I am a pretty happy guy as I head into the office.  The paper’s going full blast, as it always is, and folks are yelling here and there and I don’t pay much attention to it because I have a regular beat and am not often there, other than to stick my head in the editor’s office and have him try and chew it off like a bag of barbeque sunflower seeds.  There’s pasty face and gnarly headwound tapping away on their remington rollectrics.., oh I forgot, we got us fancy com pew terrs these days and they work just fine until you hit ’send’ and they go off to slower slobovia to be consumed by fanatics that don’t comb their hair.  AT least I think that’s where they go, Dogpatch certainly knows better than to garbage up my stuff..

I’m thinking about the date with Milkusky most of the time I’m in the orifice, and when I pat out that I’m on my beat, they all sort of wave to me as if they’ve heard through the greater boroughs grapevine that at last Al Meadowlake has gone on a real date with a real woman and has ‘made time’…which in their minds can only lead to one thing, which I would be sorry to tell them did not happen, and even more reluctant to let on that I’d dreamed for quite sometime would one day happen, but I will rest now in the fact that I’ve gotten close enough to her to see the pores in her face and know for all the city grit, she’s very clean.  A very clean girl.  Never mind that there are rappers on the corner, or that Adam Clayton Powell once represented places like Harlem, or that if you have a hero he may soon be dead in city and national politics and we did always seem to have a problem with heroin here, but we know now if you’re stupid enough to put someone else’s pee in your veins, you get what you get.  So I’m just a happy guy and don’t care to know about sewer rats, human or otherwise, because Milkusky being a cop and all, she sees some of the stuff I end up writing about and we have that in common.  Suffice to say that with her it’s all about rose gardening techniques and where to have a Sunday afternoon picnic, which was about the last thing we talked about.  And then I stuffed her into a checker cab and off she went into the night.  She hadn’t called me yet today but I gave her my cell number and she said she would.  I believe she will.  I am one happy guy.