If I had to summarize the last two weeks the word would be malaise.

I'm starting to want my life back. Being a road warrior has taken a toll on my life, and I'm still learning how to cope with it. For one, I've lost track of my life in Washington: being there two days a week makes it horribly difficult to keep track of what is going on in town. It's hard to stay in touch with friends, and it's hard to make new ones--I'm neither here nor there.

I suppose it's all a matter of perspective. I'm saving oodles of money by having the company pay for just about all my food expenses during the week. I'm finding myself spending hefty chunks of time with people from work, which fluctuates in quality between the fun of getting to know someone in a different way and a root canal. It's hard to fit exercise into the picture, which has resulted in my already sedate body taking on the attitude of a lump of putty.

Louisville, Kentucky is one of those cities that got forgotten by land developers. The offices we work at are out in the boondocks, a suburban wasteland remembered only by Home Depot and White Castle.The city follows the river on the border with Indiana--the greatest landmark being the Louisville Slugger baseball bat signalling the museum.

The actual city part of Louisville, with its gridline streets and tall buildings, seems to die at night, although last Wednesday some co-workers and I ended up discovering that there is a night life in town--although it comes in Kentucky style..

At the prompting of one of the people I work with, who was itching to find some place with young people, we ended up at the local straight meat market, The Phoenix Hill. The place itself reminded me of the house Seal and Serpent's faithful cook Stan used to live in. It's like one of those storybook cottages in the woods that seem small from the outside and yet has endless numbers of rooms once you go inside them. I'm still at a loss in trying to explain how some one entity could accumulate so much random crap. Signs, old signs, new signs, torches, lamps, umbrellas, cartwheels, stuffed animals, mirrors, more mirrors, little mirrors, big mirrors, beer signs, old phones, hunting trophies, plants and more plants, all carefully places to give the impression of a crowded attic.

The crowd was an altogether different, and much more amusing, story. The men there seemed mostly fresh out of boot camp, chugging beer like babies sucking on a pair of breasts and looking to score with one of the women there, the vast majority of which were reminiscent of late-night TV ads for 1-900-HOT-4-MOR. It also seems that the Spice Channel look is in. Skanky women in hoochie dresses gyrated with each other in a pseudo-lesbian schtick designed to get a rise out of every football-playing cock in the room. I stood, amused, as a big-breasted girl in a halter top placed her arms around me asking for a cigarette. Solitaire was her name, and when I deferred to one of my co-workers to become the purveyor of smokes/bedbuddy, her attentions quickly shifted to them. Once it became clear to her that a cigarette and a smile was all she was getting from this crowd, she went back to her cadre of overdone, underdressed girls grinding into each other.

Larry Flint would be proud.