Most of the Best of the Rest

For several days, Hoss has been telling how he spends his day. Some people my age (74 360/365ths) would just be going: "Got up, peed, ate, peed, watched TV, ate, napped, peed, watched TV, ate, went to bed. Got up to pee. Got back in bed." But I discovered you, so my day is lots more interesting than that. We are up to:

12:04 p.m. A new addition to my b**groll is Theresa, who is out of the projects, the first in her family to graduate from college, and who is writing a book. She might get some help from her twins:

Twin A: "This toothpaste tastes like butt."
Twin B: "How do you know what butt tastes like?"
Twin A: "Well, you were sitting on my head in Mom's tummy."

12:06 p.m. -- Also new is Tabor, a most interesting lady whose husband grows oysters in their back yard and who years back went fishing with Che Guevara and to dinner with Castro. But enough about him. Go find out about the amusing her and the new house she is building.

12:08 p.m. -- A professor at a London university, Huw, fascinated me with this illuminating sentence:

"Call me lazy, unromantic, a dour old pessimist, a socially inept hermit, but the stresses and strains of setting out with deliberate and purposeful womanising in mind leaves me nonplussed rather than excited as convention supposes it should." Don't let on that you know, but he since found a "special somebody." We'll see. But he sure can write. And so can Texas's Follow That Star, an engineer turned hairstylist who is an absolutely brilliant writer.

12:11 p.m. -- I head over to see (at right) Karla, whom I really appreciate because she tells stories on herself. Like the time she woke up drunk in an alley, or the time she raised maggots in the trunk of her car. Worth a visit, regularly. And so is my buddy Jana, who gave us her daughter's take on a song:

Daughter: "Let the rain fall down and bake my beans, let it wash away my celery."
Real Version: "Let the rain fall down and wake my dreams, let it wash away my sanity."

12:20 p.m. -- From there to the dirty words department. My buddy Autumn, over there in Minneapolis, is the ace of strong language. You remember George Carlin's "the 7 dirty words you can't say on radio"? You are warned, but, my goodness, she is funny. I calm down with some classic photographs by my buddy Deb, whose eye for beauty is superb. And I breath a sigh of relief that we have good people like Dr. Mike, who is down in Texas volunteering his time to help flood evacuees.

12:25 p.m. -- I gotta go see Portland's Betsy, who does a little bit of everything -- politics, whimsy, stories about her kids, who I think are 9 and 11 and who both have b**gs! And I visit with Inanna, who has great West Virginia stories but who is losing her grip on strong language. This is because, according to her son (age 9 or 10), "While you were sleeping I had doctors come in and do tests and you don't have any sailor blood."

(After I am done going through my b**roll, I will tell you how to write your Internet piece: "You sit at the keyboard, open a vein, and bleed.")

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My favorite word today is hope. Adj., smoke 'em if you got 'em. Def.: The desire of smokers that it is a particle of food lodged in their throat, not cancer, that is causing them to cough.