SINCE YOU ASKED...

Yes, Saratoga is still there and so am I. Your humble blogger has been absent from this page for a little over a year, not for lack of material or the will to share, but from sheer bewilderment at the changes this year has brought, and, to be honest, uncertainty that any of you, my much-missed readers, would be interested in my new milieu.

The New Milieu is inherently interesting, I assure you, but, well, a touchy matter on which to comment or opine or share with the random Googling public. I am now a law enforcement dispatcher - one of those disembodied voices heard over car radios on cop shows to add verisimilitude to various crime scenes, car chases and other staples of Glass Teat exicitment - for a Certain State Agency (heretoafter to be referred to as CSA). And it just kills me, it really does, that I don't feel wholly free to share the tragedies and comedies that now make up my workday (or rather, night, as I am a happy graveyard shift worker).

And, to be honest, for the first year I didn't have much of a life outside of work. Old-time readers of this blog who say they've missed me but have probably given up on me in disgust (and out of sheer cussedness and perversity, I'm keeping mum about resuming publication; they'll have to find me on their own) will know that I led an appallingly full life in Saratoga... a term on the town council, a seat on the water and sewer joint powers board, a seat on the community center joint powers board, time served as the director of the local chamber of commerce, time served as a newspaper reporter/columnist, time served hawking dust catchers in a silly little downtown store, time served as a substitute teacher... whew, I get tired just filling in all of these spaces between commas.

So, I took last year off. No community involvement of any kind, except for my job, of course, helping officers find and deal with all manner of stranded motorists, drunk drivers, car crashes, cattle on the highway, poaching, traffic hazards, and motorists who think our agency has nothing better to do than to find the guy who flipped them off from a moving vehicle somewhere on the interstate two days ago and give same flipping motorist a good talking to... but I am drifting into editorializing on that last point, something I seek not to do in resuming this blog because it could make things sticky on this job that I enjoy so.

I live now in Cheyenne, a city mostly identified in the larger consciousness of this nation and the greater world with a Big Scary Rodeo and the odd western-themed film of old. But it's even weirder than this might indicate, a city on the crossing of two interstate highways and a railroad, the capital city of Wyoming, and thus a haven for scary drifters and bureaucrats alike. It boasts of a symphony orchestra of mild repute (I've yet to attend a performance, since I work weekend nights), an astonishing collection of flea markets and funky mom-and-pop businesses and surreal crap stores, one of Wyoming's three, count them three, shopping malls, an assortment of chain restaurants (newest addition: Hooter's, a sign of civilization that is surely on a par with the advent of modern sanitation and of the mastery of fire and the fermentation of certain grains to make alcohol, surely) and incomprehensible zoning. Parts of Cheyenne resemble every post-urban pod Robert Kaplan ever saw; other parts look like something out of the Andy Griffith show; still others like something straight of of a William Faulkner novel.

I still haven't really found my place here, another hindrance to the continuation of this blog. But I miss publishing this almost as much as certain readers (Aunt Scarry, My Own Dear Personal Mom, the Sewer King, the Rock Star) claim to have missed reading it, and so, I make this attempt to continue it again.

Consider this my long-overdue Christmas letter. I'm still here, my family is fine, we're all making progress towards new plateaus of happiness and irritation, and, to quote Samwise Gamgee, well, I'm back.

Since you asked...