Well, that was a weekend. No updates because Mr. Rowe was upgrading his machine with all sorts of memory and Operating System Macintosh thingies, well really just one of each of those. Everything looks different now, and in a good way. I only had to deal with the s-word for a coupla hours Saturday morning, phone calls and such, which was okay. No writing at all, and I do mean none, so that's not good -- but we finally started Christmas shopping.

Yes, that's right. Finally started. About halfway done now. I feel like human families can be too large.

Saturday night was all kinds of fun. We had to go to Christopher's company Christmas shindig, and then we went to a place called "The Continental" (Full name: Continental Inn) so some of the guys could shoot pool. See, you don't know about the shadiness of "The Continental" because you're unaware of its storied past. And unseely future. I'll try to write about it later; this is the kind of hotel where many infamous and lesser things have happened (by lesser, I mean that they're not necessarily things that matter in the scope of all time, but things that matter a little to some people). There's a rumor that Elvis stayed there. I really can't speak to the truth of it. I can tell you that five minutes after we got there, two really drunk guys got thrown out -- and guys here is misleading because they were MENFOLK, you know the type -- and one of them had to stop the bouncers and get his pool cue from Christopher, who was using it unaware. (Doesn't it just floor you that there are still guys who take their own pool cues to bars? This guy was no Paul Blue Eyes either.) Anyway, these guys were both so drunk that when I encountered them at the bar moments before their anticlimactic fight I couldn't really make out their faces because they seemed to be sloshing around on the skull, collapsing inward. The other people we were meeting saw a woman get ejected, repeatedly, while being yelled at to "just start walking." And as I was trying to find an open bathroom with the waitress she says to me, as this rail thin guy comes jogging toward us, "We should move out of his way, he's the manager. Of course, he's too skinny to do any good in there, but still. I shouldn't say that." Working at "The Continental"requires a lot of jogging and talking into walky talkies. In that respect, I daresay it's like the secret service. Only with less planning. Did I mention it's not so much a bar as a complex with the aforementioned hotel and no less than THREE bars (not counting the indoor pool bar, which wasn't open)? I saw a morbidly obese man in a brown polyester suit being escorted upstairs by a prostitute in a hot pink '80s miniskirt. The people playing darts had apparently rented a room upstairs to use as their private bathroom.

There are whole cultures our lives never touch. They are very nearby. Be careful. Some of them will make every single stitch of clothing you have on reek of smoke.

Uh, guess I don't have to write about Saturday night later, cause I already did.

Off to drop off the drycleaning (uh, the jackets we had on Saturday night) and on to work.