I have to give a shout out to Bokonon [http://quantilary.blogspot.com/] for his absolutely f*ing brilliant summary of the paradox of artistic expression (its in the "March 30" entry although it is really April but don't tell him that because he also thinks its 1877and Rutherford B. Hays is president). Anyway, B sums up the ambivalence, the frustration and the uncertainty that undergirds my own numerous incomplete attempts to generate art. More importantly: his observations are concise -- "spare" in the nomenclature of East Coast & Oprah Book literati (along with "pale" and "luminous").

I get sick of writers writing on and on about the joy but especially the agony of writing. Agh. How dull. How dreary. How positively self-absorbed can it get? The only thing duller than writers bitching about writing is writers bitching about writers bitching about writing, but since irony died with 9-11 (conveniently for George W.) As Oscar Wilde once said: [insert obligatory Oscar Wilde quote here]. While you're chuckling at Wilde I'll just shut my mouth and spare you further pale attempts at luminous wit.

Alright, here's something to do. I used to do it as a kid:

1. Take your hand, k?

2. Hold it up to your face.

3. Lick your palm. Get it good and wet, k?

4. Now sniff it. (hint: scroll down)
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
How does that smell?
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I used to do that when I was a kid.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I'm glad I grew up.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Now get back to work, you!

Here is a funny website with which to pass the time while I catch up on rest after my marathon 48 hour paper-writing marathon:

"The Cult Construction Kit"

http://www.fadetoblack.com/cultkit/

Well, the air is full of allergens and woke up with a head full of em. They're pouring out on their own, though, so I don't have to go in there with a bucket and a straw.

Y'all hear that Nina Simone died yesterday? I heard that. I didn't know who she was by name, but when I heard her voice I knew: she was that great vocal master that dies every week on NPR but you never heard of, except Simone truly *was* great by the sound of her. Why do they keep Matchbox 20 and Weezer in endless rotation when Nina Simone has been out there all this time? *Sigh*. Its probably Clearchannel's fault somehow. Anyway, I heard her singing the obligatory Dylan cover and *damn* it was sweet. Why is it that everybody can do Dylan better than Dylan? Don't get me wrong -- I love the guy. Not loving Dylan is a bit like not loving yourself, 'cuz we all got a little bit of Blackjack Davey in us. I'm just saying that he gets on my nerves at times and his voice sometimes needs Jesus more than he does. Anyway.

So yesterday I'm told I pulled a "George Castanza". Apparently he's that short fat guy on the chicken commercial with Evan from Joe Millionaire. Here's the scene last night at school:

I'm in class, the sun is setting. Yellow buds drift by outside the window. Beautiful women all around. It might be a moment for nostalgia and reflection, but instead I have to listen to my colleagues discuss their projects: child labor in Baltimore, antebellum black elections in Rhode Island, Nixon's Civil Rights record... The prof is a tough, rolly-polly New Yorker named Kraut who likes to say things like "Once in a conversation with the late Stephen Ambrose, I said..." etc. (He hardly needs to drop names: he's a CNN star and one of the finest historians I've ever encountered.) Anyway, folks are droning on. I'm droning on. Everybody' is droning on. We make a beehive sound like a bunch of nursury school kids singing "God Bless America." Everybody's bored. I'm getting hungry. I'm dreaming about all yellow jujubees stuck beneath the change dispenser in my car. (I hate yellow jujubees. Even though I love the color yellow and I love lemons. I hate yellow candy, period. Fuck yellow candy. Yellow candy it gets culled and stuck to things.) Anyway, break time comes. Five minutes of freedom. I think I can make it to my car in time. I start hurrying out the door, but out of the corner of I my eye I see it...

It.

Golden.

Sublime.

Relatively uneaten.

Snugly secured in a box.

A DONUT box.

Resting on the top layer of the trashcan.

A DONUT.

A single, unfrosted cake donut.

My favorite.

I simply could not *believe* my good fortune. Of all the types of culinary baked goods eaten in in the world, unfrosted, unpretentious cake donuts are among my favorite. No gritty atomic cinnamon to overwealm me or sickly sweet FD&C # 40 red syrup -- just sugar and baked, brown dough. Furthermore, of all the entire universe of boxes out there: refrigerator boxes, cable boxes, boxcars, there are very few I would ever contemplate eating out of, but a donut box happens to be one of them.

