fly like a beagle

I'm a little miffed that nobody bothered to send me a copy of the Melissa virus. After all my bragging about how ultimately cool my new laptop is, no one bothered to attempt sabotage. What am I, beneath your contempt? Don't you care? Don't you even care? I spend thousands of dollars of my wife's hard-earned money to buy the ultimate in mobile computer electronics and there it sits.

Working fine.

I don't know. Maybe this whole "staying at home and being a dad" thing has me a little loopy these days. I want to get out there in the world. I want to feel the breeze in my hair (what's left of it). I want to pop a tape in the deck and be embarrassed at red lights when people notice me screaming along to Barbara Mandrell using my cigarette lighter as a make-shift microphone.

I've got to get out more.

I saw the new Kubrick film. Yep, you losers, my wife smuggled a copy home for me to view and let me say right off that Tom Cruise is hung like a hamster. Never have I been more disappointed than when looking at "little Tommy" and thinking "What does Rosie see in this guy?" The film is okay, I guess, but I'm not sure it's how Stanley would have wanted to be remembered.

I swore I was going to write something this week besides "All work and no play makes Steve a dull boy." I made a big show of it at dinner Friday. I started talking to the neighbors about how my novel was at "a crucial stage." I walked over to Lizzie's husband's garage (the center of all guy-ness) and told Mike about how I'd base one of the characters on him in exchange for a lube job.

I'm not sure he took it the way it was intended.

I really do need to get out of town. I can always tell when it's time to move on because I start to ramble. Face it. It's time to move on. Yep, it's time for Steve Amaya to fake his own death, steal a nicer car, and head for the border. Aaaaaah Canada. What a great place to be this time of year. I'll hang out on Dave Van's couch for a few days until my new identity papers are messengered to me.

Then I'll be simply Enrico Fermi Sebastian, pipe-fitter from Duluth, Montana. I'll live free and easy with my laptop, my copy of *On The Road*, and a new-found sense of well-being. You laugh, but I've done it before.

All it takes is a little guts, a little nose wax, and a cool new name. In fact, one of the lists I found while cleaning out my desk was for new names I'd been tinkering with:

1. Gill Gamesh
2. Dakota Montana
3. Red Ruffensore
4. Johnny Panic
5. Professor Night

Of course you come up with stupid stuff like this all the time when you're a kid. The date on this list was last February.

"The Rising Of The Lark" -- Roger Whittaker -- DANNY BOY

today's wisdom:

"There is no nation on earth so dangerous as a nation fully armed, and bankrupt at home."

- Henry Cabot Lodge