I know this is a dumb question, but is anyone here offended by overuse of 'fuck' in my posts?

You damn whiners! Go read this NYT story about a famous magician! And if you're too cheap or busy for a free subscription, read the Wiki article. I tell you: someone gets shot. Someone bamboozles those damnable British. There is a probable love affair. Hot!

Okay. Next: National Novel Writing Month. What the hell is with National Novel Writing Month? I have no idea how to feel about it.

Perhaps you have seen my NaNoWriMo t-shrit—a pencil between two cannon wheels, surrounded by the words

FOR THOSE ABOUT TO WRITE
WE SALUTE YOU!

Which is pretty sweet.

NaNoWriMo is like Lucas—good-hearted but probably ineffective. The idea is to register yourself on the website and then, in November, write an entire novel of at least 45k words. The website now has bulletin boards and a store and other community features. It's all very late high school/early college centric, with some late-20s outliers and a few who are much older.

The main criticism is that you can't possibly write anything quality in a month, to which the response is that you're not going for quality, but quantity. You're supposed to edit later.

Anyway, I think it's silly but I love the hell out of it at the same time. It's so fucking ridiculous and idealistic and flawed that I am in love with it. And yes, I will marry it. Come November, I'm sure I'll at least write more prose than usual, even if it doesn't turn into a novel.

So this NaNoWriMo blather reminds me of a conversation I had in Ames last weekend: how do you tell if your affection for a song or book or movie is based on the work's merits, or if it's based on your circumstances when you first experienced the work? That's pretty convoluted, so here's an example: there are songs that I shouldn't enjoy but that I do enjoy because when I first heard them I was happy as hell. And if you like something more for its context than for its quality, is that wrong? What do you think?

The reason NaNoWriMo reminds me of that—I first encountered it at college my senior year, while I was still dating Carol, and thus drunkhammered at two in the morning, a bottle of rum on the desk and rerun anime on Cartoon Network, and I was in a great damn mood. And I read about this monthlong endeavor, and . . . whenever I read about any sort of hip, intellectual movement in far-flung places I get jealous as hell. Like: we should do something that gets covered by these papers! These blogs!

My pants size is now a 35.2. This is a 2.2-inch increase since high school, and a 1.2-inch increase since college. This shit must be stopped! Today I looked at the slop of enchilada and beans and rice on my plate, and I said, hey, fucker! Back the fuck up! And then the black hospital worker behind me said, not gonna show it, they just ain't gonna show it, not gonna show it because CNN was too busy showing Rumsfeld to show any NASA footage. And then I didn't eat the rest of my enchiladas.

Having a 35.2-inch waistline means you can't buy any fucking pants. You know how often I've seen 35-inch pants? Once. You either get slightly tight 34 or the fat-as-hell 36. You get that 36 and then you go home to your bathtub full of donut holes and you collapse into that spongy bed, into that quicksand pit of loose confectioner's sugar. Because you're fat as hell. You're

fat
as
hell.

Last night I was attacked by a spider. I was crouched in my bedroom, my trashheap of a bedroom, stamping out another query letter to another agent, headphones affixed in ears, when some brash spider tried to crawl on my wall. I swore. "You're fuckin dead," I said, or something like it, and then I moved to grab a book. Sylvia Plath, the old spider slayer herself, was handy, and I scooped her up. But the motherfucker dropped down into andy's black towel, which I'd already washed, and hid. I put the towel in the tub to trap the spider and guess what happened today? Alyssa got him. Yeah.

And about the sniping kitten: yes, I've just started adding unexpected google image search results. But that last one, the alien: Dave, you should post about that. I'm pretty sure you're the one who showed me. Andy will love the story. Love it.