So it’s after three in the morning and she’s in the bathroom taking off her makeup and your man’s at the other end of the hall on the bed in his t-shirt singing. The kids are at their grandparents and he’s full of wine and champagne and his hair stinks of smoke from the bar and he’s sort of crooning this song he always sings because it fits his mood and also it’s the only song he knows all the words to that’s not a Christmas carol.

She says something at the other end of the hall.

He stops singing. “What?” he says.

“I said you have a nice voice. Please keep singing.”

So he does.

I got home and my wife told me X “went for a stroll and dropped dead.”

I think she mentioned he was walking along the Danube. This would have been Sunday or Monday. We agreed he was about our age. Far too young to go dropping dead.

Heart attack. It turned out he was 56, not our age. Also: pacemaker. He looked good for someone 56 years old with a pacemaker. Now I have this image of his final moments: watching a swan, perhaps. Or a sunset. Some kid rolls past on a skateboard, yakking into his cellphone, “zzzt.”

He was a nice man. He worked in education. The news saddened us. It also made me think, “that was close.” It could have been me. That feeling was mitigated when I found out he was 12 years older than me. When I heard, “pacemaker,” death moved another step away, I told myself. I sat in the library with a glass of Bushmills and listened to the day’s overtones circle in my daughter’s harp. Then it got late and I had things to do.

Howard Dean must die, an endorsement.

[Via Six Different Ways]

Sexy new Shoe Project.
Ann has polished up my old Shoe Project, which had been languishing, down at the heels, etc etc. As you can see, she has a nice new URL and one sexy collection of footwear.

Practiced dance steps all afternoon on Saturday; we had a good laugh if nothing else. Went to the ball Saturday night. Tried dancing, decided to go back to dance school next fall. Sat at a table upstairs overlooking the happenings, drank wine, ate a schnitzel, talked to friends, stood around in the bar drinking champagne, tried dancing again, verified we had forgotten pretty much everything, went back to the table, back to the bar, stood around until I felt sick and lightheaded from more champagne, all the cigarette smoke, went upstairs for fresh air, met more friends, had another wine, went home.
It was excellent.
Alpha looked beautiful in her black ball gown with this long lacing up the back, and high heeled black pumps, mmm. I spilled a glass of red wine all over her pretty early on, but it was okay, black dress and the wine wasn’t that great either. She took it well.
The ball is the high point of my year, socially at least. I would love to attend one with a zoologist or a sociologist, if he had a good sense of humor, to study the behavior of the guests. The pecking orders, the mating rituals, the display behavior, etc.
Some of us were talking about how the ball has come down in recent years. People running around without ties, or in pantssuits etc. But to be honest, the kids looked far better than the first time I went, in 1980. Their parents are obviously spending more on fixing them up. The boys all had nice suits, the girls were all expensively-coiffed and shoehorned into spendy gowns, especially the debs who opened the ball, all in white.
I could go on and on about the evening. My delight at seeing the used-car dealer and his wife, who look like a couple of swingers. He looks like a riverboat gambler played by Kevin Spacey, she is a good match for him. They spent a lot of time on the dance floor. And so on. I could talk about how the band sucked, again. But I’ll stop here.

While the symbolic meaning of dreams for our everyday life is common knowledge, the obverse meaning of waking events for our dream life is generally less explored. An example: when you dream of holding a lecture while wearing no pants it means you want to smoke a cigar. When Mig attends a ball tomorrow night and realizes he has no new shoes and has forgotten all the dance steps he learned last year, it means he will dream of spilling baby oil on Charlize Theron, who in the dream is also Beyonc

“Bhutanese citizens or permanent residents only. Candidates without work permits need not bother apply.”