Monday, January 13th, 1986, was my first day at my current job. The company had been in business about two years at the time. I never expected to be here that long.

Friday evening, I pulled my tuxedo out of the closet, and Marion and I went to a black-tie optional Christmas dance. It was held that early because there are enough others that will happen in the next couple weeks that the organizers didn’t want to have to compete with any of the others.

It was an enjoyable time. They didn’t play any sambas or quicksteps, but they did almost everything else, including a couple of Argentine tangos. Lots of waltzes and rhumbas. Anyway, towards the end of the evening, a couple came over, and the man said he wanted to let me know how much they had enjoyed watching Marion and me dance … it was almost enough to make him ignore how much I looked like Dennis Miller.

I haven’t figured out if it was meant to be a compliment, yet.

Actually, it’s not the first time I’ve been told I looked like someone else. Not even the first time I’ve been compared to someone famous.

Back in 1974, I was in a group that got to hang out in Naples one afternoon with the wife of the American consul. One of the places she took us was a sculptor’s workshop. I soon found myself positioned at one end of his workshop, while she and the sculptor stood a couple dozen feet away and chattered together in Italian. Every time I tried to ask what was going on, he would reposition my head and she would tell me to be quiet. Eventually, I found out that he had positioned me under a bust he had done of JFK, and he was pointing out similarities to her.

Then, in the early 1980s, I had a boss who was convinced that I looked like Dan Ayckroyd. A few years ago, the blogger formerly and sometimes still known as Zombyboy saw my driver’s license photo (from my last license, not my current one) at a Blogger Bash and said I “totally looked like Saddam Hussein!”

Maybe, one of these days, someone will tell me that I look like myself.

Asleep in bed, as one normally is at 1am when one must work in the morning, when I was awoken by a clatter. Butch, my cat, had apparently decided it was time to find a toy. From the sound, she was obviously not chasing a whiffle golf ball around the floor; she’d knocked something off a table or shelf. It sounded small and non-breakable, so I decided to ignore it until the morning.

Then, at 4am, she started purring and kneading my neck. This is something she hasn’t done in years – I kept my bedroom door shut at all times for the last several years of Kiki’s (my other cat) life, because she had ruined the bedspread by using it as a litter box, among other things. When I replaced it, I banished the cats to prevent Kiki from ruining that one.

I was surprised that Butch came into the bedroom. She really hadn’t done it at night since I started keeping the door open again – I presumed the noise of my CPAP running was keeping her out. Be that as it may, she wandered out after working on my neck a while.

She came back in at 6am. So I got up and fed her, then went to the bathroom and discovered that the toy she found at 1am was my toothbrush. Now, I’m dressed and presumably ready for work, but I haven’t had a good night’s sleep, my eyes are burning, my mouth tastes foul, and I’ve got dance classes from 8 to 10 tonight that I’m not certain I’ll be awake for. I’ll pick up a new toothbrush on the way to work. I hadn’t planned on needing a new one for a few weeks.

Anybody want a cat?