4 April 2001

I hope you all know the bad old joke the title refers to. If not, well, e-mail me and I'll tell you. I've just felt like that all morning. Off, somehow. Like I'm dragging my brain around on a string. I've been doing practical things, which may be part of the problem. I think after I'm done writing this, I'm going to do one more practical thing -- call the credit union in Minneapolis and yell at them, bleah -- and then make cookies. Or brownies, if we don't have the stuff for the kind of cookies I want. And then write. I think the baking is crucial. Sometimes I just need to do something concrete, something I can poke with my finger and say, "Here, this is what I did." So much of my work is in computer files that vanish with a click of a button. It's nice to have solid stuff, too.

It's a pretty social week for me. David came down from Oakland yesterday for his first Blizzard (too sweet for him -- oh well, not everybody has a taste for the finer things in life) and then some double mushroom chili. I like mushrooms. Lots. I always worry about talking too much with new people, but I figure eventually they'll either start avoiding me or talk more themselves, if it bothers them.

Tim is going to come up tomorrow (must get as much Tim time as he can manage before he leaves for NY!), and then on Saturday we're heading up to Oakland for a party with some people we know, hosted by some people we don't know. That ought to be cool. It had better be. Or else. Yeah. Anyway, so then next week my folks and grands are coming out for Easter. So I'll have much "people time" in the next few weeks.

And maybe I'll get more stories in here rather than just stuff I was thinking about. I don't know. I don't know which one is better.

Yesterday we went to the mall for David's Blizzard, and I saw a van that I proclaimed, "Holy shit!" Because it was. There was holy shit painted all over the van. (Tip number one for persuading people that you belong to a loving religion: make sure most of your slogans relate to the threat of something really terrible and sometimes call people names. Nothing says "God is Love" like cheery little tongues of hellfire.) Now I'm trying to decide: is an entire van festooned with religious slogans better or worse than a bumper sticker? On the one hand, it doesn't say, "My entire belief system fits on a pithy little rectangle!" On the other hand....

My medical marijuana stuff from earlier seems to be less depressing than I thought: lots of Americans support it right along with me. About three-quarters, in fact, according to a recent poll. Not that that seems to filter through to politicians, of course....

Right after I posted the entry yesterday morning about coping with life in a city and how sometimes things are not arranged for my convenience, nor do I have any business expecting them to be...Mark called. There was a truck overturned on the eastbound Dumbarton, closing it. He wanted to get on the westbound anyway, but his bus couldn't get through. Oops. So he had to take the car and fight traffic after all. That's the sort of thing I didn't need to have demonstrated that quickly. I already know the cosmos does not arrange itself for my convenience.

And, lo and behold, lots and lots of Americans are functionally illiterate. You can look at that big surprise, too, if you feel like it. We're worse off than Poland. Think about that one. Me, I'm considering learning Icelandic. It's a little country, but it's got a 98% literacy rate, so at least most of my neighbors could read my books if they wanted to.

Books...aghhhh...okay, okay, back to the book, with my brain trailing behind me....