I think I’m catching cold. It’s God’s punishment for trying to stop smoking. Or his encouragement, I’m not exactly sure.

Anyway, I took yesterday off because I just didn’t feel like it.

Mostly, I lolled around and napped and listened to music and such.

About 5 p.m., got a call to go to coffee at Will’s on Western and how could I resist that? It wasn’t like I had lots of appointments, things to do, people to sue and lives to ruin. I was doing nothing. So, I went.

One thing led to another and it ended being a perfectly lovely evening.

We had dinner at Sushi Neko. After all, it was right next door. Miso soup followed by Negi Maki (I insisted my companion have some warm saki to go with that) and a finish of a couple of sushi favorites, smoked trout and crab. YUM!!!

From there to the champagne special at Roccoco on Thursday night. I’m of the opinion that Eric, behind the bar there, is the best in town. Seems like a really great guy and very attentive. A couple of flutes later, I found myself kissing in public. Always a good move, I think. Makes everyone around you so at ease. Saw the redoubtable Thomas of Raffine there, again without his ballcap. WTF?!? He was speaking to two, count ‘em 2, gorgeous blonde women (Nicole and Paula maybe? He introduced me, but I was otherwise occupied in liplocks at the time). Meanwhile, there’s a jazz combo there on Thursdays and it was absolutely perfect. The music provided ambience without being intrusive, but if you listened, it was pretty darn good. THAT’S what I’m talking about, as they say.

Missed the usual crush of boy meets girl at Flip’s on Thursday night and didn’t even come close to the faux sophistication of bin 73, but it somehow seemed perfectly all right.

Coffee for a nightcap and early to bed and early to rise. All in all a lovely evening for me.

On the downside, I woke up this morning coughing with a tight chest and feeling like I’d been the one drinking. Must have rubbed off. Can you get drunk by kissing someone who is drinking? Sweet mystery of life… .

Read this a.m. that Wes Lane’s wife is in trouble with her probation for prescription drugs. Don’t usually feel sorry for right wing Repugs, but I feel sorry for Wes (who I don’t know). It’s a bad deal. Hurt politically. Put in a bad place on the job. Worst of all, the problems at home dealing with addiction of a loved one.

Wonder if someone somewhere sometime will get the idea that the War on Drugs is a failed public policy. If the guy who uses crack and the girl who smokes pot goes to jail, no questions asked, why does a doctor who is the spouse of our DA get a walk when she prescibes herself painkillers? Why is crack cocaine for poor people so much worse than powdered cocaine for rich folks? Aren’t we bringing the law and the justice system into disrepute with these glaring inequities? Since it costs $15,000 to provide therapy to a drug user and $30,000 a year to lock them up, why are we building so many prisons and not more rehab centers? The War on Drugs started in the Nixon administration and politicians ever since have been more and more populist in their appeals to get tough on drugs. What have we accomplished? More drugs on the street, worse drugs on the street and more vicious thugs selling drugs on the street. Why is America the drug capital of the world? Why is our problem so much bigger than the problem in Europe or industrialized Asia? Could the difference be that we have the War on Drugs and they don’t? Drugs kill more people in America than all the terrorists in the whole world. The War on Drugs has cost you and me — even if you didn’t inhale back in the 60s — significant Fourth and Fifth Amendment freedoms. Of course, the War on Terror has dwarfed that loss of our freedoms via the Patriot Act and seems to be just as effective in making America seem stupid, but that’s another story altogether.

Anyway, I feel for Wes Lane personally. He’s got a codependency problem and a political problem and that’s tough. Politically, he’s hoist on his own petard and I think he has no choice but to send his doctor wife up the river. Maybe he can watch Bogart as Sam Spade telling Mary Astor she’s the one that has to go to jail, to take the fall for killing his partner. Live by the sword, Wes, and you die by the sword. That’s the rule. Oh, how that karmic wheel does turn.