Angry Goldfish

Bloody hell! Looking over the past few posts - well, somebody has to now and then, so the bits don't rot - looking over the past few posts it appears to all the world that I'm stuck in some kind of Apple-bashing rut, like some fat-arsed snidewit with his belly FUPA'ed out his shirt and a finger corking his nostril clockwise?

Where in the three-colored Heck did all that come from? It might well be a pet peeve, but nothing to obsess over. It's like, it's like, put a guy under enough stress for a long enough time, you'll strip him down to some feral geek. Or sumpthin'?

I forget. I'm thinking I had to post something back then, just to move things on, but was completely stuck for something to write about, then along came an Apple commercial.

But I forget.

Today I forgot what "hash-browns" were called - again. Forgot their name last week too, and the week before that. I had to ask my wife - again again - "What are those fried potato thingies called I like from the deli?". Yesterday I forgot my street number. Doctor's assistant had marked the address in my file as WRONG, and I had to think about it. Twice, before being sure it was correct all along. But now, today, I'm not so sure - did it said "5" or did it say "6"?

I forget. I always forget. Been that way for donkeys.

I forget numbers more easily because I hate numbers. I've spent six years doing my utmost to avoid them, while all that time developing measurement equipment. It can be done, oh yes... alls you have to do is the harder stuff underneath, the stuff that makes the beans that can be counted elsewhere. I have, though, just these past two weeks, committed my cell number to memory. But only because of a parallel with my home phone that I hadn't noticed before.

Fat lot of good it's done me though: to remember my cell, I must forget my hoose.

A new job will help. New scene, new people, new field, blessed relief. Been interviewing; waiting to hear, been given a nod as good as a wink, but not yet the Nod. Shouldn't be long. And just in time too - learned last week that I'll be escaping the coming purge. That was not what I wanted to hear at all. I want to be gone, and so it shall be.

Spent last week in Chicago, but without my wife. That was just wrong - all that way, supposedly in desperation to show some progress somewhere, and what we did, day after we got there, we were taken on a boat ride up the river and out Lake Michigan; walked Madison Avenue from Lakeshore to Millenium; spent an hour gazing out the top floors of Hancock; stuffed our faces in the Chop House, and spent the evening in a blues bar listening to live. Now: all of this was great, sure enough, but completely surreal given our predicament. And it was just wrong, in the wrongest way, to be doing all this with people from work, and not with my Belovèd, who hasn't been to Chicago either.

Change is in the air, has to be: and unlike Garth, we do not fear it.

You will of course have realized that I've totally forgotten what I set out to write about.

No... wait... that's what it was. I'll tell you: by some arcane twist of serendipity I discovered a blog this afternoon that is written by a great pal of mine from the old days. A friend I haven't seen since I left. This guy, he's one of those storied people who are legendary in the company of others who know him; the kind of guy we all tell stories about when we're drunk. "Remember that time when P- did this?", or "Wasn't it P- that...?"

Well, there was P- and there was D-, but D- spent a couple of years out here, then went back to work for the same folks as P-. Broke my youngest daughter's heart when he left - she was eight, I think? It was D-, not P-, who walked into a party one time and discovered one of those full-length distorting mirrors, and straightaway shouts "I wonder what my wullie looks like in that", and then found out.

It was P-, though, who spent a year in Boston; who was always flicking the V's at american colleagues because they thought he was just saying "Hullo". It was he who discovered, as only he could, that whereas complimenting a female colleague on her appearance at work was considered sexual harassment, telling her that she looked like shit and her clothes were rubbish did not!

He had the sharpest, most cutting wit of anybody I ever knew; but he could take as good as he got, which made him a Hero.

And that's why I was digging around the old posts - what if he comes to visit! The place is a pigsty! What'll he think I've become, me who always despised those sad-sweatered geeks who collect chip designations like train or bus numbers; who argue the merits of Rev A over Rev B at the water cooler?

Last time I saw him he was single and wild. Now he's married, a father, and a country bloody squire who walks his dog and his sprog. Enduring, by his own account, something of a mid-life crisis; wondering where the years went and what happened to his Cool? Ach, but don't worry son - the dreich passes. It happens to us all. And your pals, don't forget, are all on the same trajectory: the ratios remain the same.

Maybe I'll get away with it?