Last week I got to visit the shiny new Federal Building with my boss, to see where the hearings will be held. We wandered all over the place, strange angled walls, artistic-industrialist furniture, up to the top floor, down into the basement, through key-code doors, past painters and plasterers. In the below-street-level parking garage in which only judges are allowed vehicle access, some workers were wiring the lights. On a huge cement pillar hung a calendar, and the picture was the dogs playing poker print. I thought that was hilarious.

Foxtrot slow, slow, quick quick quick comes the coming winter, and there’s wood to buy and a chimney to clean, dead grass and leaves to rake, straw to lay in the garden so it doesn’t turn into a muddy bog when the storms start rolling in from the ocean.

I keep writing and backspacing to erase, and I don’t think what I wrote is worth the time I took to write it. What then to write? The process of writing, or rather writing about the process itself reminds me of roadwork, stop and go traffic, yield signs and authoritative sun-tanned people wearing bright orange and sunglasses holding walkie-talkies. Stop. Slow. Big machinery moving earth and gravel and asphalt.

I don’t want to do that anymore.

Last Saturday we went partying, it was the uptight “Oh what do YOU do?” crowd who discuss their resumes at parties. The hosts were fun as always, and I bobbed for apples and whacked on a piñata, but S and I finally ended up alone in a corner of the front room, sipping sparkling juice and hemming and hawing.

The drive home from the party was interesting, both Homecoming and the weekend before Halloween, and all the little freshmen twits were drunk in the streets down by campus. Fifty kids drunk off their asses, milling in the middle of the street at 2am, forming a roadblock of stupidity… and I have to ask, this is our nation’s best and brightest, students at the university?

One girl was so drunk she could barely teeter on her spiked high heels, standing in the middle of the street. I honked my horn at her and she turned around with a huge amazing grin on her face, a pretty girl, and pulled her shirt down to expose the red bra beneath her black shirt. I honked again, and she turned around and pulled her shorts up into the crack of her flabby ass. Other kids were screaming at her to get out of the way but Brittney Oblivion was too far gone, and another kid pulled her to the side of the road. S said Let’s go around them, go slow, turn here. Last year these geniuses were lighting couches on fire. So that’s what ‘party school’ means? How much fun, get shitfaced, half naked, and stand in traffic. I yelled Go to BED at them like that would help.

Sunday we spent at home, laundry & dishes & tidied up, ate lunch and drank a bottle of wine on the back porch despite the fog and cold. S made a fire in the evening and we enjoyed a quiet day. It was the first day in a long time when neither of us had something else we needed to do. And half the day spent in bed wasn’t bad, either.