books

Greetings from Tryst.  You may remember this place from Election Night.  I'm here with Jane, Swopa, and Pachacutec.  There are multiple TV's in the room blasting the Superbowl, so it's a little hard to concentrate, but I'll see what I can do.

So, back to court tomorrow.  It's going to be an exciting week.  I'm starting to wish that I had taken more time off work than I did because I'm really not going to want to leave again on Tuesday.  This week, we're expecting testimony from Tim Russert, seven hours of Libby's taped grand jury testimony, a "mystery witness", and then the prosecution will rest and the defense team will commence to bring their witnesses.

It's FREEZING up here, and of course, you can't smoke inside.  Anywhere.  Sure, smoking a pack of Marlboros a day is probably going to take years off my life, but the case of pneumonia I get from standing around outside in 22 degree weather several times a day poses a much more direct threat to my health in the short run.  The first thing I'm going to do when I get back to Athens is sit inside on my warm, comfy sofa and SMOKE.  Without shivering.

Jane, by the way, looks great.  She claims she doesn't feel quite 100% yet, but you'd never know it to look at her.  Swopa is tall and handsome and awfully charming.  And Pachacutec is his usual inscrutable self, sitting next to me with the scalps of his enemies hanging off his belt and his giant Inca head-dress towering over us all.

Not really all that much on my mind tonight.  This is the problem with trying to write on the road.  I can't spend as much time gorging on media as I normally would, and there's so much that's new and interesting to see and do that my brain doesn't get much time to process all the feelings and impressions and translate them into words.

I love this city.  Everyone who lives here tells me that if I moved here I would hate it, but they're not pushing 40 and living in a quaint little college town, the kind of place where you tell someone that you're a writer for a political blog and their eyes sort of glaze over and they say something like, "Well, I can drink a whole case of beer without throwing up."

I mean, it's kind of nice to look around and see beautiful young people everywhere who look like escapees from the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog, I guess, but then again, it can be a godawful drag to look around and see beautiful young people everywhere who look like escapees from the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog, all healthy and gorgeous and not an original thought in their pretty, pretty heads.  People in DC are attractive, but in a different way, an "I've actually been places and done things and occasionally sat up all night thinking about something" kind of way.

Pach and I were talking tonight about this book that I'm going to write, eventually.  My thoughts are still pretty nebulous about exactly what sort of book it should be and what it should be about.  The last thing I want to do is publish some dull-as-dishwater pud-pulling treatise like Army of Davids or a deeply mediocre birdcage-liner of a novel like Dog Days.  Pach suggested a book of essays, and given that his judgement is usually spot-on, I am inclined to agree.

And that's what I've got tonight, Firedogs.  I promise to have something especially good for you tomorrow night.

See you then.  In the meantime, I'm off to smoke another cigarette in the freezing cold.  Hooray!