Without calculating the odds of catching SARS, lockjaw, E. Coli or all the other possible illnesses one can acquire eating garbage, I stealthily ambled up to the trashcan, flipped the lid of the box and snagged that winsome, forlorn O-of-pure-good-fortune and devoured it on the way out the door. Note: the trashcan was about 3 feet from the door but the donut was gone before I even reached the hallway. I ate it so fast bacteria on it didn't have time to metastasize. It hit my belly quicker than a carton of Egg Fu Yung at a frat party. But not before being noticed by, of all people, Ann.

Let me just say a few words about Ann. There are few keener-eyed people in this world than Ann. She is intensely observant, and is not prone to keeping things to herself. Fortunately, she also possesses an acute sense of humor, is fun, and likes to drink beer.

"Did you just pull a George Castanza?" Ann said, laughing.

"MM?" (mouthfull)

She explained the whole scenario. A danish on top of the trashcan. George eating it, etc. Seinfeld whining. A perfect analogy. I allowed the possibility that I had pulled a George Castanza. She shook her head and walked away. (If you ask me, she was just jealous that I had gotten there first)

A few minutes later I sat down in my chair again and prepared to listen to more of my colleagues discuss their projects, when Cindy leaned over in her chair -- [note to the world: Cindy is the type of individual who, regardless of the health of your self-esteem and the satisfaction you may feel in every other aspect of love, life and existence, you cannot help, upon finding yourself in her company, that you possess some charismatic trait that, however fleeting, will inspire her to flash a smile or say a few words. But I digress.] -- Cindy leans over in the chair and says,

"Did you pull a George Castanza?"

[*Doh!*]

I wasn't sure if she had actually witnessed my depravity, or merely overheard my conversation with Ann. Perhaps I had crumbs on my face. Fortunately, she was smiling as she spoke, but I definitely detected a glimmer of disgust in her voice reminiscent of the tone my sisters used to use when they'd catch me munching on a 9 inch long, two-part, bloody, hairy booger.

I considered delivering a witty response, or rather I considered how much I *wished* I could think of a witty response to dispel the look I was *sure* she was giving me, but truth be told I wasn't sure what look she had on her face because at that moment I happened to glance at the trashcan (perhaps in the hope that *it* might contain my witty response) and lo! What was that? Something I'd missed on my previous pass? Indeed, it appeared to be just that:

Within that selfsame box of baked deliciousness, obscured by the misty sheen of transuded vestigal moisture from its previous contents, was yet *another* member -- or the better portion thereof -- of that exclusive fraternity of moist, cakely, (unfrosted) donutkind...

Suddenly, all thoughts of reputation, mouth crumbs, and grandstanding, fled. Myopic eye-narrowing set in. The yellow buds and the sunset dimmed beyond all sight.

"Excuse me," I muttered hastily to whoever might have been listening, slipping out of my chair, and ambling discreetly toward the trashcan...

One great thing about the web is there is guaranteed to be a minimum of 59,710 instantaneous conduits to "the p-word" and no, I'm not talking about porn. I'm talking about, whate else: procrastination. Lately I've been developing this into an art. For instance, last night in preparation for the unstarted 35 page paper due Thursday on POW/MIAs, I watched "Twelve Monkeys". Bruce Willis did his usual bangup job brooding, frowning, and remaining entirely inscrutable until the obligatory slo-mo messianic death scene ended the misery (how many times do I have to watch Blade Runner?). Fortunately for us Willis always turns out to have a sense of honor, or we'd be in trouble. I really like Bruce Willis. He's a better action hero than Stallone, Schwartzenegger, Cage, Douglass, Gibson, Seagall, Van Damme, and Vin Diesel combined. In fact, I'd like to put Willis in a WWF wire cage match with Willem DeFoe (minus the geeky goblin carapace). Willis would glare with half-lidded fury into DeFoe's bug eyes until one of them cracked and went all Fight Club on the other. Speaking of DeFoe, I think he matches Christopher Walkin pound for pound for sheer psychotic creepiness. DeFoe also trumps Gary Oldman, sorry to break it to you G.O. fans out there. Oldman is good but he rolls his eyes and dribbles dribbles spittle far too often for my taste. While I'm at it, here's my short list of overrated actors in case anyone out there remains unmiffed: Connery (go back to Scotland and quit trying to be my father), Nicholson (time for a new jeer), Pacino (good actor, predictable as hell), Robin Williams (yeah, we *know* you're sensitive), on and on. I like: Bradd Pitt (he rocked in "12 monkeys"), Johnny Depp ("Fear and Loathing", "Chocolat") and I *really* like Nicole Kidman ("Others", some morning show I saw a few weeks ago). I know its trendy to talk about how great Kidman is, but she really is phenomenal. I think Tom Cruise is a pretty fair actor too. Jackie Chan is better than all of them and he could kick Bruce Lee in the eye ANY DAY. There's a bunch more, of course, but I haven't got time to discuss them because what I really logged on to say was that all of you should log off of "hotornot.com" for a moment and check out the "belief-o-matic" on beliefnet.com. Its a survey that tells you how your beliefs conform to various well established dogmas. Here's my score:

1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Secular Humanism (92%)
3. Liberal Quakers (92%)
4. Theravada Buddhism (87%)
5. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (83%)
6. Taoism (75%)
7. Neo-Pagan (66%)
8. Bahá'í Faith (66%)
9. Nontheist (63%)
10. Mahayana Buddhism (62%)
11. Jainism (56%)
12. Sikhism (52%)
13. New Age (50%)
14. Orthodox Quaker (49%)
15. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (47%)
16. Reform Judaism (47%)
17. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (46%)
18. Hinduism (41%)
19. New Thought (39%)
20. Scientology (36%)
21. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (34%)
22. Seventh Day Adventist (26%)
23. Jehovah's Witness (25%)
24. Eastern Orthodox (21%)
25. Islam (21%)
26. Orthodox Judaism (21%)
27. Roman Catholic (21%)

If anybody needs me, I'll be lashing myself with limp calamari, eating chocolate eggs and drinking Manachewitz wine in church...er...temple...I mean in ziggaraut...

(just in case of course)
(sure beats studying)

Last night the tempurature dropped 30 degrees. When we went to bed it was a smoking 80 and humid. By the time I began my nightly ruminations at 1:00 the wind was up, but it was still hot.

By 2:00 the wind was really going, but there was a coolness behind it. The pink walls of my house were wild with shadows from the outside.

By 2:30 I was out in the living room, head against the stereo blasting "Clocks" over and over, gazing out at the orange sky, watching cyprus bob and joust. There were flashbacks to the cabin and the river -- all my friends and uncles on the porch playing music, hot dogs on paper plates, that heavy sensation that comes after days of water and sun. Once there was a fire up the canyon, somewhere on the Kaiser ridge. The sun turned salmon. Ashes rained for days.

My wife woke up around 3:00 and we talked about our plans. Her mom will be in the hospital soon for radical chemo. Two weeks, perhaps. My old man called last Sunday and said he has cancer again -- a different kind this time. Everybody is optimistic about everybody, of course. Nothing to worry about at all. Just routine scalpals and sonograms and get well cards, flowers. Everyone brave and efficient, quiet plans tucked away in file cabinets just in case. Guilty refiguring of the odds at every piece of news and entirely too much waiting. The tempo of illness is far slower than the tempo of worry.

By 4:00 the air was in the fifties and thin enough to breathe. The orangeness dimmed slowly and finally went dark.

Although I am supposed to be transcribing an interview I did a few weeks ago with a woman whose husband vanished over Laos in 1965, I've found myself instead repeatedly snarling and lunging at a cute little grey squirrel on the porch who keeps trying to eat my wife's tulips. Its not that I'm not sympathetic to the little guy: some years ago a mean ol' construction company mowed down his ancestral oak tree, put in a cozy little cinderblock apartment, painted the walls pink, and left the squirrels to fend for themselves. They do so by eating whatever flora remains to be eaten. So I am sympathetic, but I have to keep things in perspective. These little grey squirrels are not native to the area. They spread from the midwest some centuries ago, to be replaced there by eastern red squirrels who used to live here. Some kind of habitat-switch, I guess. Perhaps a bit like that show where everybody goes to Pier 1 and buys trinkets to decorate somebody else's living room with. Well, come to think of it, it is not like that at all. Anyway, not being native to the area, these squirrels have no natural right to eat tulips belonging to other creatures -- even other creatures not-native to the area themselves (i.e. white Australian women). I might add that it would be just as immoral for my wife to eat the tulips, although this moral construct becomes problematic when the discussion shifts to the basil plant she planted next to the tulips. But forget about that for the moment. Since its clear no one has the right to eat the tulips, and since I have a can of peanuts next to me, I chuck the peanuts at the squirrel to keep it off the flowers. I wonder if that's the best tactic. It might be a little bit like chucking raw meat at a dog to keep it from begging for scraps...

