Maybe it’s the cold/flu thing that’s been sacking my will to live. Or, maybe it’s that I just suck completely at specific date recalls and human emotion.

Today-ish is when M. and I have an anniversary. Tax day figures into the early lore, but the first meeting is a bit before. Tax day we both remember.

About four years ago we started the liasing. So far, so good, I do believe. His knuckleheadedness seems to dovetail nicely with my knuckleheadedness. We still laugh. We still smile. And, now we have our peaceful, walking life, in which a Sunday night dinner is followed by a stroll to the local independent bookseller and the ice cream shop.

If it weren’t my actual existence, I would barf all over my shoes at the cloying sweetness, the fairytale, hand-holding giggling togetherness.

I suppose if I wasn’t feeling tired and sorry for my sick self and bored with phlegm in its various incarnations, I would show the boy-o some warmth and caring. But, love means whining repeatedly for an entire weekend and coughing someone awake pre-dawn, doesn’t it?

Took today off, apart from doing the work at home thang and checking out a restaurant for a meeting. I just have a cold, but I was trying to fine tune my inner hypocrite.

All week I’ve been sitting next to sneezes, coughs and various sounds of phlegm noises among my little cubicle hell. My simmering wish to avoid airborne germs had me tooth grinding with each sniffle. I figured, now that I was the diseased and inflicted it was my moral obligation to stay home.

My heading down to Palo Alto made me think about this thing I have with M. that we call a relationship. What does it say about me that whenever I am without him, I eat those things towards which he does not gravitate? It’s like a liberation act. Although, that might suggest captivity.

The falafel of freedom.

The true glory of the time out of the office is a chance to do my taxes. Whoo hoo. Loves me some tax-paying.

Given as I’ve self-styled exiled myself, hiated, you might say, from performing, I haven’t been thinking that much about comedy. I still think funny thoughts and watch the Daily Show, but I haven’t been itching to see stand up.

Not sure why exactly. I just haven’t felt like heading to a club or bar or open mike. I’ve watched some pros via the television waves, but not devotedly as I have done. Maybe it’s a bit like a groove I rolled off of a bit and haven’t felt like rolling back into it.

Tonight, though, I made an especial point of watching Nick at Nite’s Funniest Moms thang. I had to watch. Two people I like personally and find incredibly funny, and who I had the good fortune of slogging through maximum crapitude open mikes once upon a couple of times ago, were getting into the final path to scripted, not-really real, magical, reality-programming glory.

The talented chicks in question are Jan Davidson and Andrea Henry. Mind the names, because if there’s a comedy god you’ll see them again.

I know I’m not just bitter and angry, because it’s pretty fucking cool to see your friends on the television. And, I caught another cool broad, Deb Campo, who I chatted with and worked with in a show out here once, which was nice.

As I was watching the elimination rounds, though, even realizing it was edited for dramatic bitchiness, I wasn’t that into it. I remembered contests I’ve been in or backroom convos among comedians, and I miss a whole chunk of that action not at all.

I made friends and have had some great conversations with comedians. But the other layer, the one with needy folks and their little notebooks, looking for approval, don’t fucking miss it at all.

Not ready to say goodbye to that chunk of me and my life. Don’t know when I’ll get back in it.

I thought about writing something meaningful and insighful about Don Imus and his big fat mouth. But seriously, who needs another reason to hate a miserable, cranky, old man. Never liked him, never will, and I won’t give a shit when he’s gone. It’s not free speech, it’s misanthropy.

Possibly my favoritest thing in the whole, wild world, or is that wide world, my favorite thing is contact with strangers. The random “howdy doos” that make us all part of the human fabric.

Cynic I may be, but simultaniously the cock-eyed optimist actually likes people. Not all of them. But a handful here and there.

For today, the rhythm of the day was food, glorious gorging food. M. had made ambitious brunch on Easter Sunday reservations at a nearby four-star hotel’s restaurant, and I willingly followed his lead. I mean, really, who am I to naysay eggs benedict, fresh berries, brioche french toast, orange juice and champagne on a sunny, outdoor patio in honor of Jesus dying on a cross for your sins? Not mine sins, mind you, apostate as I am, but yours.

I wanted to stay, drink and eat until I vomited. I couldn’t convince M., who recently had a physical and is becoming a bit too acutely aware of mortality and our 40+ years on the planet and gravity’s drag, to eat ourselves into oblivion. Instead, his call, we took the four or five-mile physical fitness tour of “the Dish” at the “the Farm.”

Damn him and his sober non-bulimic ways.

