A LONG WEEKEND. I suppose I could put it down to a slow news week. The big stories have been few: one butt-ugly WTC tower being replaced by another butt-ugly WTC tower; further fist-shaking about the memorial therein (I say have David Allan Coe do twenty-minute-on-the-hour sets in the lobby and leave it at that); a Presidential speech and Congressional babbling. Who wants to read about that, let alone write about it?

But the plain fact is I'm burnt. Between a work schedule that never lets up, the demands of human beings (Christ, they're always trying to talk to you and get you to talk), and nightly wrestling matches with the Angel of Death (at least that's who he says he is, though I could swear I saw him in a Bumfight video), I have been hard-pressed to find tranquility enough to recollect emotion, or even to collect stray thoughts and ball them into blogposts.

So, with apologies for the slow pace of production, I am getting the fuck off the merry-go-round for a few days. I'm going to New Hampshire to visit Editor Downs and his family, and eat pie and walk in the woods. I am not much of a tree-hugger, but on the excellent chance that I will have a nervous breakdown in the maddening cricket-encrusted silence, a tree will be useful to cling to when I feel as if I am about to fall off the earth.

See you Tuesday. Meantime have a glorious Fourth and remember, when the roaring madness of the times gets you down, the immortal words of Neil Young: "Got people here down on their knees and prayin'/Hawks and doves are circlin' in the rain/Got rock 'n' roll, got country music playin'/If you hate us, you just don't know what you're sayin'."