I added two blogs to my list: "A Little Bit of Cyn" is one of my all time favorites. Its one of the blogs that inspired me to start blogging a few years ago. "Rabbit Blog" is a new one I found and I'm not sure who is writing it, but her writing style is low-key and, for lack of a more precise term, polished. It reminds me a bit of "Hometown Unicorn".

On other fronts:
I think vagueness is one of the least understood concepts in the English lexicon. Is anybody clear on it? Is it even possible to have a clear idea about vagueness? I'll be up all night thinking about that one. Maybe I'll fling that up to the fellows on Pluto and see if they can sort it out for me.

Let me just say that after all this thinking I've done and all the advanced degrees I've taken, its all only about one thing in the end:

Its all about rockabilly.

Driving down Nebraska Ave, passing the Swiss Embassy with its perenially running foo-foo mercedes benzes and sallow-faced, sunglass-clad goons named Jarl who could snap my neck like a Nestle bar, passing trees so full of spring flowers they look like pink and white Hostess(TM) Sno-balls, passing the usual medly of attractive, bored co-eds at the bus stop...passing all of that and leaving behind nothing but a blast of smoke and a momentary fragment of J.J. Cale's "Devil in Disguise" upon the wind. Its the ultimate "road-trip rockabilly". Here's the lyrics in case you ever need to get away in a hurry:

From the California shore to New York City
The beat don't never stop
You can hear it on the radio anywhere you go
It's steady as the rhythm of a clock
It cuts through the noise of the city life
It won't seem to go away
It's the devil in disguise I tell you no lies
My fingers do the walking everyday

Yonder comes a young girl she wants to take a whirl
She thinks it's all a dream
She got rock and roll way down in her soul
She wants to know where's the limousine
Get up honey let your mama sit down
You're too young anyway
The devil in disguise give her the price
Then you can carry her away

When the road I travel starts to unravel
Every which way it goes
The beat starts to press on my bullet proof vest
And my high turns out to be low
Give me my guitar I'm going to go far
Let me see it let me hold it in my hand
I'm the devil in disguise I tell you no lies
I'm playing in a rock 'n roll band

Today's got several things going for it. For one thing, it isn't yesterday. That sounds like a truism, but it isn't: yesterday was particularly heinous. I took my big nasty 4 hour test. It was hectic and I didn't organize my answers well, but my wife read the photocopy swore it looked good to her. She'd pass me.

But forget about yesterday. Today started off as well as a day could, which doesn't require elaboration other than to say that the beautiful spring weather and brand new tulips open on the porch weren't the sum of it. Nor was the exquisitely brewed gourmet coffee, which is usually all it takes. We read the paper awhile, skipping the war for a change, went for the funnies and book reviews, clipped coupons. Then we drove up to Ikea which is an errand I normally detest, but pennance had to be paid. I kind of enjoyed myself (but don't tell anyone who knows my wife). Ikea is basically European Wal-Mart, but with lower quality products and *impossible* directions. Last time I'd been up there I'd finegaled a deal so that I wouldn't have to return for a full year. I'm not sure what I offered in exchange. It is quite possible I just whined like a baby and maintained a sour disposition for the duration. Either way, my time had expired and new furnature was in order. (To be fair, the busted table was a flimsy piece of shit: it was basically just three dowels sticking out of a pressboard disk covered by a piece of fabric). Anyway, we bought a thing with drawers that wasn't too expensive.

