’m working on a Facebook game right now, and can therefore easily rationalize any time I might waste there. It’ll be a good game, too: I bet I’ll make at least a dollar a week off it.

Anyway, so here’s my first non-post in months and months, but I don’t have much to report. Nice chatting with you. 🙂