I feel sharpish. Don't ask me to cook. Or help you.

It was an amicable parting.

Georgia and I are quits.

Good Lord. I've talked to Alice twice. She was much more cooperative when we'd paid fines.

I call it inspirational music. I caught up with this woman in 1978.

Got it!

Nothing better than a Byzantine background when you're dealing with a Georgia court.

I'm loaded for bear. Now I need to find the bear.

UPDATE: The comments have lapsed because I am dealing with real life. If you have anything to say to me you can use the email address in the header.

That's enough of that.

The main heresy running around Byzantium and the Eastern Empire as opposed to Rome is iconoclasm.

It doesn't improve my mood when I tell someone I'm from Dallas.

"What part of Dallas?"

"Dallas, the city."

"But what part?"

"Dallas. I mean Dallas. Oak Cliff, Oak Lawn."

"My dad lives in Dallas. He's lived in Garland, Allen, and some other places."

I do not know how many times I have to admonish you to stay street-legal, you idiot chilluns.

We are looking at $4000 worth of cascading expenses because you wouldn't take the time to register your car in Georgia, of all places -- stringent traffic laws. Or bother to address a ticket.

You are not bulletproof.

UPDATE: For two days, I have been talking through closed loop telephone systems. I want to shoot somebody.

I can do entirely without Stephen Tyler, but where are the other choirs doing "Lean on Me"? Do you have some?

Of course, there's the classic:

Maybe this one:

For kicks, because there's a pretty woman backup saxophone:



That alto sax is Kate St. John. She's just a few months younger than I. Now, I know I have worse genes than a lot of people, but really.

She works with Marianne Faithfull, which, if you're my age, gives you confidence in the resilience in the human race. The women, anyway.

Unanimously we will flow into the mystic.

Maybe we'll go with this one:



It soothes me, if not his mother.

I don't think that music exists to describe the conversation that passed between the boy's mother and I this morning. We're civil. We might even like each other, given time.

She doesn't sleep under stress, and I don't eat. We're very helpful.

What would you posit?

The outside scent is orange blossoms. Yes, the satsuma trees need spraying for smut.

Our big, bubbly, bouncing, blond 35-year-old baby boy is coming in.

I've been making space. I wonder if I could have fit into those black jeans I bought in 1991. Or breathed, if I did.

And I took those dresses I bought with my mother in 1990 off to a Baptist mission store. The dresses were pretty, still are, if more befitting a thirty-year-old than a 54-year-old, but they did represent the last shopping trip I took with my mother. She always pushed me a little harder than I would have gone, and I never regretted it.

The boy will be hungry, and that spells some serious expense.

When I married Lyman I thought I was surely out of the woods with children. I had chosen not to have any, he had a vasectomy.

April Fool's!