First of all, let me point you to my paid-for downloaded-myself fully-legitimate copy of Morgan-Quitno's 11th annual city crime report, which I'm offering to my readers for free in exchange for a thank you in the comments. You're welcome.

Last Friday, I was about five minutes away from getting rolled up and sent to county. I'm not kidding. There'd been a real rash of them lately, and my probation officer knew that I was a good guy so I had a bit of a longer leash, but not that long. I left my phone on silent, and my baggy pants prevented me from feeling the vibrate feature. Also, I was away from my desk, and so it took a while for me to finally be found, though I was eventually tracked down returning to my desk by my boss.

Five minutes. 300 seconds. Three hundred seconds could have separated me from writing this blog entry, or from seeing my parents and Liz and Matty J, from seeing the Chargers beat the Raiders.

I've been reading a lot of Kavalier & Clay lately, and I want to extend my thanks, again, to Liz and Matty J for forwarding me this book, which is on pace to replace Herzog as my favorite. It's got everything that I want out of a story, and while it doesn't approach the heights of a Great American Novel (that, as far as I'm concerned, is To Kill A Mockingbird), it's still a fantstic, fantastic book so far.

There are times when my blog gets sentimentally charged, or filled with an expansive sense of self-indulgence that comes from being a writer with an audience. Most days I just feel like spouting off the list of interesting things that have happened. Today is one of those days.

I sat down at lockdown, taking off the Chargers pullover that had accumulated plenty of static electricity from the overly windy visitation day here in Camarillo. How appropriate, then, would it be that my pullover, with an embroidered lightning bolt on the front, would popping with static electricity. In the darkness, it was pretty cool to see arcs of static the width of my finger jump at various spots in the fabric.