Just one addendum. I just looked at the count of how many people are reading. 0 was (quite justifiably) the number most often seen. There were 42 readers on the day I announced I was going to do this, a lot of 2's and 3's and for some reason I cannot fathom, one 16. Given my current twitter followers count of 290 and the unlikelihood of anyone who does not at least marginally know the style of my wit or half-wit depending on your opinion, it would seem to me virtually impossible to get this thing into consistent double numbers. I may regard this as a reason to stop, with apologies to my fan (but I tried) or it may bring out the "fuck it. I am doing this because I am doing this" part of my personality, which again is really more my shrink's business than yours. Looking at it from this point of view (perhaps slightly influenced by my daughter's comment about my looking sad), if being read is the goal, I can start cranking up the wit machine and possibly get to over 300, something I have never achieved. And in a way the tweets are more to a point than the blaahg. And then there is the novel that this may be interfering with the writing of--or not-- it is just so much harder. Were I not writing the blaahg there is as much chance that I would not be writing the novel at all, rather than attacking it in fits and starts as I am now. Go have dinner.

Hello duskness, my old friend. I have so much to say today, of so little relevance, all pertaining to me with hardly a mention of the outside world-- it's as if it didn't exist. I think I am approaching the point where I have to decide what the fuck I am doing with this blog and whether it is worth continuing. I have a diahretic (sp) facility for word spill so that's no problem. But is this a public diary? Is this an attempt to find out what it is the meaning of? Is it an attempt for me to gain insight into the meaning of my life? Is it an old man's equivalent of trying to be Justin Bieber-- being famous on a tiny scale for just being famous. The extent of my ignorance of what this thing actually is, where it goes, who, if anyone reads it, is staggering. My computer ignorance is such that just getting to this site and being able to add to the chaos is an accomplishment. But how much of the life that leads one to write, but not really tell the reader what he is writing about except that he is writing and the effect that has on, say other things he is writing. Who on earth could possibly be interested in such nonsense? Or the fact that the author read some pages by a real writer and despaired, as well he should. Or the fact that the author is wearing a gray sweatshirt and black sweatpants with white socks and that there is a cool breeze wafting in through the window and that both cats are sleeping. Or that his daughter, recently visiting for a week, said he seemed sad. (There is a long story attached to that but it is so personal, really material for my shrink, not for public consumption, so what you are left with is the fact that my daughter (who is very perceptive) thought I looked sad. Not knowing either me or my daughter, this statement must be of staggering unimportance to any reader. I think it sinks below unimportance to egotistical incoherence or something like that-- the fact that I could possibly think that a non-fact about my life in no context whatsoever could be worth writing about it. What does this say about the writer. Do not jump to the obvious conclusion because this very well may be the shrink's perview. Blog was allegedly restarted by popular demand (one person and it may have turned out to be the wrong person, not the one that I know casually. A conclusion seems in order and the only one that comes to my mind is that if for some reason you stumble upon some words with subjects and verbs in the right place you will tend to read them. What does that say about your life? I think we should call it a night. We started off nowhere and are going downhill fast.

Fucking reality. Screws everything up. Woke up early for personal reasons. Don't know exactly when because the mice ate all the clocks so we are living on approximate time now, which seems to do just fine. Who am I writing to? Whom am I writing to? What am I writing to? What am I writing about? Why am I doing it. Fuck, I don't even know when I'm doing it. Shall we start with dimensions and work back.

There is absolutely no reason to be this angry except for the fact that I am fucking tired and my internet connection went off for an hour so from four or five to six or seven I just turned widgets on and off, pulled and unpulled plugs, was told that I had no internet connection even though my ipad said I did. If we were to extract from the total of things written over the last 10 years everything written about the internet, what would be left? We are writing about the instrument on which we write, not that we have anything particular to say except that we can do it faster or slower and get Chinese food by pushing a fucking app. The capstone of mankinds's achievement: fast Chinese food, which is still luke warm, just like it would have been if you called, or, heavens, walked to the store.

I think this should be a brief entry. I am half asleep, pissed over the internet fiasco will try to go back to sleep and then be woken by the internet guy who will tell me everything is fine which it is not but wasn't when I called and got screens of instructions on how to fix it. Just go to apps/settings/mother/declaw/institutional insominia/big Bob's internet bar and if all this fails shake the computer from left to right. Fuck computers.  The nothing that I am saying would be just as pertinent written by hand, or not written for that matter. Fuck everybody. I am going back to sleep and turning off my phone. Of course I will not be able to sleep and will be back here in 10 minutes, scrubbing the bowels of my mind for something to say that looks as if it might be coherent thought there's no way it is because I am way beyond coherence now. I am in space. I am on the multi-net. I am, I think delerious.

