Welcome to February

Well, first of all, to put to rest one vicious rumor ... I'm not dead.

I also was not on the MARC the morning of the Great Derailment at Union Station, was not pinned between train cars, did not fall beneath the tracks into the bottomless pit of derailed dreams, and I haven't broken my neck breakdancing (remember that rumor about Alfonso Ribiero from school?).

I also have not been signed to a 6-year, max contract by the New York Knicks and I was not traded to Baltimore in the Erik Bedard trade.

I also did not have to appear before Congress to explain my possible use of HGH and other performance-enhancing drugs. That's right, folks, I write all this shit on natural, God-given talent. Hell yeah!

But I've spent most of the month in bed.

Yeah!!!

No, don't get excited.

From the onset of Super Bowl weekend till about, I don't know, now ... I've been sick with pneumonia. Or at least that was the first guess by the doctor I saw. Another said I didn't have that, but didn't say what I have, who knows. I'm going with the pneumonia diagnosis for right now because I've never had it before, I've never been sicker, and I think the first two doctor knew a hell of a lot more about what she was talking about than the second one did.

So the product of being sick is that for the month to this point, I have commuted by rail exactly twice, and one of those was only a half-day, so there wasn't much to tell there - other than having to go to something known as Track 28 at Union Station to get my train home. I think I actually walked to Ocean City before getting to the track where the train was. It was so far out that once I got there and got on board, I was quite sure I was on the wrong train and was going to end up in Red Deer, Alberta, four days later.

There really wasn't much to tell from today's commute, either, other than to say that the 5:10 express train experiment may just be working for MARC, but it's hard to tell. The 5:20 train was still fairly crowded, and there were some people standing, but it wasn't as overpackafied as usual. It wasn't difficult to find a seat and there wasn't any one standing in the aisle today trying to sit on me or eat their dinner or whatever.

It was a little annoying that apparently the person actually driving the train was the 87-year-old grandmother of 21 from those Life Alert commercials, as the train never got above about 41 mph and we were late getting in at Halethorpe.

As a consequence, it's 6 minutes after 11 p.m., I feel like I just got home, and it's time to turn in already.

Oh well.

At least I'm not dead. Or traded.

Yet.

(Well, as far as I know. I guess I could have been dealt to Grand Forks for 20 hockey pucks and a blog about missile silos to be named later).

MDR