slipjig3 | One more lap around the sun, Jeeves, and keep the radio playing

I've been away from the blogging game for so long, I'd forgotten that "so much to say, so little brain to say it" sensation that pops up after 10 pm. on the Friday of a chock-full-o'-nuts week of wonders. It's worse knowing that since I have been away for so long, I feel like I have to back-story everything so much that it hardly seems worth the trouble. As a storyteller, I make up for my lack of ninja fights and opium soirées with a matching lack of narrative brevity. This is why I can't open with something simple like, "I'm sitting in Brunswick, Maine with

hypnagogie right now," without feeling it necessary to explain that I still live in Providence while she's in Maine finishing her post doc and I see her every other weekend and and and. Just because I sometimes live in perpetual nested flashbacks doesn't mean I need to splatter them all over my journal and expect the world to keep up.

So let me cut to the chase: Birthday week! Yes, mine! 48, if you must know, but I don't feel a day over...well, over 62 at the moment, for reasons that will become apparent in a bit. Birthday proper was Monday, which is almost as much of a drag as a birthday less than two weeks after Christmas, but I treated myself better than Mondays usually warrant, which was enough for the time. The real celebrations came later:

Wednesday:

blissmorgan shares a birthday with me, and for years we've been swearing that this will be the year we get together and celebrate somehow, followed by hemming and hawing against the background drone of mildly annoyed crickets. But this year I think we were both feeling an exceptionally focused need to get the hell out of our respective houses and into good company, so we not only made actual plans, but we actually followed through. We settled on bowling at a place halfway between Bliss!House and Adam!House, which we quickly discovered serves up a light show and either disco or '90s alternative depending on who's controlling the knobs, so it made it harder to concentrate but much easier not to care that we were bowling solidly two-digit totals. (Neither of us had done this in years, which explains not only the "are you sure this isn't golf?" scores we were nailing, but also the fact that we are hurting in places we weren't aware we had places two days later. I'm not convinced I didn't throw out my first hip, hence the "day over 62" crack back there. From there we sought food at the kind of local restaurant that serves Reubens and liver & onions and burgers named after regular customers from the '50s, where we ate well and adored our waitress and had the most amazing conversation that led directly to me opening this DW account. Bliss wrote up the event far better than I ever could on her own journal (complete with snappy bowling ball glamour shots), so do pop over there, but suffice it to say that it was precisely what I needed in so many more ways than one. Thanks again, Bliss, and let's not wait so long next time.

Friday: I left for Maine straight from work, a 2 1/2-hour drive that's 2 1/4 hours longer than my bowling-ravaged joints were prepared for, but it was so very worth it as

hypnagogie and I convened at the Brunswick Tavern for my official birthday meal. Their head chef has a contract out with someone from the demon realm, because good Lord. Pork belly with applesauce, steamed mussels, an amazing lamb shank for me and a steak for her that was so tender you could plant tulip bulbs in it without benefit of a trowel. We topped it all off with a bourbon-butternut cheesecake the consistency of gentle sleep that she described as "if pumpkin pie were made of God." I could go on at great length about the food and the connectedness that an exceptional meal shared can create, but I want to skip ahead to where she gave me the present she'd been dying to give me for weeks: she got me a smoking jacket, people. A SMOKING JACKET. Black velour with silver-and-black piping, perfectly lined and pocketed, and it even goes perfectly with the purple Thai fisherman's pants that are my new pajama bottoms. Ladies and gentlemen, I no longer sit—I lounge. Sybaritically, with a rake's practiced moue and a leisurely eye-fuck gaze that coos, "Hello, dahling, don't be shy. Welcome to Raymundo." It's perfect in every way. Thank you again, hon. A++++, would marry the hell out of again. (And yes, I'm bringing it to Arisia, and yes, I'm wearing it to the con suite at one in the morning.)

....

Remind me, how do you end blog posts again? It's like this, isn't it? Just kind of trailing off when you don't feel like typing any more?