I am assuming no one is interested in the particulars of the title, except maybe for the last one. That's the only one that's unique in any way. The divorced and fired parts were ugly as they all are and threw me on my ass like a cockroach on its back trying to right itself. I'm still trying. Why I am still trying and exactly what I am trying to do elude me, though I pay $400 in therapy bills a week to try and find out. It may be that I find out that I will never know, which, I guess, is as valuable as finding out anything else. It may be that I will find out that I am wasting the thimbleful of talent I have writing this thing instead of busting a gut trying to write that fucking novel, the 30 pages of which I have and just read out. They're not terrible. I learned that from the 700 last year. They're just so orderly in the way a children's story is orderly. It will have a beginning, a middle, an end and tomato juice. I spent six months thinking about whether the story could be written; another six months deciding whether it  should be written and another six months obsessing over whether I could write it. I decided I wouldn't have wasted the previous year thinking about it if I seriously didn't think I could do it. The one blog I did was a pebble in a lake. I quickly decided if I were to put the effort into the novel that it required, and since it was me doing the writing it required two or three times as much effort as anyone else doing it, then I couldn't waste my time on blogs, which I don't understand until I get into writing an entry and it seems the most natural thing in the world. The fact that I never read what I've written or correct things that contradict each other make the writing of blogs so much more fun than the writing of a novel where you have to starch out every word to be sure it's not too much like a similar word in the previous sentence. All this to give the illusion that what you are writing is really happening or has really happened, which of course is not true. The real meaning of a novel is to give people something to do on a train rather than staring at the ugly people facing them. I guess blogs can be read on trains now as well but the casualness of the medium coupled with the casualness of the ride makes me feel like I would slide off my chair, across the floor and through the opening at the bottom of the door, whereas a novel keeps you securely fastened to your seat, even without a belt. I go back and look at the novel every day to make sure I am making the right decision on how to use me meager endowment of expression. I don't think there's an answer. I'm not even sure there's a question. But there is something to be said for writing something as you are thinking it and letting it be as opposed to structuring it into ersatz reality. Thus, for at least another day, we are here. Brahms, by the way, will be back. If you have no interest in classical music there are going to be parts of the blog that are even more boring to you than the parts that aren't about classical music. They are marginal, but necessary. Mahler said something to the effect that he wanted to include the whole world in his symphonies. I want to include as many unrelated aspects of my being as I can think of, thereby giving an accurate portrait of who the fuck I am, once I find out in therapy.

Back, Keri.
When it came to ambition, Beethoven was no slouch himself. Even though he could not hear a lot of what was going on, he had a very powerful sense of intuition, and early on got wind of that Brahms kid who was trying to out-Beethoven Beethoven.  Two examples of Beethoven's character: In the  famous Ode to Joy that caps his monumental Ninth Symphony, the chorus enters famously in the last movement, singing, "Freude" (German, for joy for idiots reading who did not know that.) In the original manuscript, which Vikopedia somehow got hold of, Beethoven wanted the entrance word to be "Ludvig," but was talked out of it when his publisher upped his advance, helping out an artist, which as we all know, is what publishers do to our very day. The other thing Vikopedia found out was that most of Beethoven's melodies, weren't even his own but were Schubert's, who had just died when Beethoven was coming into his own (my timing may be a bit off here), but he stole some of his best melodies including the infamous Fur Elise, which again, he tried to call Fur Ludwig, but was bribed out of. He dumped the originals in a carton in his basement where they were not found for decades by Mendelsohn, who complained for the rest of his life to his analyst, the young Freud, that Beethoven was trying to kill him.

