Can you blame me?  I had a miserably long Sunday at work, complete with drunken NFL fans getting all up in my mix with their sour breath and wearing their beer-stained jerseys, coupled with a dining-room full of wannabe pirates drinking a rum-soaked English IPA and singing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” complete with references to homosexual roosters (could I seriously make that up even if I tried?).  I needed and deserved a cocktail  or two ten once I threw my keys on the kitchen table and kicked off my shoes.

Fresh out of beer and not feeling some wine, I cuddled up on the couch downstairs and spooned with a newly-opened bottle of Bombay, who had the courtesy of inviting her friends tonic and a wedge of lime.  The four of us enjoyed each others company while upstairs my son slept innocently in his top bunk  and my wife watched reality television in our room, both oblivious (not really) to my transgressions taking place in the room directly beneath them.

As the evening transitioned into late night, my nite-owl (my spelling–I think it adds some funk) instincts kicked in and my buzzed sense of calmed quickly twitched itself into a nagging restlessness.

Earlier in the week I finished my feature article for Rails-to-Trails magazine (The Winter 2011 edition due out newsstands across the country in Novemeber, or visit railstotrails.org for more info!), and also finished-up a woodworking project for a restaurant in Denver, and for the first time since I graduated, I don’t know, Prairie Middle School (lemmie hear you, A-Town!) I didn’t have a single extra-curricular activity going on to help distract me from the nagging voices in my head.

“Completely Unacceptable!” I proclaimed out loud (I was drunk) and stumbled to my computer.  I somehow rationalized that the tingle in my fingertips was a sign not that I was tanked, but rather that I needed to type, and decided to send out some query letters and land a new project.

I would have been content after sending out out the first two until I realized a bit late that I had a glaring typo in the first five words of my letter that would most likely prevent me from ever hearing from those publications again in my lifetime.  But rather than wave the white flag and retreat off to bed, I decided to send out one more, this time perfect and void of any hint of grammatical error, and shoot for a publication that I would have never dreamed of querying if I were sober.

I awoke the next morning feeling like  my skull had been cracked open like an eggshell and I had swallowed two small kittens.

“Oh Shit!” I proclaimed, again out loud (I was hungover), as I shot out of bed to go check my email.

Finding this in my inbox, oh shit was right:

Hmmm...(and I really need to learn some basic photoshop)

Thank you for the writer’s lesson, Mr/Ms editor chick/dude.  I will go ahead and look elsewhere.