February Sucks for Walter Mitty - Sex Stories

February Sucks for Walter Mitty

... employees when the weather got particularly rough.

Our specialty was producing engaging, somewhat-truthy paid articles that depicted our clients in a new and surprising way. For example, one of our customers was Timber Valley, a local retirement village. Rather than going the usual route of focusing on facilities--pools, art rooms, and semi-independent apartments--we commissioned articles on the link between exercise and delayed aging, and illustrated them with pics of Timber Valley residents on zip lines, jet skis, mountain hikes, and other strenuous activities.

Sales increased five percent in the first quarter after we started running our stories. In the second quarter, we started giving discounts for extended family members to come along, and sales went up nine percent. Later, when we pushed the#WildRetirement and#TimberValley4Life hashtags, they went up 13 percent. They were still rising.

My work isn't rocket science, but I think it's fair to say that it takes a particular kind of weird brain to position death's waiting room as life's next adventure for the Woodstock generation. Thankfully, I have that kind of brain, and I seem to attract similarly bizarre individuals. Together, we've turned the daydreaming that nearly got me kicked out of sixth grade into a career that had recently crossed the line into six figures.

This isn't to say that I spend ALL my time with my head in the clouds. My work hinges on picking out little details and building stories around ...

... them, so I like to think I'm pretty aware of what's going on--at least until I choose to let my mind wander.

Which, admittedly, I'm prone to do.

My wife Linda, on the other hand, always had her feet firmly planted on the ground. As the office manager for Sprague, Sprout and Skrewie, one of Buffalo's biggest law firms, her work involved corralling a herd of overambitious, oversexed lawyers into something resembling a functional company. I was a little nervous when she started working there--"legal ethics" is more of a punchline than a strict guideline, and I'd heard WAY too many stories about workplace shenanigans. But her first office Christmas party put my mind at ease: It soon became clear that, while Linda was basically the den mother for an office full of coked-up bonobos on Spanish Fly, she regarded her charges with a sort of disgusted bemusement.

Linda had to be in her office from 9 to 5, regardless of the weather, so I was the one who saw our kids--Emma, age eight and Tommy, age six--off to school in the mornings and picked them up in the afternoons. By default, that meant that I was also the go-to parent--the one who handled doctor's visits and teacher conferences, organized cupcakes on birthdays, and ferried the kids to playdates. I usually treasured it: My father had missed much of my childhood, and I felt lucky that I got to see my kids grow up.

It wasn't always sunshine and rainbows. That winter, school closings meant that I spent a lot of time as a ...