google google no
Surprise biz trip to Boston. Hello Boston! You’d think that putting 3000 miles between self and sleepless blicket would mean I would NOT wake at 4am just to make sure she’s all right, but no. Odd night trying to reset internal clock to EST. I kept waking up in other hotel rooms: Avanos, London, Portland. I’ve been travelling too much lately. My soul is getting stretched. You can see it in my colleagues, who biz-travel way more than I do. Their souls are just thin slicks, like oil on the Atlantic.
I miss Jeremy, duh, although SMS, my new favourite protocol (is it a protocol? Google google no, looks like a service that runs over the SMPP (short message peer to peer) protocol), keeps us busy bewildering each other with cryptic abbreviations. Last night, for example, he texted “Bluth/Troy?”, which you’d probably need to be me or someone very like me to interpret as a proposal for an Arrested Development/Nip/Tuck crossover, possibly involving a steamy love affair between Michael and Sean. This morning he notified me that he and Claire had “struck down evil with the mighty sword of teamwork and the hammer of not bickering”, which lets you know that Mystery Men was on yet again, as well as just how much TiVo we watch. Oh well, if anything ever happens to J, we can inter him in a bowling ball for Claire.
Biz trips are very clinical these days. Coming across the country was like catching the bus, especially because I used the electronic check-in at the airport and the hotel. Longest conversation I had yesterday was with room service.
“You like it that way,” said Jeremy.
“I really, really do,” I said.
It’s working out as a writer’s retreat; I got five chapters of Breeding done on the plane. My own private Yaddo.
There’s dirty snow piled up everywhere, beside the roads, in the courtyards. My hotel is connected to several office and apartment buildings by huge glass shopping malls. Very Minnesota or Toronto. I haven’t needed to go outside at all, which is good because I left my wool coat on the banister at home. Once a year I get a chance to wear a wool coat non-ironically, and I blow it. Good thing I don’t smoke. There are little cadres huddled outside each airlock, like sad smoky polar explorers.