My favorite reason for walking the Dish is my constant quest for a great hawk picture. These below will underscore that the quest continues. I’m guessing Red-Tailed Hawk.

Post nature, we stood around downtown Palo Alto trying to imagine what we could eat now that dinner time and a lowering sun had rolled around. We stared fixedly down the main drag, tyring out various ethnicities and diets in our imaginations.

About the time we each took an overly dramatic stance of not knowing what to have, an older woman passed us walking in the opposite direction with a personal grocery wagon piled with the day’s shopping and a flat of spring flowers for her garden or window boxes. She paused, a tad dramatically her own bad self, and told us that “you two look so serious,” perhaps implying that no one should be that serious.

I had to laugh and confess our serious faces were drawn by our joint concentration on dinner choosing. A topic lacking a certain gravity.

She recommended a Greek place down the street, which I’ve made a mental note to try, and went on her way.

Are there any conversations better than the unexpected and unbidden?

Thought about a lengthier entry. Right nw, it boils down to this one simple phrase.

Can’t complain.

First the political. Is there anyone out there left, throught the wonders and ubiquity that is youtube.com, who doesn’t believe Bill O’Reilly is just a mighty rancid piece of shit of a dickwad? Wow, that was convoluted. Simply, he is vile.

This should be all embedded and shit, but it ain’t working, and I should be sleeping. Here’s a link to Bill-O being an absolute douche to a retired colonel in the Armed Services of the United States of this America, Colonel Ann Wright before silencing her microphone.

She’s one of the foks in uniform, which I gather from the right wingers on other video that I’m supposed to respect for her uniforma and service to the country. Unless she disagrees, of course. Then, Bill-O, anti-hater, full-on truth-telling patriot, tells it like it is and tries so very hard to paint this woman as the US-hater that anyone in the military for almost three decades surely must be.

By the way, thanks to newshounds.us for the tip on the Fox subtitle progression. At the beginning of the interview, she’s “U.S. Army (Ret.) Col. Ann Wright.” It devolves through referencing her quitting the State Department because of Iraq and ends with calling her “Anti-war activist Col. Ann Wright.” A few more minutes of time on camera before cutting the microphone, she probably would have gotten the label “Godless, Communist Whore Who Hates America, Ann Wright.”

On the personal side, all I got is my tired, empty, soulless self. Towhit, M. and I watch hour after hour after hour of shows that dig the dead. Some nights, through the wonders of cable television, reruns and on demand, we clip on through both the CSI franchise and the Law and Order flavors of juggernaut.

Sometimes, it’s gets sprinkled in with real-life bad shit on CNN and MSNBC and the true stories of CourtTV and the Discovery channels.

Bottom line, there’s a whole lot of killing going on. You watch enough and you gotta figure to be in a couple is to kill or be killed.

Loveless we must be as a couple, since not once, not yet, probably not ever, has or will one of us fly into the forensic-leaving rage of epithelials left under fingernails and spatter patterns. Nor is there the slow simmer, the long-term commitment of poisoning over time.

We have each other, but where’s the drama?

I’m sure this photo belongs somewhere next to some kind of inspirational something.

Otherwise, I’ve been toting the camera around, especially highlighting shit in bloom. If you are bored and artsy, you can go here and check out what I have wrought.

If you do, I should explain the pic below. I walk or drive by the Holy Cross of the dead folks cemetery every day on the way to work. It is the single most decorated in a floral jamboree of any graveyard I have ever passed. Like a ton of graves abloom every day.

I asked a local born Catholic, but she hadn’t noticed and, I don’t think, knows a lot of dead people. The mystery of the oft visited graves.

I must confess. I must bare my soul and admit my far too human shortcomings.

There are weblogs I read solely because I think the writer is a big old loser. I don’t entirely know why I do it, but I suspect its too feel better about myself.

Somewhere the sad calculus computes something like this — Wow, I can’t believe she (invariably a woman) wrote about her boring day that ended in catching up on television re-runs while eating a Lean Cuisine dinner, because she’s concerned about her backfat. Oh, and she’s wondering why she has no boyfriend, but just wrote eight paragraphs on the cuteness of her kitten and how great it is to have something warm and breathing nearby that will listen. It’s a cat.

Or it’s the twenty paragraphs parsing the meaning of “his” email and whether it meant what she thought it did or was he being passive aggressive and how many of her friends could she call to see what they said it meant, if only she wasn’t nervous about showing them, because it could get back to “him.” Um, yeah, good neuroses to slap up in a public place.

Anyway, I’m not like her. Ergo, I am not a loser.

Judge for yourself, but yes, yes I am.