Well heavens to Betsy, a blog. Who could have left this old thing just lying around where anyone could trip over it. Kids these days.

I want to reclaim my mornings for exercise and meditation, but all I do is strap Goblin into her Borg outfit and drag her around the block at a snail's pace. This hoopla takes two hours, and then I have to feed her, feed myself, and answer a hundred thousand emails. I haven’t been getting to work until 2 or 3 pm this week, which is a shameful example for my employees. Of course, I work late into the night and in the wee hours of the morning while they are happily engaged in whatever it is that happily engages them outside of work. There must be something; all of the sad sacks have moved on to browner pastures.

In other news, I submitted my neighborhood beautification plan to everyone on my block to survey their responses to the idea. I said that if I didn’t receive a fifty percent positive response, I would not move forward. So far, I have received a total of one response. This is why democracy doesn’t work. In a dictatorship—with me as the dictator, a la George W. Bush—everyone on my block would have wrought-iron fences and thriving front gardens instead of dusty, weed-choked patches of dirt festooned with the excrement of Goblin’s enemies. This would be paid for by cutting taxes on rich people and selling the organs of the poor. If I ran the world, the art school students would walk respectfully, single-file down the street, with no part of them crushing my plants or dropping trash on them. Also, some of them would be naked, but surprisingly few.