The "Girls on Laptops" pile. This is back to Old Pen. Carrying a bottle of India ink on location seems a bit risky. Reminds me, back in 4th grade, when kids had to use fountain pens, I was sucking on mine (one of those Scriptos with transparent barrel) and suddenly my mouth filled with ink. Being at that age where just about everything mortified me, I sat silently through history class with a mouth full of ink and spit it out in the nearest water fountain afterwards. Needless to say, my lips and teeth were stained indigo blue, and I looked like a child zombie the rest of the day. Except instead of a pale face, mine was crimson. Kind of like a sad Joker. I'm still trailing that particular cloud of glory.

Logic would tell you that coffee shops would be crammed with hyped-up stammering fidgeting buzz-headed nerve-shot caffeine junkies. How many times have I told you, when it come to human beans logic is worthless. Your eyes would tell you that you've stumbled into a Xanax shop or a narcolepsy treatment center waiting room. It's like drinking coffee in the library, only without so many homeless people and librarians with glasses on chains and their hair in tight buns that when they get home they loosen up and practice pole-dancing. At least that's what I'm told.

So I hear that some of the people at FairGrounds know me as "Small Coffee". As nicknames go, it's no T-Bone or Mickey Bats, but Small Coffee seems to fit me on so many levels. Now if I were still patronizing Starbucks, I guess I'd be known as Tall Coffee, which commands a certain amount of respect, but as such would be entirely misleading, and could lead to an undermining of the whole nickname tradition. So I'll make do with Small Coffee.

A vanishing breed. Shills for the Brave New World claim that people are doing their reading on the internet now, but the numbers show that even those who are, are reading less. And if you ever tried reading a book on a computer monitor, you know why. When we stop reading, we put our brains in the hands of those who spew content onto our TV and computer screens. Even if we disagree with these jerks, we're letting them set the agenda. Who's going to be left to say that maybe Angie's pregnancy isn't quite as important as the decimation of marine life in the Gulf of Mexico? Well. maybe it was always this way. Maybe it's nothing more than that I'm entering the grumpy old man phase of my life. There's something to look forward to.

Sure, it's a big job, but if I don't do it, who will? Or more to the point, if I don't do this, what will I do?

I have this gift for being able to tell what people are thinking. And everyone in Fairgrounds Coffee this afternoon was thinking about dinosaurs, oddly enough. Hey, it's no skin off my nose if people want to waste their time thinking about dinosaurs.

Nothing wrong with pensive people. Pensive is good. Reminds me, I've had a few conversations with a friend lately about the saying that the examined life is not worth living. Like all truisms, it's both true and false. There's no question that George W could benefit from a more examined life--in fact, we would all benefit from that. But too many of us, me for example, examine our lives to death without actually doing anything. And I've known many people who think that examining your life is a laughably useless activity: some of them are louts, and some are among the finest people I've ever met. Why aren't there ever any easy answers?

I was in Starbucks yesterday being mildly annoyed at someone putting a small coffee--excuse me, tall coffee--on a credit card, thereby bringing the line to a halt, and I realized how much more annoyed I am at that TV campaign for Visa which shows some retail business or other running like clockwork and being brought to a halt by someone using cash instead of a Visa card. What bullshit! It's an insidious way to get us all to accept that true is false and false is true. It's hard enough to know what truth is under ideal conditions, without advertisers and PR people and politicians trying to convince us that the truth is not true. Actually, the really treacherous effect this is all having is nurturing the notion that nothing anybody says is true, that we're all spinning things to our own advantage, to the point where, say, evolution and intelligent design are merely opposing opinions. Or, like, when the overwhelming majority of scientists say global warming is a reality, they're portrayed as manipulating facts in support of some hidden agenda (meaning -- shudder -- liberalism, world government, esperanto, the whole house of cards). Now there's a variant of the new field of "word of mouth" advertising where you're paid to talk up a product among your friends. If that doesn't disturb you, then it's too late for you--you've already become one of the pod people.

I know what you're saying to yourself: This guy needs to expand his horizins. And I answer thusly: Why should I listen to you? You can't even spell "horizons"! And your comeback would probably be: Interior monologues don't have spelling, asshole! To which I would retort: How dare you call me an asshole on my own blog, you wanker! And you'd answer: I'm not calling you anything! You're making all this up in your own head! What is your problem? At which point, I would just shake my head in wonder at the capricious nature of people.

Yup.

Here's an amazing coincidence for you: last night at the Naro I saw "Black Book", a Dutch film, and the Naro is in Ghent, which is named after a city in Belgium, which is next to the Netherlands, I think! Wow! These epiphanitic Indira's-Web kinds of moments remind you that we're all one and shit like that.

If your house had an attic where you parked all your scruffy superseded furniture, and where a gaggle of your slightly dotty relatives lived...well, that's Elliot's Fair Grounds.

I was just thinking, you can use the word "canal" in everyday conversation with just about anybody, but remove the "c" and boy can you not. This is the kind of musing that I'm probably not going to be able to do in my newspaper feature WHICH DEBUTS TODAY IN THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT so I'm getting it out of my system now.