Then we went to the Kawasaki Grill in the Inner Harbor. I would argue that its the best Japanese in Baltimore, and stands up to any I've had anywhere. Of course I've never eaten Japanese anywhere else in Baltimore, and I've only been to a dozen or so other Japanese restaurants total, but I'm confident in my expertise. Its inexpensive and looks out onto that cool old boathouse where "Homicide" was filmed.

After lunch we drove up to Fresh Fields and spent a rediculous amount of student loan money on the usual assortment of delicious yuppie food: olive bread, dead sea salt, papaya.

Then we came home and took naps.

When my wife is done putting the furnature together, we're going out for ice cream...

Definitely a good day.

Mea Culpa

Well, last night I inadvertangly got soused. I say "inadvertantly" because what started as a cordial session with the honorable Evan Williams turned into a 3 hour alcohol binge replete with incoherent raving, broken furnature and keys flung angrily into the closet (from which they emerged after 40 minutes of searching since they had somehow come to rest inside a discarded purse at the bottom of the closet...).

Needless to say my behavior was deplorable and embarrassing. I became a poster child for why people shouldn't drink whiskey without adult supervision. Fortunately I have a wife with just enough tolerance to put up with my occasional tirades but not enough to encourage my many bad habits.

It all started when I was cooking dinner and talking to a friend on the phone -- a great friend whom I miss and don't talk to enough. After we hung up I got to missing *all* my people. I got to missing California. I expressed a sense of isolation to my wife. She ventured the opinion that maybe I was just a "lonely person", which I couldn't argue with, which I agree with, but which broke my heart to hear. Especially coming from her, since she'll probably blame herself for not being able to keep me company every mile of that long windy prarie where I keep my heart.

I realized that I wasn't just lonely, I was angry, too. There's a wellspring of anger I've been trying not to dip from because its poison, but its been running over the top. I'd need a twenty gallon hat to collect it. All this war and world trouble, its getting to me. Snipers. Yellowjackets. Love of country cut with a newfound and abiding shame. Back in Cali there's issues among folks I wouldn't care to describe, issues that aren't really my business but I couldn't meaningfully weigh in on even if they were. Probably that's what bugs me most of all. Little things seem bigger than they ought to from far away.

Out here I've got career prospects in the works. Yesterday I turned down an interview to work for the Senate Finance Committee. They wanted an archivist to do research and a large quantity of data entry. I didn't get a graduate degree to do data entry even if it *was* for the most powerful so and so in the city. Plus I got carpal tunnel syndrome from constantly pouring my soul out on this blog. Anyway, not having a job isn't what worries me. I'm worried about *getting* a job. Getting job means getting *stuck* in a job. Getting stuck in a job means getting stuck in D.C. and committing to the East Coast. It means resigning myself to bi-yearly trips to see the moms and the pops and the peeps. It means saying goodbye to Pacific blue and Sierra campfires.

My old man went out to Galileo Hill with my six year old nephew last week. They had a great time alone together just grandpa and grandson. My dad and I used to do similar things. We'd go out to the Providence Mountains, the Mojave tortoise reserve, Red Rock Canyon, Death Valley. We'd hike around. He'd birdwatch. I'd pick up geodes and bullet shells. I found a phatty crystal once in some bone dry hills near the Nevada line (and when you're close to Nevada, you're far from everywhere else). We saved an endangered tortoise on the side of the interstate once. My dad picked it up so I could get a photograph of it. It pissed all over his leg. Good times those were. I'm glad my nephew gets to have his share of good times with my old man.

Anyway, where was I. Oh yeah. Lately I've had my head in too many books. I haven't been doing the right kind of internal, reflexive maintenance on life (geeks might call it "self de-fragging"). I've been neglecting the finer side of life: the laughter, the idleness, the whimsy. Friends have been put on the back burner, plans have been pushed aside. I suppose thats why I was in such a mean mood last night. Everything I looked at was cloudy. Sure, by the end of the evening I was guilty of mentally pistol-whipping a few dozen deserving culprits, and yelling past midnight, and just generally being a sonofabitch. Sure, the splinters of the night table attest to the precariousness of my mental and physical balance. But that's immaterial. Its just another hammer blow to the liver and the unsupportable edifice between self-control and self-delusion. Call it lowbrow drama and recognize we're all entitled to it. There's no problem there. My *real* sin is that I've been treating life like an ordeal, like its just something to get through as if maybe there's something better waiting on the other side. Thats the shame of it because I know its the biggest lie of all. Its spiritual perjury and it don't take the Honorable Evan Williams and a jury of my peers to pronounce me guilty.

