Lest anyone suppose I have been in chokey the past few months, or killed off in South America (a rumour which has dogged me the length of my life), I leave here upon the wall a bit of info, for the cognoscenti.

Strangely, but three days after my last post, my computer--less than vintage, less in fact than two years old--succumed to infant mortality. Yes, I do not know whyfore, but there it went, frozen at 4:59 AM forever, it went to sleep and never woke back up. I always thought that I would have been the one to go first.

Alas: not having the wherewithal to replace such an expensive machine, I have been silent (or silenced) lo these past four-five months. At this moment, I am racing against the slim margin at the public library, to give you this much of a leg up on the mystery of my newest hermitage, to open a window upon our shared grief. I am crush-surrounded by chatty skateboarders and gesticulating library marms, and this does not help my trance-formation, the zymurgy of that spooky liquor, of writing in that fairly high style.

Generally speaking, I have a backlog of about 100 untyped essays, a pent-up fury of supernova snowball, ready for your reading pleasure, if and when I ever get another horse.

Let me express my gratitude to you, thou faithful and fun, and my regrets that my return to the kingdom in March must yet be elided by the oldest of tech age griefs, the broken machine...