But what has all this to do with Brahms? Brahms was a notoriously slow writer, mostly because he had never fully mastered the scales and with each note had to go through "every good boy does fine" or "face." That's why it took him decades to release his first symphony, not because of artistic struggle. It is also rumored that Beethoven tried to kill Brahms by shooting him from one of the turrets of a castle with a gun given him by Napoleon who secretly bent it to not shoot straight when he took his name off the Eroica. The warning was not lost on Brahms, especially because the premier of his his first symphony in Heidelstrasenbergenluffthansa was on a night when Beethoven's Fifth was being performed in an adjacent hall, and the Fifth was already the monster in popularity it is today. Beethoven, of course, got the big hall and Brahms one so small the gargantuan (for that time) orchestra could hardly fit on the stage, the violins having to occupy the first row it was so tight. The performance seemed to be going well. Brahms was in the lobby chewing a cigar as was his wont when all of a sudden a piercing scream rang out. It seems that at one of the most tender moments of the adagio the first violinist, unaware of exactly how tight the quarters were stuck her bow in and extracted the eye of on eight-year-old Clara Van Veisenthallerbachanalia whose name, according to Vikopedia, is not well known today because Brahms had to pay her the entire royalties for the performance, which also explains why his next three symphonies followed so quickly, one after the other. When Beethoven, basking in the glory of the reception of his Fifth at the adjacent hall, heard the scream, he smiled. He knew the architect of the hall where the Brahms were being performed and had the score. He was good friends with the architect, who later went on to build the Eiffel Tower, which he tried to call the Ludwig Tower but could not get it through. At any rate,the seats were adjusted just a tiny bit so that when that note came some part of someone's facial anatomy was going to get to know it intimately. But an 8 year old girl? Even for Beethoven, this was excessive and for the rest of her life, Clara received one percent of the royalties for Fur Elise, a not insonsiderable amount, for her medical expenses. There are also rumors about Beethoven and her having an affair when she hit her teen=age years, but Vikopedia discovered that these were simply fabricated by Brahms and there was no truth to them whatsoever.

How'm I doin' Keri? Living up or down to expectations. Should I go back to 150 whatever aphorisms? No can do anymore. You have slit the bag open and the cat is on the prowl. And out of sheer perversity it may be a long shift. Or not.

In the interest of full disclosure, not that it remotely matters, not that I know if one person, even Keri, is reading this or cares, I must confess that some of what follows, in vastly regurgitated form (I will not consult the manuscript and just have a vague idea of what I wrote for 700 pages except I know it was pretty nasty). Before proceding on with one of the heroes of this blahhg, I just want to tell those who may be nervous that it all ends happily with the arrival of Hurricane Sandy, when what has seemed arbitrary if you had actually slogged through it attempts to have meaning which keeps getting swept back out to sea. But there are large planks of wood.

Johannes Brahms was a fairly normal Austrian or German child except for his habit of going for walks in the woods and sneaking up on sparrows, grabbing them, biting their heads off and calling it lunch. Musical critics much more critical musically than I know the influence of this act on his music, for example his use of the key of F (for flying, even though it is something else in German). Anyway, Johannes was quite an ambitious young composer of no great talent but he was obsessed with how Beethoven,  that deaf prick, had used his own talentlessness to become a composer of great acclaim throughout with world without even hearing most of what he wrote. What balls! The royalties on Fur Elise music boxes alone allowed him to buy a castle in Saxony.

The inclusion of the life of Brahhms in this blahhg is not quite as arbitrary as it might seem at first.  All else aside, it is full of useful information you will not find anywhere else as the author was privy to the first sketches of Wikopedia made in the 19th century where it was called Vikopedia. From it we learn, for example, that if you put the keys of all the movements together, in this, the piece that finally got him the worldwide notoriety that Beethoven had, it read (in German of course), "Sparrows forgive me. I love the taste of blood."
One of the other myths that Vikopedia destroys is the one of Brahms walking around for 40 years before he wrote his first symphony saying, "You have no idea what it is like walking in his footsteps," referring to Beethoven. But Vikopedia retranslated it more truthfully as, "I wish I could kick that Beethoven in the tuchus. Yes, I am famous, but not nearly as famous as him. I must figure out a way to become more famous."

And he did, but that, my children is the subject of another story, so let's all put our digital nightlights on Brahms' Lullaby and have a good night's sleep, for there will be much excitement tomorrow. Brahms may or may not appear again but definitely one or the other as we are not in Schrodinger country yet.

