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This won’t be edited (if you can call it that) until Tuesday morning. “If everyone else around you is an asshole…” Crankenstein often says, paraphrasing an aphorism that serves as an elegant solution to what Leonard Cohen might’ve called a popular problem: “If everyone else is always the problem, maybe the problem isn’t everyone else.” […]

“Something’s wrong,” I told Crankenstein this evening, after Muriel joined us on the couch and leaned against me. A half-hour earlier, when I’d gone upstairs to shower, she seemed fine. But there was an unmistakable disturbance in the force — i.e., her joie de vivre — by the time I returned. “What?” Crankenstein asked, glancing

If I don’t jump off the McCheese hamster wheel tonight, I’m not sure it’ll happen again this month, so here we are.* My writing time this evening was spent working on a review that remains unfinished, like almost everything else in my life lately. The problem isn’t depression, if anyone’s worried about that — the

We were again woken up at 4 am by street noise, but there wasn’t a coked-up deliveryman doing his best Sonja Henie in a balaclava this time around: the disturbance was caused by a plow that a neighbor apparently hired to clear her driveway. Four hours later, tired and exasperated, we were at the grocery

The ZzzQuil I fantasized about on this very site last night sure would’ve come in handy just a few short hours later, when a ruckus on the street below roused me from a fragile sleep. Normally I would’ve assumed it was the fence-waterer next door being a drunken jackass, which is a common weekend occurrence.

I’m speechless tonight as we watch CNN’s wildfire coverage and worried about everyone, including friends and loved ones, in Los Angeles. A relative who is not yet under evacuation orders sent a screenshot earlier of a map with her location and those of the wildfires multiplying around her; other friends have left California in recent

Where’s Mrs. Garrett when you need her? We’ve been visited by a winter storm named Blair — traveling solo, nary a Natalie, Jo, or Tootie in sight — and are digging out from under a heckuva lot of snow and ice. I’ve been manning the blower and also spent cumulative hours clearing ice from our

There was a rare but embarrassing tech glitch here on Saturday night. What started as a McCheese entry became “A House and Its Head,” at which time I unstickied this thread and deleted the (incomplete) 1/4/25 entry. But then there was a cache error and the previous McCheese draft remained stickied and was served instead

This won’t be edited until Sunday morning. There’s a little laundry left to do tomorrow and a few more basement windows to insulate before the temperature plunges, but we’re close to winter-storm ready. What I wasn’t prepared for was the toll this week took on me physically and emotionally — and I’m not talking about

In last year’s New Year’s Eve post, I hopscotched through time and imagined what I’d tell my loved ones (and myself) if we were granted New Year’s do-overs. There’s undoubtedly newer, more relevant advice that I’d richly benefit from right now, but it’s only with hindsight that I’ll know what the hell it was, I