ummm - guess i should have budgeted a bit better the last four weeks  instead of blowing my limited supply of quotes, colors, ideas, and capitalization on entries which promised so much and ended up delivering so little.  now here it is, the end of the month, and i'll be lucky if i have enough small, plain letters to last me until my next shipment comes in from the government's department of journal services on wednesday or thursday.  damn, but i hate being a poor writer....

how bad are things here?  so bad that i'm having to shamelessly toss together the following three nutritionally empty incidents and pretend the result is a worthy meal for the eyes.  if i'm not careful, i'm gonna end up working for usa today for sure....

anyway, last week someone sent me a paper bag in the mail.  well, ok - they actually sent it to the guy who used to live here years ago, but it ended up in my mailbox exactly as if the thing had been addressed to me.  it was an actual brown paper bag - 5" by 9", I guess.  closed and apparently unused except as an envelope containing some stiff cardboard card of some sort.  i couldn't tell what the card said because a small adhesive circle sealed the opening of the bag and i wasn't inclined to break it.  instead, i wrote on the bag "not at this address" and put it back in my box.  my mail carrier  took it away the next day.  it's a game we play.  he keeps bringing me the mail of a guy who hasn't lived here for years, and the next day i keep giving it back to him.  no matter how often i do this, he keeps bringing me more of this guy's mail as if someday i might suddenly remember that i'm actually him.  and maybe i will - who knows?  this is the first time our game has included a paper bag, however.  the guy's address had been stamped on it by a machine, so apparently someone is sending these bags out en masse.  someone from anaheim, california, according to the otherwise uninformative pre-printed bulk rate stamp.  who?  why?  i'll never know.  i don't want to ever know.  i've gladly traded the moment of explanation that would have come had i peeked inside for the lifetime of speculation that's now mine.

hey - it's never too early to plan for one's retirement years.

today i varied my activities a bit.  today i threw a pill bug out my bathroom window.  there's probably a law against this.  it probably violates my lease or local zoning regulations.  tough.  in the special little fantasy world in which i live, that pill bug is much happier outside in the grass somewhere than he (she?) ever would have been continuing to crawl around on my carpeting.  it's nice enough carpeting - a pretty beige/brown - but the makers of it simply did not have pill bugs in mind when they made it.  at least i hope not....  as pill bugs go, this wasn't a very big one.  in fact, i was able to throw it out my window using just a single hand, and i'm no weightlifter.  still, it took a bit of thought.  one doesn't just throw a bug which can trace its ancestry to europe out the window as if it were a common sweater-eating moth, after all.  for one thing, etiquette demands that one use a dixie cup to scoop it up and not the fingers.  for another, one must take a moment to remember that the pill bug entertained millions of american servicemen in wwii by rolling up into a ball like miniature armadillos when bob hope still had his ass stateside.  finally, one must recall that these utterly harmless little creatures have somehow managed to survive and even thrive unchanged for millions of years when most hit songs nowadays only manage to top the charts for a few weeks.  only then can one toss one of these bugs out the window, and then only after making sure that the screen will not interfere.

is it any wonder that i've been feeling tired ever since?

saturday night i watched nbc's broadcast of "nobody's fool".  well, i watched most of it.  i missed the first 15 minutes.  generally i cannot bear to watch anything that i've missed even the first 15 seconds of (hence my difficulties with so much of life), but my wife begged and pleaded with me to sit and cover up the fresh cat stains on the couch so she could enjoy the movie without being distracted by them, so i stayed.  it was a nice movie,  a well-made movie, a paul newman movie, a mostly gun-free movie, a wintry movie which made me appreciate the late summer night more than i otherwise would have.

but.

part of the plot involved the reconciliation of a son and the father who had abandoned him when he was an infant.  seems movies and books often do.  of course the reconciliation went fairly smoothly.  oh, sure - much of the son's dialogue consisted of his needling dad for abandoning him, but it was more annoying than convincing.  after all, the son kept hanging around dad and eagerly snatched up the job dad offered him even though the son had been a college english professor and the job being offered by dad consisted of handyman work just above the minimum wage.  had the son not explicitly told us he had been an english prof, you'd never have known it.  certainly he wasn't eager to reconcile with dad so they could trade insights into milton.  no, no - this reconciliation, like so many hollywood depicts, apparently was driven simply by the mystic powers of biology and blood.  although warm and comforting as it unfolded on the screen, this always proves nauseating to me as it gets run through the head.  i mean, an emphasis on blood and biology is what nazism was all about, wasn't it?  and all those balkan atrocities.  and middle eastern wars. and ad infinitum.  if it's bad to kill someone because they're aren't related to you, why is it ok to love someone simply because they are?  it's a lousy basis for human behavior or it isn't.  i think it is.  i think we love everyone as fellow human beings and/or living creatures or we reject love as a flawed binder/separator and embrace a more reliable, less dangerous ones like shared interests and needs and sensibilities which transcend who happens to have fucked whom.  hollywood's frequent failure to question the primacy of bloodlines merely reinforces certain dangerous assumptions about how things work....

i'd say more, but i seem to be running out of letters...

maybe next month....