It's bad when you can't remember an entire weekend.

Friday night I went on a (futile) quest for Munchos, Sonya's chip of choice. I never found any. After that I can't remember a thing. Not because I was drinkin', either. I just lost Friday night somewhere along the way. It's sad, really.

Saturday night found us at Chili's for some reason - and in the non-smoking section, no less! I'm not sure how we ended up there, but the food was good. The people sitting around us were entertaining, too. In fact, everyone there was entertaining. Sonya and I made merciless fun of our fellow diners the entire time we were there. It was a hoot.

Saw a few movies over the last few days: Scream 2, City of Angels and Hellraiser: Bloodlines. Scream 2 was as much fun as the original. City of Angels was well done, if not quite my thing. Sonya enjoyed it, though. And the way the angels would be perched on top of buildings and street signs was pretty clever. I think I just have a hard time seeing Nick Cage as a real goody-goody angel after I saw him kill that guy in the opening scene of Wild at Heart. Hellraiser: Bloodlines was not exactly what you'd call excellent cinema, but seeing Pinhead fuck people up is always a good thing.

I moved a piano Saturday. My lovely friend Angie purchased an antique piano for $100. I think they gave her ten pounds of piano for every dollar, 'cause that sumbitch was heavy.

Me, Angie, Angie's Deadhead brother Jack and one of Jack's friends managed to wrestle this musical behemoth into the back of Jack's friend's truck. Then Jack and I rode in the bed of the truck with the piano on the way back to Angie's house. This was fun 'cause the piano tottered back and forth like a drunken fat man while Jack and I clung to it. If the piano had tipped either way it would have destroyed itself and probably killed me and Jack.

But the piano didn't tip and we got it in Angie's living room without too much trouble. It did scratch up the bed of dude's truck, but I don't know him so I'm not too worried. Afterwards Angie went and got some beer and I spent a pleasant hour in the backyard, swinging lazily in their hammock and shooting the breeze with Angie and Jack. It was a nice way to spend a summer afternoon.

Ummmmm...I went to a ball game Sunday. The Redbirds were soundly thrashed by Tuscon, but it's still fun to go out to Tim McCarver on a summer afternoon.

Oh yeah, Sonya and I had a big fight Sunday before the game - over underwear, if you can believe that. It's too stupid to go into (e-mail me if you want the details - I promise you'll be disappointed) but I ended up laughing scornfully at her (she hates that) and she called me an "arrogant asshole" (I hate that). I mean it was a walkin'-out-the-door kind of fight - we were on our way to drop off her car at the Nissan place to get some repairs made, and the fight started minutes before we left. We exited the building and got in our respective cars with nary a word to each other. I was seething. I'm sure Sonya was too. By the time we made it to the Nissan place, though, we'd both cooled off and become civil to one another. By the time we got to the game and sat down we were happy again.

Isn't that silly? Sonya and I never fight over money, or kids, or jobs, or anything of importance, really. These big, life-altering topics have always been easy for us to discuss. We simply sit down and work it out from top to bottom, with no selfishness of covert agendas. When it comes to important things, we're very mature.

Something little that rubs one member of the family the wrong way, though, can cause World War III.

The pizza pan in the dishwasher. Dripping water in the sink. Toenail clippings everywhere. Squeezing the toothpaste from the middle of the tube. Making the bed. These things can and have caused days-long hostilities between me and Sonya. We never usually apologize for these fights, either. We just kind of ease back together and act like it never happened. Which I think is good - once I get through being mad about stuff like this my first thought is usually, "what the hell was that about?" I actually get so mad I forget what we were fighting about. Stupid, huh? Such is domestic bliss...

Oh yeah - speaking of getting mad, let me tell you about this cunt, this utter bitch I had an encounter with the other day.

Sonya and I were in my truck, driving down a side street in Midtown on our way to the grocery store. So I'm on this street, just driving along, and I come up on this 1983 P.O.S. stopped in the middle of the block. There are no other cars around, no stop sign nearby, she's just stopped right in front of me. So I lay on my horn. The driver starts to turn ever-so-slowly to the left and into a driveway there and as she does so she sticks a hand out the window and flips me off.

How dare she?

Think about it, okay? She was wrong, I was right. She was the stupid one for being stopped in the middle of the street - anyone would have honked at her. That takes a lot of fuckin' nerve, you know? She flipped me off because I was right and she was stupid.

I'm gettin' mad all over again just thinking about it...

For the last couple of weeks I've had this lingering feeling of restlessness and overall dissatisfaction. I have no idea why.

Maybe it's the time of the year and the weather we've been having. The traditional end of summer, the constant clouds and threat of rain, the heat and humidity that have calmed down some since July but are still making their presence felt. It all reminds me of summers when I was a kid. School would still be a few weeks away so you couldn't worry about that. The clouds would just hang over my neighborhood...you could stay outside all day, riding a bike or playing kickball, and never get a sunburn. What I liked to do best was just get on my bike and go, with or without friends, but usually without, until my legs were tired. I'd find new neighborhoods, new parks, new friends...I'd stay gone for hours, and I got in trouble for it more than a few times.

Don't misunderstand me, though. I'm happy with my life: work, family, friends, everything. That's all wonderful. Sonya and I have talked about this before: the urge to just throw it all over your shoulder and get the hell out of town. She gets the urge, too, and she realizes, like me, that she has to suppress it.

For now, anyway.

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