Nocturnal Lament

A hair before midnight, I returned to my loft. The nachos from Del Taco were sitting heavy in my stomach.

Dinner was uneventful, but it was uneventful with a friend, which beats the hell out of uneventful alone. Tanner writes for the Post-Dispatch. He spent the day on the crime beat, following up on that ABB shooting last week.

After dinner, I wasn't ready to go home, so I parked at my loft and walked down through CityGarden, seeing if it had warmed up to the point that my tongue wouldn't stick to Bernar Benet's Arcs. Fortunately for me, it had. I spent an hour and a half walking through a slushy downtown, listening to Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds" on my .MP3 player.

I returned to my loft, sat heavily on the bed and lit a cigarette. I spent a good five minutes watching the smoke drift in little circles up to the ceiling fan, to be scattered to the far corners of the room. I booted up the laptop, answered some e-mails, then surfed over to Expedia to look into flights to Anchorage, a vacation long deferred. For the record, January is a HORRIBLE time to fly to Anchorage, but I'm ready for a change of pace.