DEATH IS FOR REAL. I don't usually title these things but this one seemed so appropriate. I may have mentioned (how many times do I have to say  I do not read these entries, not even for continuity or repetition, which is  a particularly disgusting kind of laziness. It is like throwing my fingernail clippings out at an audience and waiting for applause. His death came as a shock (you can always count on death for that, it's had centuries to perfect the act) and he was two years younger than me. I've always had two fantasies about death. 1) It often gives no warning whatsoever--you're alive/you're dead. Or your drugged/you're dead. But sometimes, for example when you're driving along and you see a giant crane falling and heading straight for your car and you figure you've got 30 seconds or a minute if you're lucky of life left. What do you think of in that last minute. Is it anything beyond, "Shit, this is going to hurt" or "This is going to set the building of the new library back at least six months." Do the laws of physics allow death to spread its tentacles into the land of the living when there is no hope whatsoever of the living surviving beyond a minute. My last thought, such thoughts being permitted would probably be something like, "Shit. I forgot to pick up the Frito. Marge will be pissed." I do not think we are built for profound thoughts. I am not even sure we are built for pounds. But maybe that's just me in my typical depressive state. Maybe there are people who think, "Shit, this is going to be so much fun. I've always wondered what death is like and now I'm going to find out! Hooray!
2)I abhor perfection in anything. Partially, no doubt, because it emphasizes my imperfection in everything. And what is "perfect" anyway? Doing things according to the way "The Perfect Handbook" says they should be done. Give me inspired sloppiness every time. Anyway, when I was about 8, confronting for the first time the reality that I was going to die some day ("but not for a long, long time," as Mother would console), it occurred to me that everyone who came before me and was no longer around had died. So in this sense, death was perfect. I couldn't believe that somewhere in a cave in the Rockies there wasn't a guy who had never gotten a social security card or given any evidence of his existence to anyone beyond his parents at this birth and they were killed two minutes later in an explosion in the hospital and his bassinet rolled down the corridor into this cave which was populated by friendly wolves and gulls who raised him. But he was off the charts. Even Facebook didn't have a clue. Could he not elude death? How could death be so "perfect" in nailing every one of us. Has there never in history been one person who outsmarted it. Aside from the generally disgusting parts of death, it strikes me that it must have a Dick Cheney sort of personality or Goebels. If anybody could have  struck out death it was probably the Nazis because they operated according to the same "perfect" methods. All this by way of saying I miss my friend terribly, find the whole thing unbelievable as everyone has to because how can you believe in the existence of something that ends your existence. It's beyond existential.
Assuming I do't go back to the novel or the 700 pound monster, I will peck at this until Keri yells 'STOP. ENOUGH ALREADY." And electrons can neither be created nor destroyed, so these letters, possibly in completely jumbled up order, which may make less of a difference with my prose than with anybody others will float around the galaxy long after my death offering clues, to those who care (and why should they?) about who I was and what I thought. This fucked up electronic immortality does not defy death, but it would not surprise me if at this moment Dick Cheney were not having a meeting with the forces of evil, saying, "We cannot allow this to go on. We are abandoning our mandate. Allowing those electrons to exist beyond a person's death is precisely the kind of immortality that clause 23.1xr prohibits. So Einstein be damned-- he is already anyway-- we must be allowed to destroy matter--those electrons--even though we still can't create it, which we couldn't do anyway because creation is in another department. All in favor, raise your hands, "Ay."

For me the key to writing a good blog is having the right dishwashing soap. No, the key (my key, anyway) is having no idea what you are going to say and then voila, it appears anyway. Having an incredibly boring life with nothing to do and no friends is also a key to successful blog writing. Many many many years ago, Dean Martin (Dean Who?) had a very successful record (record? what's a record, Dad?) called, "Everybody Falls In Love With Someone." The second line was "Everybody falls in love some time." How do I remember shit like this that's probably 30 or more years old? Because given the contemporary vacuum of my life my mind  goes backwards in time trying to pick up things it can remember, thus proving it has some sort of function and could not just be surgically removed making no difference to the patient. I, for example, could never remember the title of that song if I didn't have a mind, though this is one of the examples I use when I try to convince my shrink that I have Dementia.

The choice of that particular song is not coincidental. Actually, I hated it when it came out and have always hated it, especially when sung by Dean Martin in his half-drunk delivery. I mean when you really analyze and deconstruct it, what it's saying is that we all need someone we can lean on. Leaning on a 30 year old horrible song is pathetic but so it falling off the deck of the ship.

The previous two paragraphs were supposed to offer some sort of insight into my secretly held art of blahhgwriting, but now that I have written them I cannot for the life of me think of what it was except for this, which may be sort of brilliant: it doesn't matter what it is, but whatever you do, take up space. Once you take up space some asshole will feel obliged to respond to whatever you said even if it's just to call you an asshole and you can respond, "Your Mother," and we're off and running with a meaningful debate.  That's why blogs are such an important addition to the intellectual temperature (rectal) of our time.

