My sound doesn’t work.  I have to reload something which means finding the disks and we all know I don’t find things so maybe you’ll be a dear and watch this for me and tell me it’s fun.

I’m having summer terrors today.  Summer terrors are when you and the father of your children have chosen to juggle things in such a way that daycare centers and nannies aren’t involved, and at the precise moment that the three long terrifying months of nothing reach down your throat, the absurdness of the whole idea strikes you like a rubber mallet hard and between the eyes.  That’s what summer terrors are.  I’m having one, right now. 

That was an awful and long sentence and it’s not quite 9:00am. 

[Rest in peace, Gary.  Sidewalk Blocker.  I wish I had something much more elegant to say.  I wish I'd said it to you.] 

M-squared (who wants to be called M-III but won’t get to be because I don’t change a name once I’ve set it.  Unless it’s Herb.  Unless you’d rather be called Herb, M-squared, I like Herb) referred to a post yesterday about A. cooking, or someone cooking, or me cooking A. I can’t remember for sure.  The point is I can’t find it.  I thought he said it was here but it’s not.  In looking, though, I’ve discovered something you’ve probably known for years:  I can’t stop talking about ants!  It’s a disease.  It really is!  YOU try to balance entomophobia with your writing material and see how you do.  See if you keep the ants out.

By the way, I want you to donate a dollar toward my disease next time you’re at Safeway.  They’ll try to steer you toward lupus or cancer, but please tell them you want your money in Entomophobia.  Insist on it.  Threaten to shop at Albertson’s.  Tell them you are tired of reading about ants. 

This has nothing at all to do with ants but I think you’ll like it.  Particularly you, M., though I’m sure you’ve already seen it.  Where is this, where’s Garrison?  The place itself, Guinans, sounds like a place Andy and I stopped at on the way to a client, some weird client we had upstate.  It was an hour train and we got off at one point and bought tall cans of beer like high school kids.  It wasn’t the usual train, like to Connecticut or wherever else all the trains go — there were leafy trees along the way and little else.  And I think, for the record, we bought the beers on the way back, after we had finished acting professional. 

It reminds me of summer, which at 48 degrees here in Mac looks like we won’t get, but still I reached back 24 years and wrote this. 

Ta-ta.

Some birthdays.  My cousin Sara, for one.  Allen Ginsberg, too.  And also Larry McMurtry.  Which makes me want to reread The Last Picture Show and maybe watch it tonight. 

This is cute.  I know you don’t like links, A., but click on it … anywhere on this line, seriously.  It’s a parody of Goodnight Moon, its called Goodnight Bush. 

I have to go people.  But before I do, what did one hat say to the other hat? 

“You wait here while I go on ahead.”

A head.  Get it?

Oh, looky! — Slate posted a slide-show Edward Hopper essay to go along with the current retrospective (oxymoron?) at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts!

David Butler introduced me to Hopper (not in the literal sense, of course; Hopper was long dead). He sent me a postcard of Summertime one year; he said it reminded him of me. (I don’t see it actually, I rarely wear hats; I’m more Hotel Lobby. Though in my 20′s I fancied myself Room in New York.  Which Hopper are you?)

It was a great introduction, thank you, David, I still owe you. I could stare at Hoppers all day for a week. Andiamo a Boston, presto!

I’d like to write the way Hopper painted, of course then I’d be Richard Yates. Theirs was a world before prozac. A place with long, lonely stretches of time — a world of brooding, and mildewed dreams and ice melting in drinks and painfully slow fades.

A. and I passed by Hopper’s house once, in Nyack. I didn’t know it was there we were just walking. It’s on the main street, to the left if you’re going uptown. Nothing remarkable, just a little sign which caught my eye. I don’t remember whether you could go in it or not, it would have been closed, this was at night.

Two years ago, Chair Car sold for $14 million dollars.

And that’s that.