Away so long for years and years
Probably thought or even wished that I was dead.
--Sting, "Fortress Around Your Heart"

Ah, Sting. I remember when you mattered. When you were urbane and droll. That was a long time ago. The last decent album you made was Ten Summoners' Tales, the apex of a literate and creative solo string that began with The Dream Of The Blue Turtles in 1985. 1985! That means Lindsay Lohan and the Olsen twins have never known a world where you weren't hawking expensive European automobiles or devolving into the dusty-bookshelf Rod Stewart. "Fortress Around Your Heart" was one of my favorites of yours, as well as the entire ...Nothing Like The Sun record. That's Shakespeare, you know. You taught me that: "My mistress' eyes/are nothing like the sun." You also taught me about Quentin Crisp ("Englishman In New York"). That if I wanted to keep something precious, I gotta lock it up and throw away the key--sort-of an upbeat update of your stalker anthem, "Every Breath You Take." (We let that one go, since you were in a group called The Police and we assumed you had the matter well in hand.) But then you always had at least one whimsical-sounding handful of steed-doo on all your albums ("We'll Be Together," from ...Nothing immediately comes to mind, along with that video of you in the back of a limo, playing sensitively with your thinning hair), and I forgave you because it was a minor slip, like a tiny nip of Coke for the diabetic. Today I'd just as easily find you extolling the virtues of Tostitos through a megaphone. Verily, the crunch is the thing.

But enough about you, Sting. Thanks for the epigraph. Some of you may have noticed I've been away for a while. Some of you might even be reading this. Well, I have no excuse other than the shit's been thudding hard-core around these parts, and this is the first moment I've had to breathe in a few weeks. Work's a roiling chaos spilling into life, and all I can do is cling to the sides while the vortex inches closer. Deadlines. Suddenly materializing female friends. More on this subject later; in about a half-hour I'm diving back under the recording-industry blood, then I'm going home for a well-deserved weekend of silence basking in the first season of Millennium, now available on DVD. Lance Henriksen is the bizzomb, and not only that--he's the best profiler the FBI ever had! He also shares the same Right-All-The-Time gene with Perry Mason, though Perry was never quite as cryptic or vague. Still, I love the show.

I had a weird dream last night, dig: I'm forced to return to the Corvallis Gazette-Times, because my "temporary" gig (after four years, not likely) has ended in California (it's related in a way to a series of dreams where I divide my time between California and Oregon). But I'm used to the good life, right, and I have to take this massive pay cut, and I wind up in a huge shouting match with G-T managing editor Rob Priewe, who I call a "bilious thighbone" before I chuck a computer monitor at his papier-mache skull. Freaky stuff.