Some of you are probably wondering where I am.

Some of you may also be wondering if this will be at all funny, if I will at all display here any of the wit and humor you have come to expect from me, if, indeed, I will use this exact forum to gripe and kvetch about this fucking ridiculous job I've happened upon, this job for which I haven't yet technically been paid, this job that, as some of you already know too well, offers much about which to gripe. Which is fine. Which you should be. The last thing any of us needs being another meta-whimsical blowhard speaking speciously of self-deception in his opening post. The last thing any one of us needs.

I am in Waco, of course, the smoke having just cleared a fortnight ago. Wokka. On the way in, though, I did check Wikipedia to see if W. was governor at that time, wondering first to myself then aloud to Mike whether he maybe should have gotten a little Republican heat for this kind of debacle under that kind of reign. Alas, the gentleman from Connecticut (whose carpeted ranch is of course twenty miles thataway) was not yet in a position of responsibility. Although of course as I write that last phrase....

So I am in Waco presently, at another RV resort/highway sound vista along I-35, I think it is. The cars go whizzing by. Ibid the trucks. All night long. Last night in Austin--pretty much the exact same 100-yard distance from the highway but about 150 miles south of here--I sat outside for several moments listening to the cars, comparing it all to Williamstown, wondering why it wasn't beautiful. Because it could be. And there's no reason why mountains and foliage and summer fog should have a monopoly on the 'beautiful', or the 'sublime'.

So I am in Waco presently. Baylor University tomorrow, another Christian university where the students are almost certain to be more earnest than the snark machines that seem, on certain campuses, to overrun the sidewalks and breezeways. For all their future work against just about everything I believe in at least I can be thankful to them for this. A little polite banter going, at least from 11 until 4 tomorrow, a long way.