Last night I couldn't keep up with the conversation. Dick and Briggs have a rapport about some things that's better than my rapport with B. If the subject is food, wine, cooking, gardening, agriculture, or the coastal conservancy, where Dick works and Briggs used to consult, I can throw in the occasional broad generalization, much like an underprepared college student in seminar, or more likely and more irritatingly I can simply pun and prattle and wander off from time to time and put something else on the stereo or check my e-mail or fix a typo in the zine.

This time, though, Briggs came up to me and asked me why I was mad at her. I told her in an embarrassingly whiny voice that she wasn't interested in talking to me, that she was repeatedly cutting me off. This is a perennial issue for us, as I run roughshod over her and most other people I talk to who didn't grow up in Newyork. But I am no good at taking it, no matter how much I dish it out. Also, I realize that a steady diet of just me is boring for Briggs. Dick is the same age as B and they're both older than me. They click in a good way, and I like him a lot. He's always been the best kind of friend, and great company. So why am I jealous?

x

Had a good e-mail exchange with my editor at O'Reilly in which we agreed that I need a little more prodding and feedback (therapy or mentoring, we haven't settled on a simile), and the goal is simply to finish the Chapter 5, false albatross, and proceed one chapter at a time.

Also, I finally got around to making some long nettlesome corrections to my Hunter interview from last September's Enterzone, and I took the opportunity to fill in some more entries in the glossary that accompanies the interview. There's an ongoing hyperproject if ever I've seen one.