"Hello ceiling (hello hello) I'm gonna stare at you a while"

I am sipping coffee this morning, listening to FARON YOUNG and preparing to return to work for the first time in 10 days -- I was away on vacation to Mexico.
Oh my.
I can't even imagine the number of e-mails that will be waiting for me. Actually, I don't even want to imagine.
My sister gave me Diane Diekman's "Live Fast Love Hard: The Faron Young Story" for Christmas, and I began reading it last night.
I have always loved Young's music. He had a great voice, chose great songs to sing ("Hello Walls," for example) and mostly stuck to a traditional honky tonk sound, even when many of his contemporaries were aiming for increased sales by sweetening their songs with lush orchestration.
That aversion to the popular movement toward the mainstream probably cost Young a lot of record sales (and contributed to the depression that eventually led to his suicide in 1996), but I think it also means Young's music has aged much better than some of the syrupy staples of the "Nashville Sound" era of country music.
When I get to work this morning (I still have to dig the car out of a mountain of snow), I will probably count the incoming e-mails while humming a Young tune. That will ease the pain of returning from vacation.