(Map of the trip Up North, with airports, major geographic features and important landmarks as annotated at the Willow Bar. Photo and map Socotra. Drink by Big Jim and consumed by Jon-with-no-H.)

I flew in from Detroit- Man, my arms are tired- and went to the office to make a 1400 meeting. The re-boot on what passes for my life was tough and it was a challenge to get the gain and squelch dials in the right position.

For one, I didn’t look right at the office. I had traveled in chinos and a polo shirt from which the ink on my left arm flirts with daylight.

Not the crisp Brooks Brothers professionalism I strive for, but screw it. I was trying to synch back up with Washington reality- you know, the surreal suspension of common sense so common out there in real America, and the adoption of several impossible things to believe.

It was wrenching to go through the email queue of things to do, and I could feel the hard chrysalis starting to cover the vulnerable flesh that was exposed by the time with Raven and Big Mama. In a way, I really envy her, now that she has become unstuck in time. She no longer has to worry about whether the idiots here in town will allow the government to default on its debt, or whether in fact that is the point of all this.

Or the price of silver, which apparently is linked to the Chinese like everything else. Talking to people in Canada and Sweden, I discovered they like coming to the US because everything is so cheap- and Chinese.

This morning Silver is through the roof, and as the little commodity brother to Queen Gold, might have been affordable if I had thought about it in time. Someone said gold might hit $3,000 an ounce soon, and it was not too late to start dumping Greenbacks out the window of the apartment toward the Big Pink pool.

I kicked myself again for not strategically buying commodities back when I could have, or moving to some other planet back when we still had a space program.

Lead on the obligations list was to acknowledge my annual appraisal, which I did, but the task also had a requirement to update the resume in the corporate database.

If you were smart enough to actually move to an adjacent planet, you might have missed the Great Compromise of everything in the information technology world. The Swedish bank my pal works for has erected a firewall so formidable that the employees can’t get in. My company, for its part, migrated from Lotus Notes, a bizarre IBM business operations suite, to Microsoft Office, and it took a while to synch up.

In fact, it still hasn’t, since the basic data resources are still on the old system, though we don’t use it routinely, and apparently all my security tokens have expired. I am not precisely sure what those are. At the paranoid government agency I used to work for there was a physical key fob that generated random number sequences that had to entered with chronological precision along with the password in order to gain access to the system.

It was viewed as a fool-proof system, which is to say that in the end the fools won. Since it was viewed as impregnable, apparently someone hacked the token manufacturer and gained access that way, since people are notoriously unable to remember the confoundedly difficult 16-character number and letter and special character passwords we are supposed to use for enhanced security.

Anyway, whoever did it- Chinese, North Korean, Russian, whoever- managed to nail Lockheed Martin to everyone’s huge embarrassment and a potentially vast national security risk.

So, of course with that compromise came another wave of enhanced security which will render the corporate and government safe from scrutiny by everyone, hackers and legitimate employees alike.

I had to update the resume for reasons best know to Corporate, so I called up the help desk and had my software tokens updated with just the mention of my employee number, which I have to write down since it doesn’t make any more sense than the constantly changing passwords.

I plugged at several tasks over the course of the long humid Washington afternoon, dreaming of the pool and the crisp happy-hour white at the Willow.

As the clock on the upper right hand corner of my screen turned over 1700, I gathered my crap together and ran a stack of documents with personal and corporate proprietary information down to the secure shred bin. There is a company that manages a tidy business in the destruction of all this stuff so the dumpster-divers can’t steal our information.

Of course, that company had a semi-trailer of sensitive trash boosted, and even the National Archives had to quietly announce that everyone’s financial disclosure forms from the Clinton Administration had gone missing. But screw it. This is the future and we made it for ourselves.

I walked over to the Willow and discovered there was a new bartender named Holly-with-a-y. She is pert, dark, and completely in the tradition of the vanished Sabrina and Aimee. I asked Jon-with-no-H about that, when I could pry his attention away from the Lovely Bea, who looked cool and refreshing.

I had to diagram the time away to help synch things up, and the map of the Mitten of Michigan turned out pretty well. The orange slice in Jon’s drink sufficed to represent the setting sun over the wide mouth of Little Traverse Bay as viewed from the deck of the Little House by the Bay.

It took a minute to get synched up to the change behind the bar, but in the end, the re-boot was completely successful.

Good to be home, where the waters of the pool are cool, and the happy hour white is too.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com