If anybody needs me I'll be breaking rocks down at the quarry. Either that or I'll be at Ikea shopping for a new nightstand.

My day so far:

1. Drank coffee and watched Maury Povitch berate slutty 13-year olds for smoking crack and trying to make babies. Watched the host of "Crossing Over" dazzle puffy old women with lame psychic dog tricks. Man, that guy is ugly. No matter how much soft light they put on him he still looks like he got his face caught in an industrial steam press.

2. Placed a call to my attorney. Discussed strategies for installing him as future president of Iran. Contemplated my own future run for political office (i.e. who we'd have to bribe &/or threaten to keep their mouth shut about my sordid past). Refined plans for starting a cult-like religion with ourselves as megalomaniac narcissistic prophets. Re-confirmed that we're far too lazy and sweet to be evil geniuses. Switched conversation to retirement plans, bland Hungarian food, and the weather.

3. Blasted "Journey" down Highway 95 into D.C. Unrolled the window. Recklessly weaved in and out of traffic to re-establish that I just didn't give a fuck. (About what I did not specify, and now that the euphoria has passed, it is quite possible that I was suffering from a moment of spring-induced false-consciousness)

4. Made it to school. Answered the obligatory "are you ready for comps" questions. Graciously recevied the necessary "you'll do fine" pep-rallies.

5. Pulled out my study materials. Played 90 minutes of dope wars. Won millions of dollars selling Crack and Special K to virtual children.

6. Here I am. Wee.

[Stay tuned for my next move...]

Last night I witnessed an all-time low for cell-phone usage. Keep in mind, I've been spending the past several years in universities, where cell phones ringing during lectures has become almost pedestrian. I've had my peace and quiet shattered on public transportation by commuters sporting these infernal devices. I've suffered the standard near-fatal collisions with prattling zone-cases in SUVs (especially in Olny, where the "intersection of near-death" can be found). I've snickered at the geeky headsets people think are so bad, especially when they try to be incognito and end up wandering around muttering into their lapels like crazies. So I've seen it all. At least I thought so.

Last night I was cajoled into bowling with my inlaws. I won't venture any opinions about bowling at the present time. Bowling hardly requires parody or comment. But the guy next to me was talking on a cell phone *while he was rolling*. That was too much. Far too much. It was clearly a transgression of some kind, though I'm not sure against whom or what. Maybe against all of us. [cue patriotic music and soft light] Against every little 'merican child (born and unborn) who wants to grow up in a world free of multi-tasking. Against the grandma and daughter out for a quiet evening on the town together. Against puppies and cherry pie and stickball. There should be laws.

One thing you can always count on here at Panacylum is this: I'll always lay it on the line for you, tell it how it is (or at least how I see it). So when I say this or that and it seems too raw to be believed, you can be sure there's no one here beside me with a gun to my head. More than that, you can be sure that by speaking the troof in the way I do I'm kissing off more than one political career, and the shadow government in this city will *never* hire me. I don't worry about it: this mouth of mine is better for yakking up a storm than for kissing babies and keeping secrets. So believe me when I say this:

I'm not sorry that Michael Kelly bit the dust in Baghdad. For all of you out there who don't know who Michael Kelly was, he was an editor for Atlantic Monthly but, more to my displeasure, he was also a columnist for the Washington Post. Now being a columnist for the Post doesn't necessarily win my everlasting emnity, but Mr. Kelly was a particularly reprehensible excuse for a journalist. He was a mean-spirited, petty, vituperitive, wag without an ounce of respect for any ideas outside a narrow range of endless self-righteous, right-wing, pro-war, pro-Sharon, pro-death diatribes. To put it less mildly: he was a demagogue, not a journalist. He was Rush Limbaugh with a typewriter who felt that ad hominim invective was a perfectly professional posture for a columnist. He had the unfailing certitude of Charles Krauthammer but without the occasional glimmer of prehensile imagination, he had the conservative compass of William Safire but without the refreshing quality of independent thought, and finally he had the snyde smugness of George Will but without the occasionally brilliant turn-of-phrase.

