I'm having the occasional "issue" these days.

Oh. I almost forgot. Hello! Long Time No Blog!

I've been working. It took an amazing (really, an embarrassing) amount of time to get back into the habit but here I am, knee-deep in it and looking for a shovel.

Alvin has gone trekking off cross-country with his family. He's on vacation for the next two weeks. Personally, I don't call piling my immediate family into a car and driving cross-country to visit other family members a "vacation" but I do understand that there are those who don't find their family as tedious as I find mine.

In theory, and certainly according to the popular picture of the American worker, I should spend the next two weeks playing computer games, surfing the net, chatting with friends, showing up late, and leaving early.

So far none of those things are happening. I may sue.

(I know, I know. I've dinked around enough in the last year to suit any normal person's needs, but I've never been normal. Bada-boom)

Whatever.

I've written five, or it might be six "papers" for the company to use as mailers or stuffers or as table-toppers at trade shows. I wrote them, then I laid them aside to "cool" while I moved on to other projects.

Now it's time to pick them back up and, with the objectivity of distance, go through and edit them until they cease to resemble something you might accidentally step in. Sadly, I'm running into the same problem here I run into in the fiction world.

I've been just about to pick these up for the last week and keep finding something else to do - and now it occurs to me that, fiction or nonfiction, it doesn't matter. I can't stand the thought of reading my own writing.

I'm thinking it's all tied up with my egomania.

Who but a rabid egomaniac would be so resistant to the concept of editing their writing? Am I under the impression that if I find faults, flaws, and weaknesses, it just might prove fatal?

Who knows. All I know is that I'm blogging for the first time in a week because I told myself this morning that I wasn't leaving the office until I'd gone through those papers...and now they're the only thing on my desk I haven't touched today.

It's after 5:00. I could go home, but I have this mandate and now I'm stuck, aren't I?

It's difficult to know if, aside from the papers, I've actually been accomplishing anything over the past few weeks. I've certainly been bustling around, anyhow. I've made folders, I've made forms, I've written notes, I've answered the phone, I've shipped stuff out, you name it. (It's amazing how banal you can make something sound by just avoiding messy details, isn't it?)

Also, I'm a little pissy because we've done three major installs of the product at client installations and, in reviewing my notes, I realize that not only the papers but every, single piece of client-directed material has to be rewritten. Also the website, which was "good enough" as long as no one was seeing it but now that's no longer the case and the major ugliness of it is becoming somewhat embarrassing.

None of this is likely to fascinate the casual reader, I know. I doubt if, by this time, I have any readers left, casual or otherwise, but on the off chance, let's change the subject to something a bit less egocentric.

Did I tell you I got around to watching the last episodes of Spike BtVS? I did. Snif.

Oh, well. it's not like he wasn't dead already or anything.

Monk! The new season of Monk starts next week. I love Monk, largely because I have a few obsessive/compulsive tendencies myself. The "cases" or "mysteries" aren't particularly deep or complex, but the show is stylish and the characters are entertaining.

Everyone else is probably going to be watching Keen Eddie. I tried that during the premiere, got bored, and turned it off.

I'm still talking about myself, aren't I?

I haven't done much more on that story. I've stared at what I've written so far, but the weaknesses in the characterizations are really starting to show. The rot starts right after the bit I posted last time.

(In reality, l I feel like this is a pretty cheesy way of writing a real blog entry, but there are days when I'm just not that amusing.)

* * *

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, Mulder's eyebrows stayed within acceptable territory the next day and presumably the rest of the week, most of which Mulder and Scully spent in Pittsburgh, supposedly investigating the robbery of a local post office and, typically, finding themselves in the middle of a ghost story.

Their case report, written by Scully, didn't mention ghosts, robbing Walter of a half-formed impulse to use the unauthorized investigation to discipline Mulder for his transgression.

Not that he'd use something personal against a subordinate on the job, but Mulder had made his unconventional, and unwelcome, suggestion while they were actually at the office, so turnabout....

Walter slammed the brakes on that thought and stuffed the case report back into the file.

He wasn't thinking about it. Clearly Mulder had forgotten about it, and Walter was not thinking about it.

It had been a momentary aberration. Something too weird to be real, even by Mulder's standards. In fact, it probably hadn't happened at all. To judge by Mulder's behavior, he'd forgotten the incident completely, so maybe it hadn't happened.

