I hear you're mad about Brubeck

I had to go back into my work late last night. By late, I don't mean at the midnight hour, though comparatively, it sort of felt that way. I was done for the day, came home from work, ran a few errands, ate dinner with Sigrid and Michelle and then found myself with little choice but to return to the office and get a task accomplished that had slipped my mind.

I all honesty, that's only half the reason why I came back to work. The other half is I knew it wouldn't slip the minds of everyone else to whom I had promised it for Monday. Like so many others I've had the good fortune with whom to work, I've become a prisoner of my own reputation. My own sense of good and bad, in terms of performance, will not allow me to offer other than the best effort, even if the person I'm working with/for is a clueless bozo who couldn't tell a cool breeze from a cold steel rail.

We've had some junky weather the last couple of days mostly as the result of a hurricane moving across the Carolinas (I say that like I know more than traffic and weather together on the eight's, which I don't) and it's not the most pleasant time of the year to have it happen a sit gets dark earlier and the leaves change and then fall off, usually all over the roads where the wind and rain just add to the fun.

Not helping last night was driving behind someone overly cautious-always under the speed limit by about six to ten miles an hour, creating more of a problem on the state highway than any of the weather conditions that precipitated her/his exaggerated sense of caution. Whoever the driver was, they are a huge fan of the dog from the TV show, Family Guy, Brian Griffin. I have no idea why though the vehicle did have Rhode Island plates. Seth McFarlane? I think not.

Oh yeah, and lots of stickers of Massachusetts based sports teams, sometimes combining the two (seemingly starkly different) motifs so that on the back window you had Brian, back to us, upright and peeing on the Yankees logo (how's the off-season hanging, Theo? Fahr'n wir nach Lodz? Denk nicht dran), One-Trick Brian watering a NY Knicks logo and a NY Jets logo as well as, well, you get the picture.

When I noticed in the upper left had corner of the rear window, Brian emptying his bladder on a circle with 'Obama' written in it, my sense of whimsy exited the building along with Elvis. I remember learning about democracy in Mrs. Hilge's class in Saint Peter's--we had a projector with a movie and a speaker and when the lights came on, also learned we had a bad take-up reel as the film was all unspooled on the floor. The movie was 'How Democracy Works' and to this day, fifty (!) years on, I can recall we all sat slack-jawed with amazement at how cool elections were (in the movie) and how important it all was that we always remembered to vote.

So much for the best idea-make it personal. Get down in the dirt and roll with it. I don't recall the movie having a single frame with Brian in it, or that damn monkey pushing a wheelbarrow full of money. But it was a half century or so ago. And when I really get to know you, we'll open up the doors and climb into the dawn. Confess your passion, your secret fear. Prepare to meet the challenge of the new frontier.
-bill kenny