Saw Tina.

Damn, you know how it is. You are just out, having your day, maybe shopping at the shopping center or walking down a lane, and bang. There she is, your ex, totally unexpected. Your mind goes blank and you don't know what to do. There is that paranoid silence while you both gather your thoughts and wonder what the other person is thinking about you. This is how it went down with me today.

There is this new product called Komfy Kuddles, it's this self-adjusting pillow system that helps you be more comfortable while you're lying on the couch watching TV. It's kind of like a large robe that you get into, and as you move around and try to get comfortable it senses the areas of greatest pressure and inflates a little bit there, to give you more padding. If you move around some more, it readjusts. Anyhow, they sell it down at the A Dansk shop in Hidden Hills, and I was on my way to pick one up after a pretty long week of watching Curb Your Enthusiasm and Sopranos.

I was walkin' along, on the way to the shop, just lookin' in the windows of various vacuum repair shops and soul food places and dessert-catering companies, when out of a doorway steps Tina, all by herself, headed in my direction. We stopped in our tracks and kind of did the look-on-down and tried to think of what to say. I kind of wanted to do the hug thing, you know, since we shared so many sheets and laughs back in the day. Clark Gable or another classy man would have done that. You know, decorum and manners. I kind of made like a millimeter of a move toward her and my hands started to go up for the hug and suddenly she just jumped all in my arms, giving me this big old embrace and even that half-meaningful kiss on the cheek. She had on that 273 perfume that I had gotten her for her birthday a couple years back, the one I picked out specially for her, and damn but she felt so soft.

I just did not know what to say after we let go. She was holding both my hands and giving me this really tender smile and my first instinct was to take us out to Luigi's for a meal together, even (seriously) imagining getting us a hotel room for the night and falling back on the old ways.

I got a little bit of control over myself and suggested that we have dinner sometime, you know, just to catch up. It may have been going a bit far but I even suggested a time and a place (tomorrow at The Chophouse, a high times place we'd been once or twice before). She smiled and said she would love to.

Man, I know me. I'm gonna be all nervous up until I get there, then I'm gonna have some Ketel, then I won't be able to help but charm her in the ways I know she likes. Like a train with a devil brain, like a machine, we're gonna wind up in the sack. And the weird part is, I can't do anything to stop me. It's like Odysseus, he had no choice.