Can you believe it's 2002 already? Okay, that's a trite way to start.

Oh well, it'll have to do. Fade to black.

Today I went to work for the 4th time this week. On a Wednesday. I'm so behind on a bunch of projects that I've been trying to get off my plate for a while that I just decided to go in on Saturday and take care of all 3,000 of my pending KCI e-mails and tune some of the systems for eight hours of uninterrupted, undistracted system administration. The weirdest part is that I actually like it lately. Sometimes I'll get home from work, spend a few hours hanging out with friends and then want to go work another eight hours right then.

I don't, though. It's 2002. The dot com boom is over, George W. Bush has downshifted our economy into a two-wheel spin into recession, and tech workers like me work with the rest of the world in nice tidy eight to five, Monday through Friday shifts. Those of us who are still working, anyway. So many of my friends aren't lately. My life doesn't work in that pattern, but my company does, so I match it as closely as I reasonably come. That's life. So I go home, relax, smoke, eat my late dinner, tap out a few e-mails and go to sleep.

Things are hardly normal these days, though. I walk down the street with Dale and Sara, on Sunday morning. "If you had told me one year ago today," I muse on our way to the coffee shop, "what things were going to be like in just 12 months, I wouldn't have believed you." I can tell they're quickly joining the ranks of my friends who are tired of hearing this particular theme, after only a few repeats. "That I'd be walking down the street with the two of you, living in the city of Baltimore, not to mention everything that's happened in the last two months . . . it's almost incomprehensible."

They nod and smile, I know they dig it, but it's a little stale in the third retelling. I still can't get over how interesting things have been. Life certainly has kept me really busy and . . . well, if bureaucracies and business can paradigm shift, I must be paradigm surfing! Just going from one way of understanding the whole world, to a completely new one in a few days. Over and over again. Then trying to keep up with what few mundanities I still have left from day to day on top of everything else! It's fun, a little tiring, but pretty exhilirating.

I wonder if it'll last.

But abiding storyteller that I am, this last year has gifted me with a set of stories that I just savor in the telling. The kind of stories you don't even want to set down in writing because then you wouldn't be able to see the amazed looks and acquiescent nodding of everyone around you hearing it for the first time. Before my Saturday workday I got to meet with Jacki for breakfast at the diner. I'm in new jeans and a shirt I picked up free working at the radio station two years ago, with my ranger hat draped lazily over a bed of my washed, dried and fluffed into a muss hair. She's blue. Blue. Not in a Winona Ryder early years way (not to say recent days aren't depressing in their own, sad way), but a very expressive and well-stated Eiffel 65 blue. Just exactly in the way I remember writing in a bunch of Everything daylogs that never left my desktop.

And with my pragmatic side distracted by a jaunting trip down memory lane, we have a great breakfast.

I forgot to that point how many stories I had accrued up to that day. It was refreshing feeling to see a (historically) familiar face that doesn't nod tiredly in the affirmative when I pause mid-thought, lock eyes and say whimsically, "Oh? Have I told you this story already? I might have . . ." And there, syncronizing up the last few months of our lives, I realized how much was already so different, and how much will probably never change.

I'm not being obscure, either. It was just as broad and non-specific as that. A sort of dawning new understanding of the shape of how life flows, and another aspect to the shape of the universe.

For the last few months, Emily and I have had this amazing sort of rapport. All my friends are really awesome and cool, but it's fun to chat with Emily on the phone and swap stories of all our events and friends. We've been in this town for the last four years together, leading such completely perpendicular lives that have finally just intersected lately, that our mutual entertainment is really spectacular, and we have easily a good decade of mutual experiences and friends to call on in our conversation.

So its a fun compliment when somebody who's known me as long as that says, "You certainly don't have a boring life." I had to smile when she said that to me just a few weeks ago, and again a few days later when I woke up and thought about it again. I sure don't, I mused to myself in the shower, and I really couldn't imagine living any other way.

I bought my second ticket to Wisconsin, my second ever plane trip flying alone, today. Tell me six months ago that I'd be buying plane tickets on Orbitz like I bought books on Amazon.com, and I'd think you were crazy. Oh? Have I told you this story already? I might have . . . oh yeah, that's another thing about Baltimore. Word travels quickly. I have to race around to make sure I can beat my stories around the block before I'm clarifying points on second telling from somone else. It gets especially bad when your close friends conspire to embarass you with a little green container of clear coat car finish in front of a big room of friends.

But then, that's the stuff that makes for good stories, pitiful excuses and wonderful daydreams.

And yes, I am being completely obscure, much like this ill-formed segue.

I had an amazing dream last night. I was wearing this black suit, with a black tie and black dress shirt, and i was carrying a concealed solid black Beretta 9mm pistol in a black leather holster. I don't think I was carrying anything else, because I was apparently the Angel of Death. Interestingly enough, my job was to visit people who were thinking about suicide, mostly people I knew. I'd show up and essentially ask them what the hell they were thinking. Usually they'd give me some smart-ass responses or attitide because they were obviously pretty stressed out, and I'd reply with, "Why are you giving me shit? I'm the fucking Angel of Death!"

That was, natually, pretty satisfying to say.

Then I told them I wouldn't let them actually die until they listened to what morons they were being first. I have no idea what my success rate was, because my visits would never last to the end, just jet straight to the next person or scene. I made like 10 visits in my dream, all very distinct. In one scene, I wound up in a friend's bedroom, and he's looks up and asks "Rob?" I reply very calmly, "I'm not Rob, I'm just the Angel of Death in the manifeststation of your friend so I can help you better." Of course, I was lying. It really was me. I was just the Angel of Death.

Zane meets John Dye meets Will Smith. That's the stuff my dreams are made of!

Soundtrack. Credits. The house lights come on.

Live plays Overcome on the stereo. It's playing for the two dozenth time tonight, probably the thirtieth time today. It caught my ear this morning on random play. So did Master of Puppets, which, suprisingly, didn't follow me home. There's a grainy face in the monitor looking back at me with my tired eyes. There's also an angel folded up in a desk chair miles away. She probably knows I'm thinking about her.

My Buddha is smiling.

He tends to do that.

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