March 8th?

March 8th already. WTF? I haven't even thought about 2005 yet and we're almost .25 done with it. Whole weeks disappear unremarked. The weather tries to shock me out of such complacency. Yesterday, 70 degrees, almost too warm, last week's snow melting in a matter of hours and mucking up the yard. Today another inch of new snow, windchill in the teens, and I can't even open my composter because the lid is frozen shut. Sorry banana and orange peels--you'll have to wait!

The student assistant tonight has shown me:

A) randy poetry submitted to Grub Street

B) the randy cover of Stern magazine

C) her randy midriff

At Grand Cru Saturday I bought 12 bottles of wine only to have my former boss--the former head of the TU English Department, suddenly behind me at the counter--compliment me on my purchase. "Who else would have such a delicious selection? Enjoy it," she purred, a jaunty knit cap tilted to one side of her head, nails bright red, audacious earrings situated on the folds of a fat scarf with which they clashed. "Of course, how could one do otherwise?" she added.

I believe the wine makes time slide by; time is not only relative to speed, but to one's level of intoxication as well. Beer, curiously, deadens one's perception of time, and whiskey nigh on stops time in its tracks.

Here's what I told Eskimo today:

1) Do not read this month's Harper's magazine cover story!
2) Don't watch the rebroadcast of Frontline!
3) Americans care not a whit about morally questionable or objectionable behavior when they find themselves ideologically aligned with those engaged in said behavior.

Completely out of the blue I remembered The best line my mom ever came up with. Our family was staying in a cabin in the remotest region of Canada I've yet visited, and while some of us were eating breakfast Porc Heaven was rather audibly engaged with his girlfriend Dawn in their room. The thumping, gasping, growling, and squealing were hard to ignore, and my mom said: "Sounds like Porc Heaven woke up in the crack of Dawn this morning!" Dad coughed an entire unchewed raisin out his left nostril, Uncle Area 51 woke from his gin-induced stupor and proclaimed himself cured of all Philadelphia Experiment-related illnesses, BroJ caught four sizable perch, a 36 inch bass, a pike longer than his arm, then said simply: "I don't get it," and I went outside and skimmed stones across a lake surface solid and reflective as flecked glass. Later that night BroJ, Porc Heaven, Dawn and I would nearly die capsizing our boat in a drunken accident--but that story is for another time, as is the one about Bill Funk the decorative arts collector trying to get Julio and I into his bed at the same time in San Fran; the one about Buf losing his cool when some truckdrivers were harrassing his wife in the Hofbrauhaus--I finally had to intervene because he wouldn't help her out and he ran off into the Englischer Garten at 2am; or the one about the confidence scammers on the Dingle Peninsula who could've robbed us all blind were it not for the ever-alert M. Traveling Jones; or the time I misbehaved so badly at my grandma's house she called the preacher and told him I had a devil in me, and he and I debated Scripture for hours seated at her clear-plastic coated kitchen table with the Bible verse placemats and bottles of Watkins vitamins.

These tales all come later.