Hi, Keri, How's it goin'? Hope you're enjoying--that this is what you had in mind, but you couldn't have terribly much in mind from those hundred fifty whatever apercus. No matter. You've plunged me into the much where I belong. The novel feels like stiff laced shoes; the blog keds with the laces open. The book, had I, were I to, finish it might have meaning, like speeding limits posted along a highway. Here were go as fast or as slow as we please and if some meaning happens by we either take a sharp left or squash the mother.

So here's one for you. Why am I so fucking miserable when my life sucks not that much more than it always has. Age? I would have thought you would pay less not more attention to the bullshit that your head is feeding you 24/7/ Wanna know how really fucked up I am? I have this elderly shrink, whose pretty good as a shrink, neither better nor worse than the other half dozen I've had, but is the kindest man I've ever met and no matter what kind of shit I let fly at him he'll say something like, "That's an interesting point. When did you first start feeling that way?" Unmitigated kindness is impossible to defeat or avoid. It just smarms all over you and for the hour you feel it soothing every fiber of your being you can actually think, "You know what? This gig may not be so bad after all." But then you leave and in ten minutes you're pushing old ladies in wheel chairs out of the way to get on the bus ahead of them. Maybe it's New York. I've lived here most of my life. I'm seriously thinking of moving to the country now. I guess it's possible to be more lonely than I feel and if there is a way I'll find it.

I was going to say something about what you see when you open your door in NY but I couldn't remember whether I said it last blaahg. I make it a point never to go back and read what I've written or I could be writing the fucking novel or doing something useful like putting together the 1000 piece crossword puzzle of a cat with flowers that I got from Amazon to determine once and for all whether I have dementia. I'm certain I do. My shrink says it's just depression. I'll show him.

I figure if I have dementia I can opt out of any attempts to do anything that might make me feel better which makes me feel better already as attempts to feel better invariably end in failure.

Keri, I need you to tell me whether I am circling in on a subject yet and if you think it is a good one. Here's what I think: The subject is being a good person how hard, how fucking virtually impossible it is to become one but if you somehow miraculously do, how fucking happy you are. You are so happy that you make everyone who comes in contact with you too, even your cats, though it's a little hard to tell sometimes.

Here's the other thing you need to know, Keri. I require endless encouragement or this will fizzle out after seven entries. I have not allowed myself to look at how many people I have lost who used to follow my tweets because I stopped tweeting because I was too depressed and it got too complicated.  I should also warn you, however, that if you tell me, "God, this really sucks beyond my wildest non-expectations," it might also have the reverse effect and encourage me. I don't know Keri from Adam. Who the fuck does he (she?) think they are telling me my prose sucks. I'll be the judge of that. And if it does suck, whose losing anything by it. Are people across America being strapped to their chairs, toothpicks holding their eyes open and this blog in front of them as they scream, No, no more please. I'll do anything. Just take it away." 

I think I said this before, Keri, but I am something of a computer moron and my computer is fucked up to boot so if you want to say anything to me use a medium like a two cans and a string that I can relate to. Also, keep in mind I wrote 700 pages of bullshit not unsimilar to this, but I think I got rid of a lot of the anger. But without the anger, I'm not sure what's left. Peace and love?

Keri, whoever you  are (which I would like to know some day), this all your fault. It takes so little flattery to get me off track, but I was falling off so many tracks already, it didn't seem to matter which one I got on. After abandoning my one blog for my novel, I now abandon my novel-in-forever-progress for the blog, which allows me to hear a lot more klickety klaks per minute. Remember, you asked for it and I will be incorporating parts of the 800 pound monster which was going to revolutionize literature but ended up just injuring my big toe when I dropped it.

Every morning when he woke up he would unhook the cat from the wall where he had put him the night before because his damn purring kept him awake.

The title of this atrocity is at least one third off, possibly almost two as I am not legally divorced yet. The happy part. Shit, what is happy? Playing around with a bunch of electrons to show the world how witty you are as your real life goes down the toilet. A good old friend died this week. My first contemporary atrocity. I can't even decide what to decide to make of it, except that me, or any of us could be next in line.

