Greetings from Missoula

I'm dying to corner a stranger at Charlie's or the Old Post or down by the tracks, give them a box of wine and say "I just got back from my uncle the hoarder's house. Sit down, new friend, I got you a story to tell..."  

That was my trademark when I went to school here: cornering roommates, classmates, friends, complete strangers at various bars, and saying "holy shit, let me tell you about my grandma's house..."  

(Technical note: then she died, 10 years ago now, and my uncle -who always lived with her and took care of her and was one of those asexual people who had his first girlfriend 3 years after grandma died when he was about 62 years old, a nice woman who unfortunately told me what I always knew but never wanted to hear "it's not very often you find a 62 year old virgin..."- lives there.)

ANYWay, tangent... yeah, where was I? 

Oh yeah, too bad you're not here. My one last friend in town took off for a few days, so I can't corner him and bring him gifts of tin boxes and buckets of bolts (I always bring 'friends' gifts when I visit them after being at the house. Sometimes it was paint -artsy expensive paint- other times it was batteries, food, bottles of homemade wine, jars of homemade jam, rolls of unused film, boxes of unread romance novels, cheap plastic replicas of fancy wooden ships that spine con men used to scam grandma out of money, the millions of dollars she won weekly from publisher's clearing house...

OOPS! TANGENT AGAIN!

So yeah, I went there and my friend isn't in town to hear me de-brief, de-compress, and drink away the stress of "THIS IS MY DESTINY!" 

(I'm the sole heir of this legacy -the only grandchild, and with no children of my own, a fact that I'm beginning to think I might need to change, lest someone can help me clean up this shit. But hey, in the apocalypse comes, he's got enough guns to arm the whole rattlesnake, industrial metal to build blockades (which he thinks he's going to use to barter with. Have any use for a 200lb tube of structural steel?)

PS- the apocalypse will be Obama's doing, not of zombies, in case you didn't know.

So that's me! How are you?