cwmurphy.com

As I type to you now I'm deep inside the town that almost nailed Rudy Rucker to a tree for heresy back in the eighties.

This afternoon I sat down in the hotel room and put my feet up. I was going to read for a bit before venturing out to find some dinner. I'm gone all week, so I packed a few books in my suitcase: Good to Great, a book on playing Go, and a new collection of Harlan Ellison short-stories. (And come to think of it, at least one of the three could get me nailed to my own tree...)

I opened one up to the page held by the grease-stained Hardee's receipt/bookmark (last night's dinner). The loneliness punched me in the gut so hard and sudden that I winced. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is my third night away.

I miss my family. I miss my beautiful wife. I miss our pets. Even if I'll only be gone for a handful more of days. Even if they're only a 3-hour drive away from where I sit.

"The happiness of the domestic fireside is the first boon of Heaven; and it is well it is so, since it is that which is the lot of the mass of mankind."
-Thomas Jefferson

In 1996, I started making real money for the first time.

I bought a watch and a pair of sunglasses I saw in the glass-case at a store with a dead brand. Soon afterwards, the sunglasses were knocked off my face by a wave as I waded out into the Myrtle Beach surf. The watch I just found again, ten years later and right towards the back of a sock drawer.

I bought a fresh battery and a new leather band for it. Good as new.

Now I can't say exactly why I stopped wearing it and that bothers me. Did the battery wear out? Did the ring that holds the strap to my wrist snap? Or did I just take it off one day and never put it back on again? Not that it really matters.

It's such a great watch.

"I turned it over, and gave an exclamation of surprise. There was a full-page picture of the most extraordinary creature that I had ever seen. It was the wild dream of an opium smoker, a vision of delirium. The head was like that of a fowl, the body that of a bloated lizard, the trailing tail was furnished with upward-turned spikes, and the curved back was edged with a high serrated fringe, which looked like a dozen cocks' wattles placed behind each other."

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Just a bit past noon on Friday one-dot-oh went gold.

Now I can't decide whether I want to climb back up on the GTD wagon or eat half of a shoo-fly pie.