Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night

I spent the afternoon roaming around town (mostly on foot), something I do fairly often when I am in a new city. It gives me a better sense of where things are and how much trouble it's likely to be to get to one place or another.

It is also a very tiring pastime.

Tonight, I had all kinds of ideas about where I might go and what I might do. There was Dirty Linen Night on Royal Street, the downtown equivalent of last Saturday's uptown fling, White Linen Night. The Wild Magnolias were playing just down the street from my house at Tips. Of course I can, even right now, check the webcast from Tips and see that even at nearly 12:30 in the morning, the headlining band, Big Sam's Funky Nation still hasn't hit the stage. If you want to see a show in New Orleans, best you take a nap in the afternoon.

So I decided to stay in and work... yeah, actual real work (well mostly) on a Saturday night. Frankly, it was kind of a relief.

At the same time I listened to Harry Shearer's latest episode of Le Show. I followed that with the new Digital Flotsam episode. Finally,of course, I turned on WWOZ and listened to Peggy Lou's Lunar Blues. She just ended the show with a toast that, "Love never gets as complicated as your phone bill." I like that.

There's just one problem, my phone bill is indeed pretty complicated, but, as far as I can see, not nearly as complicated as love is at even its most elemental. For that matter, in my case (at least right now) love seems to be rather integrally tied up together with my phone bill. NOT a great situation.

I'm very big on anniversaries and this week is a fairly significant 10th year anniversary in my life, but in the midst of everything I seem to have misplaced the person at the heart of the matter. Or perhaps she has misplaced me.

I found a picture of her tonight, a picture from long ago, right on the edge of a perhaps prescient semi-catastrophic event. It sort of looks like a sighting of Sasquatch. And it feels about as confusing.

I find myself standing in the middle of the trail with snow and wind whirling around me in free space, scratching my head and saying, "What... was... that?"