Last night, I went to dinner with Viki and Doug. Viki’s purse was actually a battered paper bag, and she made us stop on the way home so she could buy Scotch-brand tape so she could hang the Orlando Bloom poster she found in Tiger Beat over her bed so she could reach new pinnacles of pleasure in the bedroom. She is thirty-seven. Doug is my ex-boyfriend. He blinks infrequently. He used to be a monk who blinked infrequently but not anymore.

I live a block away from a railroad tunnel. In the darkest hours of the night, I can hear the trains quite clearly, giant sewing machines rumbling along the tracks, stitching in time. Often, there is a whistle, quite melancholic, as train whistles are. (I have yet to hear of one that is jazzy.) There are fools in the current “administration” whose “heart’s” desire is to transport dangerously radioactive nuclear waste by train through population centers on its way west, west, west. Where it goes, nobody knows, but I’ll bet it glows. Sometimes, when I flush the toilet, I imagine how the water (and what’s in it) shoots through the pipes, joining a vast network of excrement that flows all around us like the Force. That’s what it will be like lying awake at night listening to dangerously radioactive nuclear waste zip by.

Tomorrow, I’m going to Minneapolis, but I’ve got stuff to do first, oh yes, an entire list. One of the things on the list is taking Goblin to the vet to have her urine extracted. She will not like that, but she brought it on herself for refusing to go in the Tupperware. I must also pay all of the bills I have forgotten about for the past month.

I already paid for the urine extraction, though.

Update: Jesus said that if you call someone a fool, you will burn in hell. I don't think this is very fair, as it is often the fool who is the worse person than the person who is merely pointing out this fact. George W. Bush comes to mind here. Not only is he a fool, but he blames all of his failures on the people who pointed out beforehand that his actions would lead to failure. I had thought Jesus was more sensible, but perhaps he is on the wingnuts' side after all.