Due to a clump of synchronous events, I find myself living on the beach in Waikiki with only occasional computer access. So far as I know, I’m the only guy down there in simultaneous posession of a cell phone, a Christian Dior trench coat and sobriety. Let this be a lesson to me.
More later, but [...]

Cigarettes are the currency of good will, along with 40-oz bottles of Steele Reserve and patience. Everybody has a story and they’re going to recite it regardless so one may as well listen and nod and mmm-hmmm as called for. I’ve met only one out-and-out sociopath but there are several men who can go psychotic [...]

I did a little bit of newsreading yesterday. Why aren’t our administration leaders in jail posing for blow job photos? The art of passing the buck advances again: just as Saddam, Uday & Qusay, Abu whomever, al-Sadr and all the dead-enders are individually responsible for our military woes, so are a small group of bad [...]

Alan is a hard-core alky with endless reserves of self-pity and anger, the two of which combine to embroil him in at least one injury-threatening situation each day. He weighs about 140 pounds and had open-heart surgery about six months ago, doesn’t eat enough and is, as I said, a hopeless drunk, so he doesn’t [...]

Various tasks have kept me away from the beach overnight several times during the past week. It’s nice to be released from the need for constant wariness but the drawbacks include a somewhat surprising discomfort associated with spending the night indoors and the work necessary to reestablish my position at the beach. Every time I [...]

whose laugh sounds like the one in the introduction to “Wipeout.” It’s impenetrable.
I made a $20 bet in December of 2000 that George Bush* wouldn’t finish out his first term in office. I hope I win, and not just because I could really, really use the $20.
According to my site statistics, someone from a Fed [...]

Life is infinitely easier for me than for the women.
The night before last I got no sleep at all because of some annoying gendarmes. Last night I adjusted my evening in response and the polices changed their pattern, but for the better. I fell asleep on a bench, and got this from the officer [...]

at 5:30 AM and you saw a tube of something called “skin-so-soft,” wouldn’t you think it was a moisturizer and not a frickin’ hair removal creme? I just wanted to give my arms a break from salt and sun.
Finally, Bill Saletan at Slate comes ever so close to voicing an epiphany he’s been tiptoeing around [...]

I’m not a confrontational person; I’ll go way out of my way to avoid social stressors, let alone a fight. I just realized today that this doesn’t hold as true as it did a month ago. I’ve had to consciously decide a few times whether to avoid or defuse a situation, or to let it [...]

It seems as though everyone on the beach but me has a good singing voice. Even the guys who sound like frogs can carry a tune, and several of the guys have an encyclopedic knowledge of rock’n’roll lyrics, which is how six of them came to be sitting next to one of the fountains rendering [...]