Yesterday I spent the whole day trying to convince myself and others that I am so important as a human being that I have to abbreviate everything I say, do, and think into text-message-speak. I mean, I don't have time to do such random things as spell and pronounce. I got an image to uphold for chrissakes. Spelling is for losers and pronunciation is strictly for the literate...aka gays. I am 2 imprtnt 2 do dat. So I spent the whole day texting and emailing ppl with mssgs that looked like this...

One of the terrible but beautiful things about YouTube.com is that, if you watch enough of the posted videos made by people in their own homes, you can begin to get a startlingly exacting picture of the content of the indoors of the more-or-less developed world. (For the sake of this story the more-or-less developed world is that part which has high-speed internet connectivity and inhabitants with computers powerful enough to take advantage of that connectivity). There are millions of folks p...

Our little darling Bonnie celebrated her first birthday a couple of weeks ago by saying the word "gardenware." I swear that is what she said. The past couple of months she has been planning her attack on the refined art of walking upright. She is methodical, calculating, philosophical, artistic and strong...a genius renaissance woman. She tests and applies laws of physics while simultaneously plucking flowers, singing, and performing deep squats. Today her weeks and weeks of intense calculat...

One day soon, if there is any fairness in this world, Google will disappear up its own ass in a blaze of binarily-notated suction unprecedented on the virtual streets of cybertown. It will drag in with it all improper fractions, awkward percentages, the formula for calculating the mass of a family size isosceles pizza wedge, and most likely Pye. It will then emerge, eventually, as a new universe made up entirely of useless links to hopeless websites which also will have disappeared up their o...

Our dog, Barn-Boy (not his real name), has formed a startlingly close relationship with our as-yet-unborn child. For several months now Barn-Boy has been trying to undermine my authority as leader of our pack. He has used every weapon in his arsenal. He has jumped up into our bed and tried to kick me on to the floor while pretending to be asleep. He knows the sleeping hours are my achilles heel. He knows I am not really in my body. Oh no. During the sleeping hours, or, as dogs call them, the ...

Day 6: Still no word from God. Audrey Auld, the country singer, is my MySpace friend now. And the Ben Smith Band is my MySpace friend... all five of them, apparently. This is on top of last week snaring both Sting and Buddha. Buddha is a DJ in Boston. He even sent me an intrusive MySpace bulletin about his next gig... he suggested I bring along some of my party-animal friends. When I got his bulletin I thought: "Everyone is blanket marketing, nowadays." And Deepak Chopra, who`s pure essence i...

My wife and child are due back from visiting with the relatives in Germany next week. For the past six and a half weeks I have watched approximately two hours of television....total. And that was just to keep my sister company when she visited a couple of weeks ago. She has a bad hip. I am over TV. But there are, I admit, some things I will look forward to watching on the tube on rare occasions. Once per month I shall turn on the TV for an update on CNN news reports. Not to keep abreast of th...

Our dog, Barn-Boy (not his real name), has formed a startlingly close relationship with our as-yet-unborn child. For several months now Barn-Boy has been trying to undermine my authority as leader of our pack. He has used every weapon in his arsenal. He has jumped up into our bed and tried to kick me on to the floor while pretending to be asleep. He knows the sleeping hours are my achilles heel. He knows I am not really in my body. Oh no. During the sleeping hours, or, as dogs call them, the ...

When I was working at the central post office in the city there was a guy on the graveyard shift called Dwayne Eddy. This struck me as odd when I first heard his name called out over the P.A. system because I knew that name belonged to a famous and innovative guitar player from the 1950s who was instrumental in the development of the rock and pop guitar sound. But Dwayne Eddy`s name used to get called out over the PA at least once every night for the three years or so that I was working there...

Capricorn: In a fit of unbridled creativity you will decide to stay indoors for the rest of the month, film everything you do from every conceivable angle, simultaneously filming yourself filming it with a second camera, and then upload everything onto YouTube, having neglected to remove the lens caps from either of the two video cameras in the first place. Pisces: It is better to steal a wet week than to drown all your sorrows under a dead doorknob. Libra: Free yourself of all your earthly b...