I’ll have to tell that guy if I ever see him again that his wife is eminently quotable :)
I festered like a blister in the sun at the barbecue yesterday. I have a black cowboy hat, but it’s for cool weather and would have killed me. It was over 90 degrees. I am worried about burning my head these days and, also, getting big blotches on it from the sun as I go along in life, getting older and older and older. The damn thing’s already covered in freckles.
I had lots of fun, socializing. I knew only a couple people at first. Oh, and I played poker! Like a real man or something! Sure, it was only for chips and not money but yee-haw! I even won some hands.
Texas Hold ‘em—was it invented in Texas? Maybe I should’ve worn my cowboy hat after all…
I was glad to learn all these manly men with their football and gun talk were no friends of Mitt Romney. It felt like a Romney crowd there for a minute—plus this is South Dakota, a state so red you’d think it was a tomato. These boys were all union members, though, hauling coal out of the mines in Wyoming so that everybody can have electricity.
Thanks, guys. I don’t know what I’d do without this computer.
We only touched on politics. Mostly we drank. They talked of work (they all worked together) and I listened. It was like they were speaking a different language, talking of conductors (philharmonic?) and dead heads (grateful ones?) and two-hour lead times. I was actually quite fascinated.
One of them looked up from his beer and said to me, “And what do you do?”
“I’m a writer,” I said.
He paused for a long time, then said, “I don’t know what to do with that.”
I shrugged. “Me, either.”
Everybody laughed. Good times.
