I look awful, I mean it. This week: a thousand things to do, and read, and research and – whatever, upshot being this morning, I’m tired but I feel fierce.

Nana lit a fire under my butt a few weeks ago. Since then, I shut off the TV and spent every minute I could reading, mostly about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Audrey struck the match with the Nag Hammadi Library, which all made sense when Nana recommended the Perfect Heresy, a history of the Cathars.

On the other hand, the same week video surfaces of a stray American kid getting his head hacked off in Iraq I’m reading about crusaders burning heretics in truly terrifying numbers. The cruelty with which human beings treat one another shouldn’t surprise me at my age, but it does. It really does. Yesterday I stared off into space awhile, trying to locate in myself not the murderous impulse – most of us have that – but whatever it is that makes one follow through on it. Break a beer bottle over a head, maybe; shove the broken bottle into the jugular, I don’t think so. Probably not.

Song on the mental jukebox: Theme from “H.R. Puffenstuff.”

Johnny asked if I could put my hands on one of his stories. He’s sent me stories since 1980, so I have quite a collection. The two I found right away were from 1991 but weren’t the one thing he was looking for. I promised to look in storage. He said never mind. I believe I have the most complete collection of Johnny’s artwork, letters, photographs and songs – but only if his brothers aren’t pack rats. It’s a library, really. I possess a library.

That tale went nowhere.

Altrok.com is taking off. I’m tickled. Suddenly, everywhere I look, there we are.

The song in my head this morning: Joan Osbourne’s St. Teresa.

Blogger’s upgrade looks pretty cool. I have Paragraph Joy! Joy! Even I know what I wrote, which is unusual.

Mamie’s helping me figure out what kind of car I should buy. My needs are so modest, most of the time, but style is all. I wish I could find a small Italian car in my Christmas stocking.

It’s bothered me for a few decades that the body of testimony re: the life of Jesus came from people who never laid eyes on him. Before you object, the Gospels were penned by four someones between approximately 40 and 100 years after the crucifixion, and nobody can prove who those someones were. That brings us to St. Paul, who’s always struck me as a nasty piece of work. I can understand the business of the secondhand biographies – if that’s the best you can do, I can see that, write down what you remember, we’ll see what sense we can make of it. Paul’s corpus of work, on the other hand, has always felt to me like a dark cloud settled over Jesus, and no flashlight would help you through it. Currently, I’m working my way through a pile of books on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I find I’m not alone in my antipathy. The residents of Qumran felt a murderous rage toward someone from within their midst who betrayed them, the community at large, and the Teacher of Righteousness, who was probably James, brother of Jesus. I suppose I should feel vindicated, but mostly I feel curious about the terrible things done in the name of spreading Paul’s word, and the sorrow created by it. Then again, some people devote their whole lives to learning what they can about these things, and I can’t decide what to make for dinner.

Nana appeared from nowhere and charms me now with the wildest ideas and stories that sound remarkably like Johnny’s. She says, “I was just out on the balcony. There’s a fat moon hanging in the sky illuminating the bay…the crickets are going crazy, cars zoom softly by in the distance. For some reason this makes me think of springtime in Tulsa, with the frogs so loud down in the creek. I remember them spilling out onto the road, the sounds of them, all squishy crunchy ribbetting popping under the truck tires, hundreds of them frozen in the headlights and cottonwoods and the fireflies, bright little splashes of cyalume on the windshield, driving south into Texas late at night. Somehow I ended up buying a harley davidson shirt from Oklahoma City, tho I dont recall being in OK City, I vaguely remember headlights illuminating a dirty shack we stopped in the middle of the night, so maybe that was it. I have no idea whatever happened to that shirt. Did I give it to someone? A.? I haven’t the foggiest. The night is so lovely out. Smoochie has been out in the back, I can tell where she’s been by her paw and chest smells, lavendar, eucalyptus in back or the smelly yellow flowers by the stairs, or the fresh earth from the gopher holes…It must be just fucking aces to be a young cat on a night like this.”

Sister No.1, who shall remain nameless until all the permission slips from the class trip to Crazy come back, calls from the road. She’s driving up and down Route 27, spending money wherever her eye lands, and her toddler sells her down the river to dad with a simple, “Mommy, did you try on that dress?” I informed her it was time to teach that little genius that the lowest form of life is a snitch. And speaking of life, it got a little strange last night when Paulie said he’s going to Milwaukee all next week. I demanded tribute in the form of cheese curds, because I’ve been to Milwaukee for the hell of it and you can’t get cheese curds in New Jersey. What are they? You can google it and get some technical explanation that won’t help even a little. You should think of these little treasures as seeds that didn’t become cheese, like eggs that didn’t become chickens. Some curds were made to grow into full-fledged cheese form; some were made just to make up to me that my Handsome Prince is spending a week near the Schlitz factory.

Paulie and I are still working out the coding bugs that make a smooth form out of my percussive writing. We’ll get there. Sometime before the polar ice caps melt. In the meantime, you’re stuck with a pointless story. Last night, Mamie and Trout sushi-napped me and fed me raw fish. For three hours beforehand, I struggled to remain conscious – I’m dull and tired a lot – and didn’t think I had the strength to lift dragon rolls to my lips. Surprise! I perked up as soon as our very amused waitress put down the appetizers and retracted her hands to count fingers.

Holy smokes, Johnny quit his job:

“It seems too good to be true that I could actually escape. But it looks convincing. If you saw it in a movie, it would look real. I’m wearing a Hawaiian shirt and jeans. Of course, if I had written the movie, I’d have a bulge in the small of my back where the Hawaiian shirt didn’t quite hang straight. But all the weapons I need to get out of here are recklessness and balls, which, come to think of it, are the same thing(s). God, I feel good.”

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Johnny says our writings “go together like assault and battery.”

For the past week and a half, we’ve awakened to rain. Despite rain’s promise to bring abundant, healthy foliage, rain has become drunk with power, a bully. It knows I want to stay in bed and sleep, and should I make it to my desk, I guzzle twice as much coffee as on a sunny day.

I feel awful. I’m mulling over a walk to the bank. From the bank, I could be tremendously lazy and get a cab by the train station, but I need the exercise. That’s what’s going to make me feel better, right? Lift me out of this achy funk?

The phone at Our Compartment went dead Sunday morning or Saturday night, we don’t know which. In any case, when I picked up the thing to call Mamie, the only silence in the whole city was on my phone line. Turns out other tenants in the building had their own personal silences or static-laced dial tones, but the guy’s lurking in the basement right now, fixing a few contraptions.

So I have hope that someday I’ll be able to use my landline and quit mortgaging my future with cell phone bills.

In other news, Larry is a small black cat bent on stealing your soul. Larry has feline leukemia and it’s really important to keep his weight up. Cats don’t start out with many pounds of cat-person to begin with, so losing a couple’s a big deal. He went into this weight freefall, then we fed him extra, then he stopped eating. We racked our brains, found ways to feed him medication without freaking him out completely and fed him prissy, expensive cat comestibles. So now he’s plotting our demises again, and we’re sure he’s ready to hatch his scheme.

Paulie’s teaching eggheads to guard their flanks. He’ll be home tonight in time for Iron Chef America, which is great because I enjoy watching men handle knives.