Are these just long tweets or am I just warming up? I do have the urge to write something immortal before I go screaming into that good night. Could this blog take the interactive thing one step further. There would be sentences like: "I think the last sentence was a) good b)great c)awful. If you hit the c button a stream of electrons would come out of your computer and punch you in the nose. It wouldn't be that easy though. There would be trick questions and answerless ones too.

The cat doesn't mind sleeping on the wall, the hook was put in painlessly (I would never hurt an animal) I am thinking about getting one for the back of my neck myself so I could watch tv and when I nodded out and I wouldn't have to move anything, myself included.

You should read up on Johannes Brahms. He is going to play an important part in this narrative later. I am going to use the word "narrative" instead of "blog" which sounds like someone throwing up, which, I guess is what I am doing--throwing up words and watching them stick to the screen. It's great when you can end an entry wittily but unrealistic to think you can do it very often. Can't you just feel the plot gurgitating?

There are so many difficult parts to doing this in addition to just doing it and I feel I must air my laundry lest a reader, if there is one, get contaminated. Much, actually all of what I say pertains to me wretched personal life and why anybody should be interested in it is beyond me. Fuck, I'd get out if I could. But a close friend two years younger than me died a couple of days ago and if that's what getting out is, I guess I have to stay and make  a public asshole of myself.

For this thing to make any sense at all to a reader probably requires his or her knowing something about me and that is not something I am about to reveal. It is a sleeping dog and I am not going to poke it with a stick.  But the events that have exhausted this dog into its slumber, things like getting fired from a job of 25 years and being walked out on after a marriage of 25 years within a five year period for both are the sorts of things that happen, I believe, to Americans all over the country every day, except they don't whine and make such a big deal about it. They find new wives and new jobs and get on with their new lives, some considerably happier than their old ones.

Ah, that I could do that. I  wistfully wish for the good old days, although, with the help of a therapist, the more I looked at them, the less good they looked.
But they did provide a floor beneath my feet, which is something I no longer have, so I respect bad jobs and bad marriages much more than I did because they are so much better than bad nothing.

Actually, I got two cats, about whom I was attempting and may continue to attempt, if I am capable of attempting anything at this point, to write a book book, which was why I abandoned the blog after one shot. Though I was an editor for many years, I don't think I ever fully appreciated the difficulty of writing a book book (and this was before you had to have live monsters jump out of the pages), whereas writing a blog-- who the fuck knows exactly what it is and who the fuck  cares. I guess in my case, it's sort of my thought processes, if I may flatter myself, about everything except the blog.

Last year, in an attempt to structure the chaos of my life into something that resembled a novel or a coherent piece of nonfiction, I wrote seven hundred pages which three weeks after I had finished I found utterly unreadable and completely boring, You might say that this blog is that blah's Greatest Hits.
I am fairly certain it is an unhappy tale that will end unhappily, so if you prefer jollity, you should probably find another blog. I told you I would quickly find some sort of form. I am not there yet but it is starting to feel like the story of a man who thought he was happy, discovered he really wasn't and is making a last ditch effort to attain the happiness he thought he had. Or something like that. Thanks for listening. You deserve a drink or a funny hat.

OK. By popular demand (1 person), the blog struggles to get off its knees and do whatever it is blogs do, which in my case is largely figuring that. I fled to the blog not only because I have a fan (I had about 300 twitter followers but that's probably down a lot because I've been such a fucking mess that the very notion of being witty within a certain number of characters felt obscene), but also because I started reading a real novel, the first twenty pages of which were so good I felt like any novel I could write would be like offering my abc's for submission. And I read to get away from interactivity. The rest of my life is so interactive I can hardly do anything. So just stick some five armed creatures fucking women in tights anywhere you please. Yeah, that's great. Perfect. I like tweeting but I have no idea how the larger tweet-universe works beyone my less than 300 fans and the hundred or so I follow. Perhaps for people my age (oh, please don't make me say it), the fact that we are so fucked up on the internet (I spend half my life at the Genius bar) is the very reason we are hooked by it. We understand most of the other things in our lives, sex, nuclear war, global warming, cheesecake--but facebook?!! My daughter spent an hour making the case and all I could think of was all the years of effort I had spent avoiding certain people and then to just fall into their laps or worse, yet, have them fall into mine-- what a fucking nightmare. I tend to require form, so I will probably diddle around with this thing for a while and then it will become my reason for living. My novel is in big trouble so maybe this can be an anodyne. And to my fan, you lit up my life. I will not alert my throngs at Twitter that the boss is back in town.