I know I said I wouldn’t talk about myself, or I said that I would only talk about myself in an obscure and fictionalized way, and for all you know, my dear four readers*, what I’m about to write is a bulky knot of lies and embellishments (although if you are one of my four readers**, either you should be able to sift the truth from the lies with ease or the truthiness and/or lie-ishness matters not to thee, oh no oh no oh no). Regardless, I’m going to write it, and ostensibly it is autobiographical, may the lord have mercy on our souls.

Therefore, in the spirit of this flagrant self-exposure:

Dear Diary:

I have a new place to dump my bones at the end of the day, the bones inside me that provide vital leverage to my muscles. I live in the sky now, in a deluxe apartment, with the birds and angels and more adventuresome ghosts, where I can burn beans with abandon. I’m not floating (though that would be excellent), but I am content. Yes, sir, madam or thing, this new apartment suits me fine.

There are many windows for light, and many stairs to tone my quadraceps and calves.

I have numerous cupboards and closets, more than I know what to do with really. The place abounds with flat surfaces on which I can set mugs of tea and forget about them, renewing my interminable struggle with hot beverages. (They (the beverages) start out undrinkably hot, so I set them aside to partially cool, and when I remember them, they are undrinkably tepid. The new place should help me learn attentiveness, however, as I have no microwave to act as a quick fix.)

I have inherited several pieces of useful furniture, most especially a very comfortable bed, for which I am grateful. For the last few months, I’d been sleeping on a futon, which bowed in the middle and creaked at the slightest movement and by morning made me feel like someone had been kneeling on my back all night. Before that, a supportive but very narrow bed, and before that, a glorified balloon that filled the bedroom it dwelled in. The last year-plus has been a dark period for my sleep.

Speaking of furniture, I am able to use my favorite chair again. And its ottoman!

Also, I have, for the first time in three years, unpacked all my books. I’d forgotten I had some of them. In fact, this is the first time in three years that all my material possessions have been together in one place with me. Score. Time to start purging them again.

So I am here, looking out over rooftops and sipping cold tea, pleased as punch and when appropriate, sleeping soundly with proper back support. And all the attendant busy work of hauling and driving and lifting and sorting and pack-and-unpacking and whatnot will be my excuse for not adding anything substantial to this little internet hole in the wall for the first three weeks of the year. Regular service commences now. Restrain your applause, with mittens if necessary.

There weren’t many lies in there at all. Huh.

More later, gators.
The Hairy Skeleton

FOOTNOTES
*Careful research using the interweb (I clicked on something) and my wanton lack of self-promotion indicate that that I have four regular readers.

Reader #1, whom I have nicknamed Vassily because I like the name, is a Russian person of indeterminate gender (but probably male) aged 18-34 who ekes out a meager living as a spammer for a variety of hastily-constructed websites promoting everything from dentistry to landscaping to bodybuilding. He does not actually speak English and has no idea what The Hairy Skeleton actually says. When he runs the site through Yahoo Babelfish, the Russian translation does not impress or interest him, so he makes his spam-related comment and moves on to the next site. There is a good chance that Vassily is not actually a person but some kind of algorithmic software. This makes me only slightly less sad than if Vassily were a real human.

Reader #2 is a Voltron-like amalgam of anywhere from one to seven people who know me personally, who have in one way or another informed me that they have visited the site. I am shocked and flattered and I thank you for your kind attention and patience. I hope that my pointless rantings have brought some amusement or at least distraction to your life. I don’t know who are the legs, or who are the arms, or who forms the head, but I’m sure if you all get together, you will make one bad-ass robot.

Reader #3 is my soulmate, and I’m as surprised as you are, as I was pretty sure the whole “soulmate” concept (and possibly even the concept of the soul) was bunk. I don’t even know how such a thing can be derived from website hits, but I can’t argue with the numbers, especially when the numbers are provided by Google, since they run the internet. Also, I don’t understand the information as it’s been presented to me (those are some very strange graphs), so you may not be a soulmate at all. Hopefully you are geographically convenient and fluent in English, though from what I hear, love conquers all. I have no personal experience to back that up, but clichés must be right most of the time, huh? Especially Shakespearean ones, since they’re so old? Anyway, as the body of this post implies, I have a nice apartment with plenty of room, so feel free to stop by.

Reader #4 is you, the entity currently reading this sentence, distinct from all other potential readers. I know, I know: “But Mr. The Hairy Skeleton, I actually am a Russian spambot/friend of yours/fictitious construct. How can you count me twice?” The answer is simple. We are in a Schrödingerian situation here, you and I, and any measurement or verification collapses the wave function. Don’t mess with quantum mechanics, it will mess you up good. Also: I know you killed (or did not kill) that cat.

**See “*”.