I’ve been reading Sartre all evening, and now I can’t sleep. (I’m reading Sartre because I’m working on a movie screenplay. Of course.) It’s been a long time since my last post, but for once I have a couple plausible excuses. One, it rained on my laptop. Actually, a pipe burst and flooded the kitchen, which in turn spread the misery around by leaking down into the mysterious world between the floor and the drop ceiling. The drop ceiling dropped. My wife awoke me to the sight of a desk drenched in water and the battered remains of the gallant panel which, like Horatio, had held out as long as it could. Unlike Horatio, it had totally failed.

To tip your laptop sideways and drain a pint of water is to cross a certain frontier.

But the other side wasn’t so bad. For instance, I caught up on my shorthand, in which I’m drafting this very post. [And now retyping it. Hmm.] Also, I recommitted myself to the belief that the world is bigger than that damn screen. My posture may have already improved.

I was able to get the laptop working again with a new keyboard. But then came my second reason for the silence: we’ve been moving. Now we live on top of a mountain. It’s a neat little place, with a wood stove, but I’m turning out to miss each one of those anonymous Latkes even more than I had predicted. I guess we all need that occasional reminder of the slight divergence between the present and the eschaton. I am duly reminded. And perhaps the adventure will be repeated.