Later that day, paperwork hit his desk requesting his approval of travel expenses to Wisconsin for Mulder and Scully. Reason? To investigate a reported UFO sighting.

Walter refused the request without comment and life went on.

Mulder and Scully cleaned up paperwork and scored on the post office robbery when Mulder's profiling expertise allowed local police to pick up a suspect hours before he hit a second location.

Another travel request hit Walter's desk. Cleveland. A UFO sighting.

This time, Walter added a note to his refusal, suggesting that the two agents resign and go to work for a private organization if they wanted to become full-time UFO chasers. With several thousand random reports a year coming into the Bureau, it needed more than, I saw a UFO, to warrant spending time and money on an investigation. Like a crime.

An unsigned note showed up in his inbox an hour later. It stated that over-regulation of government was a crime in itself, stifling imagination and creativity. It also suggested that remaining open to new ideas might produce happy results. Walter had read fortune cookies that were less transparent. He threw the note away and went on digging through the next year's preliminary budget figures to see what was being funded and what had been cut, or forgotten during the negotiation process.

That night when he got home, he had to pick up a rose some deliveryman had dropped in the hallway outside his door. He probably should have knocked on a few doors. The sensible thing to do would have been to throw it away and forget about it, but Walter dug out a vase and gave the flower some water. It made a bright spot on the counter and it smelled good.

He'd forgotten how sweet roses smelled.

The next day it was a candy bar. A Cadbury Fruit and Nut bar. Walter hated the things. It went into the trash and he made a mental note to mention the rising level of hallway trash to the doorman.

Dinner. A sandwich, tasteless. Canned soup, not hot enough and never as appetizing as the picture. If the candy bar had been something a little less disgusting, he might have taken a chance and eaten it.

When he walked past it, the rose still smelled sweet.

The next evening, there was no mistaking it. A tiny, white box dangled from his doorknob. Walter stared it at for a moment, then slipped the ribbon from around the knob and let himself in to his condo.

He put the box on the counter, next to the still-blooming rose.

He pretended not to be looking at it as he dumped some of his Chinese take-out into a bowl and moved his food and the evening newspaper to the table. As he ate, as he skimmed the headlines, he could feel the box sitting there, sending out a subliminal invitation.

There was a point after which you had to ask yourself if you were giving something more power over you by using up all of your energy resisting it.

Walter got the box and carried it, and the vase with the rose, into the living room. He put the vase on the coffee table and sat down on the sofa to look at the box. After a few seconds, he gave up the struggle and opened it.

Inside, nestled in a layer of soft foam, was a fly.

It was a good all-around fly for fishing a lot of conditions, but somehow Walter doubted that was why it had been chosen. It was called a Stimulator.

He picked up the fly and the foam shifted, revealing a second fly at the bottom of the box. It was a Bugger, a Woolly Bugger, actually.

Walter knew just whose sense of humor he was dealing with, but why?

It should have been some kind of apology for crossing a line, and maybe the flower or the candy bar could have been interpreted that way, but not the flies.

It was hard to believe that Mulder, of all people, wouldn't have known the names of what he was buying. Hell, knowing Mulder, by the time he'd finished paying for these, he'd probably learned enough about fly-fishing to give a speech on the subject.

Still. It was offensive. And it was...it was harassment. He'd said 'no' after all. That should have been the end of a situation that should never have come up, right?

Absolutely. And Walter could totally see himself filing a complaint. 'Special Agent Mulder asked me for sex and after I refused, someone started leaving anonymous gifts outside my door.'

Cheap gifts, too. One flower? A candy bar? Cheap flies? It was almost insulting.

The original invitation, in all its unromantic bluntness, had been better than this. At least it had had the advantage of honesty.

Do me.

Walter gave himself a mental shake. What was it about Mulder that seemed to compel people to play by his rules? Walter had felt it happening to him before and it was happening now. Mulder wasn't even in the building and it was happening. He was letting Mulder set the rules for...for something that didn't exist.

I'm not doing it. He promised himself that. It had been a long time and he wasn't falling off the wagon, so to speak, now. Not for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as unreliable and unpredictable as Mulder.

All he needed was an opening. One indiscreet comment from Mulder, one thing he could use to tie all of this back to the man, and Walter would put a stop to it.

Ah, well. Maybe inspiration will strike or something.