So I've been on vacation. Sue me.

Yep, I've been a rotten blogger. Normally after a hiatus like this, I'd feel a little guilty for not having posted anything for ages. At the moment, though, my conscience is clear.

About 10 days ago I came home to central New York for some leave. I hadn't been home since Christmas, and the family had been planning a beach-side vacation during August -- since that's about the only time all seven of us could get together. We headed down to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and spent the entirety of last week sprawled on the beach, swimming in the surf, or drinking the very tasty beer brewed by Rehoboth's own Dogfish Head brewery.

I'm now brown as a nut, my hair has grown far out of regulations, and my vacation is rapidly drawing to a close: I fly back to Louisville tomorrow afternoon, and it's times like these I dread. The last fleeting days and hours of a trip home are always melancholy, since I know that soon I'll be returning to Radcliff, Kentucky, which is a place God has forgotten about.

The good news, though, is that the break has given me some good perspective and focus in terms of this final year of Army service. I've visited some old friends -- one of whom lives in Ocean City, Maryland, and has a dock on the channel for a back yard -- and I've seen a little of what life will look like once I'm out.

I also got some ideas together for the zombie book, which I think will be a fun, violent romp through post-September 11 American schizophrenia. After the events of the past few years, how could a zombie apocalypse story not involve some systematic failure of the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency? Write me now if you want to share in my millions.

It's really just an experiment, and I don't actually expect it to pay off in spades, if at all. But it'll be interesting to slog my way through the process of actually writing something that big, even if the content is going to be heavy on dreadful descriptions of undead cannibalism.

So, onward and upward, I suppose. I'll be back at the grindstone Tuesday, and while I'm not looking forward to it, at least it'll be the beginning of the last 365 days I have left in this business. After that, who knows?

-30-

I'm back. I'm back in the New York groove.

Sort of, anyway.

For those of you who have checked this space with any regularity, I'm sorry it's been so long. I just haven't had anything worthwhile to say.

For those of you who just happened upon this space while looking for Li'l Jon lyrics, go fuck yourselves and find some good music to listen to, because right now, you suck.

Now that that's out of the way, I might as well say that there's nothing interesting for me to talk about. No neat scenes ripe for description, no embarassing stories to tell, and nothing brewing on the professional side that warrants a retelling.

My latest plan is to write a crappy horror novel, which hopefully I can sell to someone who will eventually rid me of financial worry. We'll see how that goes.

Politics? I can't do them any more. It's too tiring. The headlines speak to an audience to dumb to understand what's actually going on, and I don't feel like I have the readership to make explication worthwhile. Figure it out on your own, I don't care anymore.

I just want this phase of my life to be done. I'm tired... it's been four godforsaken years already.

I'm not depressed, really. Just tired. Tired of the same old shit. It's definitely time to move on.

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