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"The Matrix is everywhere, it is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, or when go to church or when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." It was cold this morning. It is cold today. I know "cold" is a relative thing, but when I say it here, I mean it is cold for Texas. I remember mornings leaving work in Saratoga Springs where you would get on-contact frostbite if you tried to walk the parking lot with any exposed flesh. Those days where the actual temperature without the wind chill factored in was still 33 below zero (Fahrenheit). It was 48 degrees when I started my truck this morning. My wife was sound asleep... snuggled up with 9 pounds of a 102 degree portable heater named Henry. I convinced myself to brave the new chill into the garage and pack mule some firewood into the house. I lit the first of the year in the fireplace so the den would be warm and inviting when EL woke. When I departed for work, the room was a few degrees warmer, but still filled with that chilly silence only occasionally interrupted by the low crackle of the burning logs. When I stepped onto the back porch, the crisp, cold air carried the smell of the fire from the chimney top through the neighborhood. Maybe it was a mixture of the neighbors fireplaces and ours, but the delightful scent is just one of many things I love about this time of year. I love the fall... when the temperature and leaves begin to change. The air fills my lungs with a different flavor for the soul. Refreshing and nostalgic. My strongest memories of times and places past are from the fall months. Perhaps it is because I favor this passage of the year more than other chapters? I think about what I'm doing now from day to day and can't help but feel that something is missing. Usually it passes with the thought as something else comes to the forefront to be addressed, but the fall makes the feeling linger. I miss the mountains. I dislike the city. I work in a high tech industry that provides a standard of living for my family. I love small towns that survived cultural sacrifice. I love those little places nestled in the country that still provide safe haven for the arts and live music. Live jazz and a well constructed martini is as important a staple of existence as sex or a delicious wine. If I could live as a working photographer in a small mountain town with cultural diversity sans the big city bullshit and still provide for my wife, I would be a happy man. Until then, it's taking the blue pill and trudging through the Matrix each day. Eat. Sleep. Go to work. Eat. Sleep. Go to work. Eat. Sleep. Go to work. Rinse and repeat. Die. Seeing as how it's about lunchtime, I must be on the eat cycle. Ciao. Move aside, and let the man go through. Let the man go through. If I stole Somebody else's wave To fly up. If I rose Up with the avenue Behind me. Some kind of verb. Some kind of moving thing. Something unseen. Some hand is motioning to rise, to rise, to rise. Too fat, fat you must cut lean. You got to take the elevator to the mezzanine, Chump, change, and it's on, super bon bon Super bon bon, Super bon bon. And by The phone I live In fear Sheer Chance Will draw You in To here.