Well, I'm back.

The weekend's road trip to Kansas City was a real drainer, but in the good way. I'm not much for stopping and taking breaks when I have a destination, and even more so when I'm driving solo. Ten hours one-way on the road through an environment that never really seems to change is fairly taxing...I think road trips are much more rewarding when there's some sort of geographical change that occurs along the way, such as mountains or palm trees. But when you go from Wisconsin to Kansas/Missouri, it's one endless stretch of farm country leading into another with the odd non-descript cityscape to break up the monotony.

The purpose of the trip was my friend Ben's wedding reception. He and his fiancee, Lisa, got married proper in Mexico, and had their reception back home where people could actually attend without the hassle of passports and the old bugaboo called FINANCIAL DISTRESS, which is associated with travel. For some of us, anyway. Going to KC is always a pleasure since I somehow have a larger bank of friends and acquaintances there than I do in my own stomping grounds. For better or worse, I've sort of been grafted into a social circle that's unfortunately more than 500 miles away and maintained by the miracle of internet technology and video games.

I won't be bitching about the heat this summer, since I discovered what it's like to live in a blast furnace of a heatwave. I thought I knew what heatwaves are like, but KC managed to up the ante by a measure of ten or fifteen degrees harsher than anything i've yet sweated through. It's a mystery as to how humanity ever survived without air conditioning. I guess people just spent days on end sweating their very life essence through their skin and laying around in heaps before the dead were carted away, back when summer wasn't some kind of months-long holiday and was actually just another manifestation of God's wrath.

But I did have a great time. The reception itself was beery, dancy, and choked with great food and old friends. The weekend's extracurricular activities led myself and others into strange places, such as bars where aged and aspiring lounge singers belted out showstopping classics and hookers roamed wild in their natural habitat, long, barely sober walks in the darkness in uncomfortable shoes, and me realizing that damn, party districts would be awesome if only i were willing to drink a whole lot more and actually dance. By the time saturday finally ended, i hit the fabric of Tim's couch and promptly expired. Whatever magics finally revived me on Sunday morning must have been powerful indeed.

It was a brief affair, though...I'd barely been down there, it seemed, before I had to haul myself into the car for the trip back. It truly sucks to have to uproot yourself from friends and good times for something as boring and endless as a return trip. And oh, the road back is always so, so long. You think of all the things you forgot to do (like my friend Tim's nascent D&D fascination that we never got to mess around with for lack of time), think of when you're ever going to find time to do this again, wonder where your own life is going after seeing what your friends have been up to, etc.

If I'd known what I was coming back to...oy...

It seems my doggy took sick in a dire way while I was gone. Not just the lazy bug or a bad stomach...she'd been zombified and couldn't keep so much as a drink of water down, and didn't even bother to greet me at all, much less with her usual enthusiasm. Today we found out that it's a cancerous mass in her liver, and she looks every bit ready to die; avoiding contact, hardly moving, refusing food and just generally in a state of total disconnect. It breaks my heart.

After 13 or so years, a larger dog is living on borrowed time, and you know it's coming and it'll be too soon. Still, when I left for my trip I had a jumpy, prancing, active old girl of a lab, and two days later I came home to the walking dead. It doesn't seem right, and even though my dog is still alive, i'm trying to find ways to let go. It's not for anyone else to care, really...pets are more of an intimate concern to a given owner or family, generally, but my dog is/was one of the bright lights of my life. When she was happy, it was contagious, when she was scared or listless it was all i could do to make her feel safe. She was a follower, an explorer, and a linchpin in the family; a dog is a weird intermediary between human emotion and something hard to describe. Before long the real tragedy becomes obvious: you invest a lot of love and affection in something you're fated to outlast. Even knowing that and having thought I've been ready for that, i don't want to have to say goodbye.

anyway, nothing really seems important right now so i guess i'll stop typing.

peace.