I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat. I see you aren't aware of it. Well you must tell me, baby, how your head feels under something like that. (Uner your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat.)

Eric just called me to tell me that the ventriloquist's dummy he found in our uncle's basement is really freaking him out. He's alone in a Brooklyn loft with the dummy staring at him from a windowsill. This and other things are not good ideas.

He can't smoke in the loft, so he went to the hallway while we were talking. He can smoke in the hallway, and he really doesn't know why, but he doesn't question it. We should really go up there and visit him. He's leaving Friday, so we should really take advantage of this opportunity. I'm looking at you here, Scott.

We talked about this over the phone, and also about how he's going to a play with our aunt, to a part of town she doesn't go to. She's been living there her whole life and there are parts of town she doesn't go to because she gets lost. Then he went back inside and, he claimed, the dummy had moved.

Scott, Anne, thoughts about going to visit Eric this week?

My mother received some gifts from her coworkers, and one of them freaks me out inordinately. It is a travel game, like the magnetic chess that was once taped to Blue Thunder's ceiling. This is weird enough already, because there is no reason to think that my mother would want a travel game. Already, the explanation must be pretty strange. She was perhaps shopping at a hobby store for Crimmas decorations, tripped out on shrooms, when she remembered that she needed a gift. Her claw hand grabbed a travel game, and the next day she was still starry eyed and hazy from the shrooms, so she didn't realize what a strange and inappropriate gift it was. That's not reasonable, perhaps, but it is conceivable (proof: I just thought of it). Here's the kicker, though: it's travel tic tac toe. A metallic cylander with nine holes, and two sets of wooden pegs, one blue and one red. And a two-page rule book. For tic tac toe. This rule book freaks me out over and above the coworker, because someone had to write it, and someone else had to ask that person to write it, and there must be a shop somewhere that printed it. It's like something out of David Lynch. I can see Agent Cooper buying one for his cousin, the camera lingering over the felt box that stores the travel tic tac toe with the little glossy label that says "travel tic tac toe." Now, if the coworker's child had made this thing in shop class as a final project, I would be somewhat comfortable with its existence, but as I've already described, that didn't happen. So the existence of the thing is creepy enough. Then there is the problem of what was going through the coworker's head when she decided to give it to my mother. I fall over crying when I try to think of this. My mother says that the woman, whose name is Diane, happens to be one of her more intelligent coworkers. A quiet woman, but when she spoke to her, she seemed okay (which is more than she can say for most of her coworkers, who are rabid Bush supporters, and foreward vicious ill-conceived badly written e-mails about the tax code, and the people Clinton offed, and that sort of thing, and probably joked about the election to make my mother feel bad, and who cackle). If anyone has insight on this critical issue, i.e. the gift, please tell me, because I'm cracked up about it. I'm thinking the world is not even approaching logical if this sort of thing can happen.

Jeff still thinks about going to New York for Christmas the way I would have when I was twelve. He makes statements about how he shouldn't have to do something he doesn't want to do, and that we are just going because society makes us, and my mother could go visit her family any weekend she wanted and is thus only going this weekend because of society. He denies that computer games have anything to do with his not wanting to go, and when asked what he would do if he stayed home, he says, "what I want to do." He keeps asking if we're really just going to stay in my aunt's house all Saturday. His voice, while he says these things, comes from some treaty between his nose and stomach, so that it sounds tight and nasally, but also has a lot of breath.

When he left the dinner table, I asked my father about disowning Jeff. He said he was considering it.

Have you looked at the moon tonight? Over here it's got a pleasing cloudy aestheticly cut-off bit, and the rest of it shines through atmospheric conditions that have the same consistency of, say, a jar of vegetable oil. It's a few minutes up from the horizon, which is sloped upward from where I was standing, and is cased in trees and a few barely showing stars. The purple and diffracted light of Baltimore's suburbs overpowers anything else, but that moon is something. Look at the moon!

Almost there, David Foster Walrus. So very close. And then you will be done. FOREVER! Afterward, I will take a much needed rest, and then maybe make a sandwich or something to celebrate.

Contrary to popular opinion, I did not lose $100 at the Casino last night. Sorry to let you all down. It was really just $94.

I'd rather be sitting at home with headphones playing something swirling, perhaps drinking tea and looking at a book with pictures. It would be nice to do this until Sunday, in a sort of motive cocoon that would scratch my head and refasten the buttons on my jacket and prop up my back and sing about aphids, making me whole again before the flight home. Who cares which slit the photon went through? So what if some space has Riemann geometry? Is that cemetaire marin going to don a blue sweater and sing hymns to the hipsters? No, fool! It's not! "Also, your dreams are boring and I don't like you," it says instead. Me and my black bag are going home now, and we're going to try to forget that we have precept at 8. Maybe if I'm lucky the campus will blow up in my absense.

I'm aware no one will comment to that, so how about this: who here likes cheesecake?

Yesterday rose bright. The people were out and smiling, and you would have smiled too, even with the knowledge that you were being sappy. We sat on the balcony and smoked, and talked about sitting on balconies smoking. Someone said the words "party" and "apartments." We went, because at night it's cold and there's nothing else to do. Phone call first, because phone calls are important. Then party: Little room under a staircase dripping snow water, ash everywhere and people grinding to Michael Jackson. They charged for the beers, but I got them free because people like me somehow. Was told by a girl she hoped that I didn't despise her, even if I hated her, and I told her I didn't despise her. She's more attentive than I thought. This is the one with a face like a decaying block of cheese, who picks at her beard and makes the world dirtier. The one without the chinhair anymore told bystanders sexist jokes he "heard from me" (people here are very witty). Got a ride with a drunk beefsteak to a closed Bell, then back to drive home and shamble.

Blake has shaved his head. He looks like a disgusting British schoolboy from a bad movie. Mark Ingham was once again the inspiration for a group uglification, although this time there is no shaving kit bought from a D.C. crack dealer, and fewer Febbies. If you have a message for Blake, leave it here. If it involves his blacke jean jacket, press one. If it is about the white shirt that hangs below this jacket, press two. If it is about how funny you find his diabetes, press three.

Tim Kile put me on the guest list for the show, and then he took me and four other people back stage. Oh, by the way:

Attn: Scott White

Wyn Butler remembers you and your interview, and he said he had a good time answering your questions.

Hey guys, who wants to go see The Arcade Fire tonight at the Paramount? Anyone? Anyone?

Oh, that's right, you can't go, because you're two thousand miles away! Ha ha!