a single run-on sentence

I came back early from my business trip, a full day earned by spending the previous one not blinking, transfixed, typing like a fiend and sending curt, idiotic emails to the main office only to retract them a minute later. Three days down in V------, wallowing in the smell of cow manure that, for a change, had the consolation of being from an actual source that I had seen, driving down into the town during the day and realizing the black hills were in fact black-and-white spotted hills covered with pen after pen of depressed-looking bovines (and what was that commercial about happy Californian cows? Bullshit, I say) each doing its own little bit to contribute to global warming, just like me in my SUV.

Not an olfactory comfort but a spiritual one, to see the cows with my own eyes instead of simply hearing passing references to them in conversation: "Farm days coming up." "Did you see So-and-so ranch is selling dairy cows? Think they're going out of business?" "Mrs. This-and-that gave me a cow for working on her son. I put it in the garage." (I made up that last.) Cows given mythical status by their invisibility might have a long-standing tradition in the East, but I found it an oddly unsettling thing to my Western sensibilities, which prefers its abnormalities be on television or neatly packaged in fast food wrappers.

I called ahead to warn the Guy I was coming back, despite my original intentions to show up unexpectedly at the door and delight him with my little surprise. An hour into the long road back home from the clinic I discovered I wasn't very good at keeping secrets, hardly a revelation to me or to the Guy. Having wrung an hour's worth of enjoyment over imagining the look on his face when he opened the door and found me waiting -- driving is a dull thing, and my car still smelled ominously of cows -- I gave in to temptation and simply called him at his office, just like any besotted teenager. "Hi! Guess what!"

I called another two times on the road, timing our arrival together with a haphazard enthusiasm; he arrived late, despite me, and I let him in to a doorbell even though he had the key for the week. Habit on his part. I hugged him, I called him an idiot, I kissed him, and that was that (close curtain) while I went to check my email and he went back to his car to fetch a new set of speaker racks delivered just that morning.

When I came out to the living room a little while later, that was what he was doing, assembling metal feet to metal poles and attaching metal speakers to the tops of them. I curled up on the floor with my head in his lap and watched for a little while, and then, lacking anything better to do, claimed his forearm and gnawed on it pensively.

He accepted the abuse with philosophical resignation, apparently chalking it up to one of those inconsequential Yuhri-things that never seem to make any sense to anybody else. This is how he accepts much of what I do, with a shrug and a kiss and a little bemusement, and if somewhere in the back of his head he's trying to remember if women are supposed to behave this way, he's kind enough not to say a word.

Two years ago I wouldn't have imagined that the most comfortable place in the world would be on the floor of my living room, with my teeth around a man's arm.

Two nights before I left on my trip the Guy and I went to the opera, a production of Hansel and Gretel that was notable for its overtones of rigid Aryan respectability and equally awful Teutonic sensuality. The roles of Hansel and Gretel, filled by two singers woefully inadequate to fill such small shoes, served as a rather depressing reminder that you simply can't go back again and revisit your youth, at least not until you're old enough not to give a damn.

The Guy was charmed by the transvestite tenor playing the witch, a creative bit of casting that stole the show, not so much because it was gender-bending San Francisco but because the singer exhibited a flair for acting to top the best efforts of the cast.

It was late when we got home, far later than I'd originally anticipated although I hadn't been too far off in my estimation of the opera's length. Our dinner was Carl's, Jr., which is a fast food in every sense of the word except in that the food wasn't fast and almost qualified as food. We ate, we drank, we felt revolting, which guaranteed that Carl's, Jr. did in fact fulfill the primary requirements of the junk food category. We complained. We went to bed.

The next day at around four in the afternoon, I suddenly discovered that my wallet had disappeared.

Don't you hate it when a story has no ending?