Everything is good except for the bad parts.  It's eighty degrees outside and crystal clear.  Look to the sea and you'll see the Channel Islands sitting in crisp relief like ships about to hit the beach.  Gaze inland a bit and you will find a man who got out of the hospital this week after a bout with a kidney stone.

My visit lasted a few days, and the morphine made it feel like a dream.  Upon my release it was a dream with a morphine withdrawal headache, but it felt good to be home.

I'm putting all my irresponsibilities from, oh, say, two weeks before the crippling event into the Kidney Stone Terror Package and most certainly I'll be folding the remainder of this year back into the KSTP as well.  Yes, it's no wonder I haven't updated or done all those other things I told people I was going to do.  I'm devouring the medical literature these days, doing all the renal calculus regarding size and shape and composition.  I've come to cherish the phrase "the worst pain humans experience" and cradle it close to my bosom.  The release of guilt is extraordinary.

*****

As a person who keeps an online journal (although journal is now an inappropriate term - it's more like a moisnal now), I've been commingling recently with others of my ilk.  It's called socializing, if memory serves.  There's a tiny group of longtime online writers here in the Greater Metropolitan Los Angeles Area and on occasion some of us have gathered for food or a lovely beverage, particularly when others of the sort arrive from the hinterlands such as Lesser California, also known as the Northern Provinces: S.F., Oakland, Santa Cruz, etc.  It is during this clotting that my true nature is exposed.  The revelation is a prod which hastens the close of the evening and sends visitors, with grateful dispatch, back to their home territories.

Socializing is not my strength, you see, mostly because I am a powerfully selfish man with no skills for the superficial lubrication necessary in good group interaction.  Old friends have dropped me like dirty shirt.  Yet I force myself.  For some reason, I'm under the impression that insinuating myself upon others is healthy for my character.  I am woefully ill at ease during these sessions, however, and fail miserably at putting on a pleasant countenance.  The Others, which is everyone in the cosmos but myself, struggle valiantly to keep me in the loop, but humans are capable of only so much pity before they must return to what's important: nourishment, parenthood, marriage, seeking shelter, that sort of thing.

Luckily, for me, I am exceedingly interesting to myself.  A marvel, really.  I know it, you know it, why be shy.  My ego is my refuge, and therein lies my bliss.

I shall go make art now.

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