Am I a mean-spirited son of a bitch for eulogizing a man so? Maybe. But I'm taking my cue partly from his dry-eyed father who, on the news tonight, wondered aloud whether his son's death was "a tragedy" or not. His wife assured him that it was, but he reminded her that we all have to die sometime.

People can turn Michael Kelly into a hero or a martyr if they want to -- but don't believe he had the motives of other journalists out there putting it on the line to openly inform you about the war in Iraq. He wanted war. He asked for war. He got war. It killed him. I didn't wish the man Michael Kelly death for his infuriating small-mindedness, but I'm not sorry he's gone. His pen was mightier than a sword, but it might as well have been a sword for all the hurtful slashing he did with it. And you know what happens to people who live by swords...

Its not often I get midnight messages from Pluto. As such, whenever it happens, or whenever I *suspect* that it is happening, I first consider all other alternate possibilities, such as:

1. Have I been drinking? (if so, where did my beer go?)

2. Has anyone *else* been drinking? (whose drinking without me?)

3. Has anyone (i.e. my wife) utilized my cranium for temporary rolling-pin storage? (not sure. those birds flying around my scalp might just be signs of spring)

In the absence of clear answers to these questions, as well as any identifiable sense of reality, I am forced to conclude as I concluded last night around midnight that the message which suddenly sprung into my head was likely one of those rare but important communiques from the 9th planet. Due to its crypic nature (its more of an unanswerable question or koan than a true "message") I'm guessing it got garbled in the radiation from the sun's corona, probably winged off the icy flume of some wayward comet, and flopped into my brain where I spent several long hours trying to sort it out. Failing that, or at least recognizing that my own cognitive prowess is limited by a certain quantity of what I vainly consider "rationality", I figured I'd drop it out there for all you crazies out there to decipher. Give it as much thought as you can -- I think it must be important to the Plutoans if they've been beaming it all over the universe. Here's the "message":

If he can, should a man cancan?

Without wishing to prejudice anyone who may have different ideas, I'll put forth my own meagre conclusions based upon this seemingly important communique.

1. Perhaps the Plutoans deciphered the great golden disk on the front of Voyager and from it learned the cancan, but are confused by the androginous stick-figures of humans dancing. (Did anyone think to include stick-penises on those stick-figures? And I shudder to think what a stick-vagina would look like.)

2. Perhaps the cancan is all the rage up there. The Plutoan year is longer than ours -- maybe French kick-dancing invented in 1828 was only a few years ago for them. Just think, they've still got to get through the Macarena, the Smurf, the Rodger Rabbit, the Robocop, Vanilla Ice... We'd better get some anthropologists up there quick so we can study our own past before it wings out into deep space.

3. The word "can" is problematic here. To use the new nomenclature, it has been "problematized." Does "can" refer to *ability* in our "man"? Or does it refer to *permission*? In other words, are they asking "if a man has the ability to do this particular dance, ought he?" or are they perhaps implying that someone needs to give a hypothetical man the go-ahead to cancan before he actually does so? (if the former, I give a qualified "sure", depending upon the quality of his legs and his self-confidence before some unfathomably, unguessably, unknowable galactic audience the composition of which I would not even care to imagine) (if the latter, I wonder why the Plutoans are asking me? Do *I* somehow hold the key to mens liberation on Pluto?)

4. What are the parameters of the word "should"? Is this a moral question? Will children be scarred by observing men cancan? Is it somehow a saftey issue? Do Plutoan men have fragile, icy bones or are we somehow talking about Earthmen with their fragile, icy egoes?

As you can see its all very vague and messy. It will take me a very long time to sort through. Maybe I'm the inadvertant victim of a Plutoan prankster, whimsically blasting the universe with rediculous questions. If so, I feel dirty and used. Then again, maybe it was an existentialist spaceman seeking to imbue universal feelings of cosmic inadequacy. If so, I am assuredly inadequate and therefore the newest member of some burgeoning pan-planetary movement. Where do I send my dues? When you send me the bumper sticker and t-shirt, send me some context.

I need to find a way to get that message to Pluto. Any suggestions? I'm running low on solid gold disks at the moment.