I’ll have you know I’m censoring what I write here. Admit it: you don’t like it when I write about politics. I don’t like doing it, either. It’s not easy being absolutely right when the climate is structured around diametric opposition. Ask Galileo.* So, I write and erase, toiling over long manifestos before giving up and posting reveting news flashes about changing my poor dog’s name.**

This morning, I began an essay on how people who oppose the Iraqi war for logical and ethical reasons are considered treasonous terrorists fit only for use as human shields, while the nutjobs who support our junior dictator because they think he will help spark the End Times—thus destroying the entire world, including America—are considered a mainstream interest group and get guided tours of the White House.

So naturally, I will now change the topic to reveal what I did last night: jwer and I had a “writing date,” which was very romantic. First a candle-lit dinner at the Ambassador Dining Room, then a jaunt across town to the Evergreen Café, which would ordinarily have been a comfortable locale for tapping away on our laptop computers, except we arrived only a few minutes before they closed. I had time to have a cup of tea and get out only one sentence before we were cast out into the cold again. We then moved on to Starbucks, which was not only closing shortly itself but blaring the most annoying reggae music,*** anathema to my writing but (after I gave up and secretly began playing a video game) conducive to my best score ever in Cosmo-Bots.

Then we went home. Jwer invited me up for a nightcap, but I had to turn him down because I’m not that kind of author. Ask Galileo.

* Not that I’m comparing myself to Galileo, and you can’t ask him anyway because he’s dead.

*** I ordinarily find reggae tolerable, but this Bob Marley album is among the most overplayed ever, especially amongst teenaged baristas who think it makes them “deep.”