What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say. 

Sixteen tons and whaddaya get? Another day older and deeper in debt.

WORST MONDAY EVER.

I had 75 minutes of one of the worst dictators in the history of humankind. If you guessed Robert Mugabe, Kim Jong-Il, or Hu Jintao, you'd be wrong. I am of course referring to my arch nemesis, Listhping Filipino Woman.

I have been working since 4:00 this morning (not to mention the typing I did over the weekend) and have almost 80 documents to show for it. Usually doctors will just have all of their progress notes typed in one document, but this doc wants each note in its own separate document. As you can imagine, this is a gigantic butt-ache. The very worst part is that the pay rate for this account is criminally low.

It all makes for the most excruciating mental anguish. I put my head down on my desk and cried a couple of times. I think what bothers me the most is how clumsy and disjointed I feel when typing for this account. It's like being a crosscountry runner and trying to win a race with your feet hobbled together.

Now I think I'm going to curl up in my little recliner with a pile of sleepy cats, have one last pity party, and take a nap. I am toast, and I still have to work later.

If you live, your time will come

There was a field behind our house when we were kids. We called it The Field, but it was really a farm. What was left of a farm, anyway. Just a small scrap of acreage surrounded by suburbia on three sides and forest preserve on the fourth, but to us it was A Field. The herds of deer that communed there at dawn and dusk were like something straight out of a Disney movie. During the summer the air above The Field was lit up by thousands and thousands of lightning bugs. They were so unbelievably numerous; there was only a matter of inches between each impossible glow. Like the warm night sky had somehow drifted down to cover our neighborhood like a blanket, putting the stars suddenly within reach. We never collected the lightning bugs in jars like kids always did in stories -- there was no need. All you had to do was sweep your arm through the air and then just watch them shimmer in your cupped hands. To this day it's still one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. True magic. I couldn't understand how we could be so lucky to have such a thing in our own backyard.

We were devastated when the farmer finally sold The Field to developers. The bulldozers came in and pulled down the trees and scared away the deer and flattened the tall grasses that used to whisper as they moved in the breeze. The lightning bugs never returned.

The machines worked relentlessly, pushing the earth up into great mounds that shed rainwater and mud directly into our basements. The new houses stared straight down into our backyards like disinterested, judgmental spectators with square unblinking eyes.

Still, we were children and we were adventurous, and we salvaged what we could from the situation. We explored every inch of those houses as they were being built, first stepping through the skeletons and trying to imagine seeing walls instead of sky; then sneaking in through unlocked doors and windows, creeping up half-finished stairways to stampede down roughed-in hallways in a race to claim the best bedroom. This was important, you must understand, because we shared a very deep and abiding dream about Upstairs Bedrooms. We had long been of the opinion that the deepest, truest magic of Christmas would be revealed to us only when we were able to tumble from our beds at dawn on Christmas morning and race down a proper staircase to the living room, which would of course have a proper fireplace with a proper mantel from which to hang our stockings. Those stairs, that fireplace...they were better than anything Santa could have left us under the tree. The bare bones of those new houses made it so real that we could almost hear our dad's old Christmas albums on an imaginary record player.

Oftentimes our dad would join us on our adventures. The second-youngest son in a large and loving-but-poor Irish family, he showed us how to collect slugs from the sawdust and debris and then use them to buy Cokes from vending machines. He made us promise not to go into the houses once the walls were up, and never into any house when it started to get dark. Never alone. Ever. But he didn't have to tell us that part. We were never alone. We were us.

One day we came across another man from the neighborhood. Dad stopped to be neighborly, but mostly they just stood in the sawdust and mud, sighing heavily and shuffling their feet as they stared bitterly down into our backyard. No doubt they were thinking grimly of the mud they'd be mopping up after the next thunderstorm. My dad made a wry comment about something having to do with all of the construction, something along the lines of: "Look at all of those [somethings]." The other man laughed with little humor and then said something I'll never forget. He said, "Yeah, they've got more [somethings] than Carter's got little pills." I had no idea what it meant -- I thought it must have something to do with Jimmy Carter's liver -- but my dad laughed long and hard. He explained it to me later, and I treasured that clever bit of adult dialogue like a jewel in my mouth.

I don't know why that phrase has stayed with me, but it's a part of me now. It rises up from my subconscious at odd moments, sometimes only once every few years, but it's always when I'm contemplating large quantities of something. I'll find myself muttering it under my breath. It returned today like those cicadas that awaken once every 16 years, found me on my back deck in what is probably the next-to-last bit of summer warmth. I was refilling my goldfinch feeders and enjoying the sunlight when I said, to nobody in particular, "Man. I've got more thistle shells than Carter's got little pills." It bubbled up from deep inside of me unbidden, forgotten and unfamiliar until the moment I heard the words in my own voice. And just like that I was 8 years old again, holding my father's hand on a cold spring day and walking beside him through the ghost of somebody else's home.

Isn't it funny, the things that stay with us?

Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies: with him weak enough to lay the blame.

I cannot lie by your fire as I used to do, on the warm stone; nor at the foot of your bed....

Also:  I miss you, Spooky. So much. My days aren't the same without you. I'm an agnostic and a skeptic and a realist, but my love for you enables a very secret part of my heart to hope that there's some illogical, improbable chance that we'll see each other again someday.

Oh, my gorgeous girlie.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. -- Carl Sagan

As Pink Floyd once said: Money.

I should be asleep,but I'm wide awake and worrying myself sick about money. At least I'm being productive at the same time: I've sent out at least a million resumes in the past hour. Possibly two million.

Even better, I spontaneously invented a new nickname for Jackson the digestively-challenged mastiff: GI Bill!

Man, that's a classic. You heard it here first, folks.

We will pay the price, but we will not count the cost

I don't want to hear his name

It only makes me feel ashamed of those wasted days

And when I see his face I wish that I could make him disappear

My guitar was getting trashed so I made him give it back

Now he won't let up, saying I took his stuff

I wish that he would just disappear

You can't say I'm anti-everything

I just don't think the whole world owes him something

He's been talking to my friends

I hope they don't invite him in again

What I wouldn't do:
Go back to '92 and erase the moment I met you

And make you disappear

Spooky's Going-Away Day

We euthanized Spooky this evening. Her kidneys have been in bad shape for a while, and this morning I could see that it was time to let her go. It was very peaceful. She was purring right until the end. I can't really believe that she's gone. We've had her for so long. There was nobody quite like her. I will always miss her.

Kiki and I are volunteering with Fences for Fido this weekend. We're fencing in a yard for two chained dogs so they can run free. I hope it doesn't rain!

Johann Sebastian Bark

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

—Billy Collins