Last night, Trout and I emptied one of her closets. Then we threw stuff away. I love throwing stuff away. Out, out it goes! Joy!

I didn’t hear from Paulie yesterday, and something funny’s happening with my cell phone, so I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that all’s well and Paulie’s dropped face-first in the haggis.

Last week, I cleaned out drawers of my desk. At the bottom, a color copy of one of my favorite Hub City Spoke Repair photographs. James is lying on our luggage, smiling. Marc, crouching, flashes the peace sign. I’m sitting on a suitcase, tipping my hat to the camera. In the background, my car’s being towed away. We were driving like Jehu to the NACB convention when the transmission gave up the ghost and the car glided gracefully into a Rhode Island rest stop. Sean took the picture.

Over the weekend, one of our former presidents died. Yesterday, I watched a memorial service that humanized the whole family in such a way as to render black and white assessments a little grayer. That stinks. In this bizarre moment when history is being shockingly re-written, I would like to stand firm on who’s evil and who’s just the mouthpiece for evil.

Such is life. The poor may rise up and declare the oppressor beloved. I should’ve seen that coming.

Keeping my mouth shut and my silence respectful is taking a great deal of effort. I need a nap.

Song in my head this morning: the Plimsouls’ “A Million Miles Away” which is so eighties and so completely from that dark moment of my life when I moved in with my grandmother and infant daughter that I recall clearly feeling young and lost and as if time passed me by. Startling how little changes with the passage of twenty years.

Paulie’s gone to the bank. The sky’s gray and over the city hangs a stillness even a slight breeze does not disturb. Larry sleeps on a bag of Paulie’s snakeskin swatches he’s using to reupholster his car. The bag is large and Larry has declared himself king of it. Paulie returns and collects scraps from the floor. Yesterday, when he got up I was watching a National Geographic channel show about an AeroPeru plane crash. Later, I watched a new show about the state of Titanic’s structural integrity. I can’t resist the forensic examination of a human disaster. Or sharks. I can’t resist sharks. They’re bitey.

And speaking of bitey, the dryer buzzer went off. Must fold, must fold.

Clean laundry hangs from every hook, niche and doorknob in the joint. Paulie’s flight for Scotland leaves tomorrow, dinnertime. For Heaven’s sake, it’s time to buy enough Ricky Ricardo shirts to last longer than a week. Sometimes it looks like a black velvet painting exploded in our living room.

Right now, the sky could open again at any moment, so he’s outside bolting his carburator to the engine. I think. I’m sorry to say I don’t know a blessed thing about cars. For all I know, you bolt carburators to cup holders so your soda stays bubbly. This is not a knowledge deficit one ought to crow from the treetops. Instead, I think I should issue guarded apologies to automotive engineers throughout the ages. It’s on my To Do list.

Friday afternoon. I can’t express my love of Friday afternoons. I plan to try by driving home and staying there.

Paulie’s plane leaves for Glasgow on Sunday, I think. What sort of gifts does one demand from a visitor to Scotland? Anything but haggis. I love haggis, but I’ve pictured a horrific scene with bomb-sniffing airport dogs and a bag of meat.

I have eaten a cookie.

See, the words don’t do it justice. I don’t eat cookies, and I generally stick to small portions of food, and have been on a diet since 1977, essentially. So when I say I have eaten a cookie, it should be read with the same announcer voice in which one hears ads for monster truck rallies:

WEDNESDAY! WEDNESDAY! WEDNESDAY! I HAVE EATEN…A COOKIE!

Fortunately, it was a delicious oatmeal cookie with raisins and a light cinnamon flavor and quite moist and I hardly even regret it very much, though I wish I hadn’t drunk the SlimFast first.

Larry’s sitting on my lap, supervising. Larry, if I haven’t mentioned him before, is a little black cat bent on stealing your soul. He’s been eating like it’s his job, which it kind of is, and he’s finally put on all the weight he lost over the winter. He has attained roaster dimensions. If you live with cats, or are in fact a cat yourself, you know that if you come to rest in a certain kitty pose, the humans around you involuntarily picture you with a golden crust and cornbread stuffing.

Memorial Day. Gray and raining. We spent yesterday in the sun with our friends from the bar. After years of this, you’d figure I’d get used to seeing them in daylight, but I never do. In this case, hooray! The sunlight was warm and steady, the food abundant, beverages resting on every surface. One dog, one child, two grills. There weren’t even any lame-brained riding mower accidents, though the landscaper really shouldn’t have left the weed whacker unattended like that.

So Nana and I are talking about culinary karma. It’s really a blizzard of emails, but – oooh! – such fun.

Me: I can’t tell you how the history of dinners is littered with

dispute-related corpses.

Nana: Ohhhhh…I feel a good book topic coming on. What dinners did you have in mind, hmmm?

Me: If you read Miss Manners for fun, you find that eating utensils and manners developed in Europe and Japan based on the potential harm dinner guests occasionally did to one another. Perhaps it happened in other places too, but on the European and Japanese customs I can be specific. In Japan, a knife at the table is considered barbaric. Because you stab people with them! And in European place settings, the knife sits to the right of the plate, blade facing the plate, so dinner guests didn’t spend the evening waiting to be – say it with me – STABBED. Apparently, stabbing is an indoor-outdoor sport, practiced without worry about gender or station in life. Miss Manners is pretty damned hilarious on the subject of place settings.

Nana: Gentle reader, it is not for this outspoken writer to condemn the place settings or wittisicms of others, and so hope that you will accept my deepest and heartfelt acknowlegement without fear of misunderstanding. Furthermore, it is with the greatest of pleasures that I peruse the etiquette titles carried locally.

Me: You can’t hear me, but I’m squealing with glee! Glee! There’s at least a short story here.

Nana: Tell me! Which part?!

Me: WHEN DINERS ATTACK. Somehow this plot includes powdered wigs. It’s an etiquette manual based on brutal and disastrous meals.

Nana: I wouldn’t miss this for anything. Especially the powdered wigs.

It’s important to amusercize yourself. Walk around at a stiff pace, noticing the funny things in your neighborhood. Notice the guy on the riding lawnmower, mowing in time to the music in his headphones. Observe the bird sounds on the otherwise empty street. See the line of red cars on one side of the street and realize cars on the other side are white. It’s all coincidence and curiosity, but your brain’s doing laps, and that’s a blast, yes?

Yes. Yes, it is.

It’s Saturday night. I’ve already been out and come home. Paulie’s going out to the bar and I’m happy to become One With the Couch. Ohmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…

My privacy is important to me. I spent all those years on stage, telling the audience everything, but I chose my subject matter carefully. The distinctions between what I discussed and what I didn’t meant the difference between art and blowing my brains out. So there are people who never figured into my work, such as it is and was. I’ve been thinking a lot about privacy as I open myself up as a person in this blogging experiment. What can go wrong in this age of repression and censorship? Gee, I don’t know. Some low level bureaucrat could decide my articles have crossed some wacky line, and next thing you know, I’m Ethel Rosenberg.

…Not that I think what I say should register on anyone’s radar. Lately, I’ve felt like the Voice Of Reason, which bugs the hell out of me. I’m supposed to be the Voice of No Fucking Reason Whatsoever.

But, y’know, this moment in time is awfully peculiar.