Oh dear, I’ve been awful.  My best and most brilliant amazing remarkable fascinating interesting engaging and capable friend Anna — Yes, Anna! – has not only gone and knocked out the best garlic farm this side of Moscow (Russia, not Idaho), but was also in the news!  

I’m weeks late reading it, this makes me a goat, or some sort of squirrel; perhaps a prairie dog, something annoying. 

But nevermind that.  This is really just a personal note to Anna, if she’s looking, to tell her I couldn’t be more proud or thrilled, ever ever since the beginning of time to be her friend.  She’s consistently amazing. 

[If you'd like to be friends with Anna, too, send a 300-word essay plus $10 here.]

Oh brother.  I want Mary Roach to be my best friend, there I said it.  But I’m sure she’s too busy, and I resent her for not making time for me, and so our friendship has soured now before it can bloom. 

If you want to make it up to me Mary, you’ll have to blurb my book and send postcards, there’s no other way. 

You can send postcards and the draft of your blurb here.

[Read Mary at Powell's.  And, duh, buy her book.]

A., you guys, has a new battery.  For his phone.  I’m serious!  Call and talk to him, if you want to, for hours!

In other news:  the Dow’s down, the bull’s up, I’m eating lettuce leaves, and Chiquita I believe (I think that’s what I hear) is throwing up.

Julie Nipp had a party and I didn’t go.  Still.  I expect her to come to all mine, if she doesn’t I’ll be livid. 

I’m having problems, they’re technical.  And so I had things to say and I’ve forgotten them because I first tried to muscle through another download by myself, without buttons, and when that didn’t work tried to muscle through the Automatic Updater plugin and that was no treat.  All because of strange goings-on in the application — this one here, right here, that I use to post my lovely words. 

Then crashing and freezing followed elsewhere, of course; these problems all come in threes.  This all on the heels of having to relocate my “office” this morning, from the back house to the front, because of a spider.  Not just any spider, but the weird thick black-and-white striped one that was sitting right square on the middle of the bed last week before A. smashed it.  Now its wife or mother or brother or best friend is back and sitting striped and meaty in the center of the table, where my coffee goes.  It’s got big muscly thighs and it crouches all eight of them down like it’s going to jump and I swear if that thing jumps it can go for a city mile.  (Country mile, city block, I know but I’ll say what I want.) 

So you understand, now, that I can’t even be in the same house as it, nor can I kill it because I’m too scared.  It has practically, almost entirely, ruined my day.

This, on the morning following the evening that I was knocked out of the Mac 3rd Street Books Spelling Bee on – I’m ashamed to tell you this, but it’s bound to get out — “scuttlebutt.”  Yes, “scuttlebutt” and I’ve no intention of telling you how I spelled it. 

It’s 10:13.  I must go while there’s something to salvage. 

M-III (formerly known as “M-squared”) hasn’t commented in weeks and I find it disturbing.  Nor has he made ravioli and invited A. and I to eat it.  All this has been noted and duly recorded and will haunt him at some moment in time.

We’re traveling in three weeks and I hobble, I barely walk.  A. is, understandably, concerned.  I am greedy about my time and hesitant to give it to doctors, I have procrastinated, I’m learning to live with it.  I think you can live with pain and hobble-walking, you eventually stop noticing how inconvenient it is.  I’m an early adapter. 

I love the book H. gave me when she was here, she specifically instructed me to read it while away and she’s right, it’s a perfect travel book.  It’s a collection of fiction from The New Yorker over decades and it should be read in her apartment in New York, or on the way there.  I’m cheating, but not too much, I’ll have some left. 

I’ve settled on a timeline for TGW, it’s June to June or maybe July to July.  Anniversary to Anniversary, anyway — the year in a life of a marriage, beginning in summer of ’99.  So I have Y2K, which I may or may not use for fun.  I remember what I did New Year’s Eve 2K, I was at H. and T.’s house and we had baked brie.  We watched Peter Jennings’ countdown, mostly.  Not the countdown but all the talking that starts a few hours before.  I remember Tony said, “it’s all bullshit.”  I remember nothing happening — no blackouts, no food shortages, no people without clothes in the streets, I was terribly disappointed.  Milleniums, I discovered, are fairly dull.

We had a baby, he was eight months old, did we spend the night that night A.?  Or pack him up and go home.  And M., did anything unusual happen at work?  Did our clients fall apart?  Did we acknowledge the world crisis averted?  Had we prepared for it beforehand?  I have no memory of this, any of it. 

I’m usually bitter about other people who write well, and so pretend they don’t exist.  I have tried this approach with Mary Roach (rhyme intended) but I’ve failed.  She is, unfortunately, too engaging, I’ve caved. 

She is also guest-blogging at Powell’s and I fear, as usual, her new book is fabulous.  It’s called “Bonk” and it’s all about sex, you should read it.

A close friend of M.’s passed away, one who I knew vicariously.  I will miss him vicariously. 

So will you, because we all, if we’re very lucky, have a friend just like him.

To K. 

I’m sleepy.  I’m having an awful time keeping my eyelids open.  First I had coffee, then pickles, now tea.  I was up too late, so was A., we stayed up.  Then I was mad about something I shouldn’t have been.  A. never does that, I wonder why.  Get mad about things he shouldn’t, I mean.  Or maybe he does and doesn’t tell me. 

Regardless.  I’m tired and so, I bet, is he and someone just shouted really loud, it sounded scary.  I don’t care for shouts out of nowhere, this one sounded mad.  Mad in both the angry and crazy way.  I bet I could get shot here.  If you want to shoot people in town, Bill’s Street is not a bad place.  It’s set back and isolated and no one ever comes here, the bodies aren’t discovered for days.  Just saying. 

It’s pomegranate-raspberry green tea, in case you wondered, but it’s not green, it’s red.  Figure that out.  Then fix the extra “A”s that have happened since my upgrade, and then we’re all done.

I’m not giving you random excerpts from my book anymore, I think they’re confusing.  Well, maybe one more, but later.  I’m very busy. 

(Yes, it’s the name of a character.  What are you going to do about it, tough guy.)

I’m going to upgrade today.  I’m one click away.  I’m going to do it and something awful will happen, please forgive me when it does.

Update:  Well, I did it and you’ll see I have many more “A”s … in the coming weeks, months and years I will delete them.  Ugh.

I have things to do, I must leave you.  But before I go, for the record, Humboldt’s Gift (Saul Bellow) is just under 70,000 words.  The Good Wife, as I speak, is 133,140 (words).  Eighty thousand is just about right; I’ve a lot of cutting to do. 

Send virtual scissors here.