Long time no update.
Troubles. Delays.
Consider this: to compress a torrent of magic--or a world of hurtin'--into a single moment.
Christmas, for example (or "the holiday season," if you must), seems to start around Yom Kippur or Shvantza* or mid-September.
That is, the anticipation for these glorious December moments seems to start in the fall.
Followed by that wondrous day or spate of days of cheer and reflection and family and the firm's free grub where some of your underlings and overlords and even a few co-equals used to get roaring drunk--the blither and blather of release.
Nuts roasting on an open fire and all that.
"Wheeee!!"
Ending with perhaps a week when your new toys still clanged and shrieked and moaned... before being discarded or left in puddles of disinterest.
Months of anticipation, special day, denouement. Then it's "wait till next year."
What if it were possible to compress that day into one second? And rather than months of drooling and shopping there was no anticipation because there was no prior knowledge. An actual surprise, as it were. Didn't see it coming.
And what if this moment, rather than being a happy time, was without question quite the opposite?
Followed by years of haggling over that one second.
Literally years. More than two years and nine months of haggling. And it's not like it takes place only from mid-September through the end of the year. And then has a stopping point.
No. Not like that.
What if it seems to just keep going on?
And on.
And on.
Something akin to the polar opposite of Christmas is perhaps finally coming to a head here this week. And when I say "here" I am not referring to this site, nor to Kevin, nor Tiffany, et al.
Nor am I referring to running into Shelly at Wally~World last week, nor to her sloppy and pathetic hug, nor to my half-hearted reach-around, nor to hearing about her and Nick completely breaking up, nor to the field glasses I purchased later that same day.
No, I'm not harkening back to any of that.
Something else has been going on all along. For years. And this something else has kept me up nights, has caused me to confuse salt with other substances at Acme Salt, has caused me to-- well, let's put it this way: there have been bunglings.
Quite a few in fact.
I'm not asking for sympathy; I'm merely explaining why I've been AFK this past week, why I couldn't keep my peeps in the know in a more timely fashion.
I admit: when you're staking out the home of "the other woman," and she and someone you've never seen before leave in a huff (they left the garage door open), leave and go to one of our swankier pawn shops on the edge of town, whereupon you watch with your new binoculars as 29 minutes later the owner of that pawn shop drives away in Beth's lemony Hummer, drives away with neither Beth nor her passenger ever emerging from said pawn shop... well, when something even half as suspicious as that occurs approximately five days ago, failing to mention it here within a day or two is falling down on the job.
Yes, it would seem I'm in arrears. I bungled. But with good reason. Had a lot on my mind.
What I'm trying to say is the notes I jotted down that day got lost.
So I'm regrouping here in more ways than one.
To the best of my recollection I flipped a coin: stay, and see what gives with Beth and her associate OR put the shadow to the owner of The Swap Shoppe.
I started tailing him.
He drove to what I'm pretty sure is his place of residence (as evidenced by him tending the lawn, ambling lazily from back gate to front door, etc.). Quasi-militaristic vehicle got parked in garage, which was then closed.
And then I waited. All night long. I saw various lights glowing, then being extinguished. After midnight his home stayed dark until morning. I'm not sure if I nodded off or not; I truly think I stayed awake the whole time. In the morning, at approximately 7:43, he returned to his place of business. In his red Cadillac convertible.
Haven't seen the Hummer since.
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*It's a holiday, sort of like Kwanza with some shvantz thrown in