I am out of touch with the world at the moment, at least by any instantaneous means. In typical collegiate squalor, here is no dial tone at Dire Wolf right now—we'd been forgetting to give to phone bills to Rob, who had thus not been paying them. The cell phone my cousin had lent me while she was in Taiwan for the summer went, along with a gauzy peaches-and-dirt colored shirt, into a Priority Mail box headed east on Wednesday; I was falling too far into its dependence trap anyway.

I disassembled my laptop—every single conceiveable nut and screw of it—yesterday evening in an attempt to reinstate my comma key, and don't want to admit defeat yet, so haven't entirely put it back together. AIM, then, is out of the question; at any rate, I'd only been signing on for the away messages to read. If I get really desperate, I check my email on Jessie's PowerBook; otherwise, as now, Meyer's 24-hour cluster serves me well.

The phone situation has been remedied from this side with a check from Rob, and screwing the hard drive and fan and DVD drive and case back in shouldn't take more than half an hour at my very carefullest most. But while Pacific Bell's red tape is catching up, and the skinny screwdriver Marc lent me from a treasure trove of tools at work lies idle on my screw-strewn desk, I'm exploring this curious and unprecedented alone-ness.

Last night, I read three books, all fast reads, before and after Ian from Birdsong across the street offered up a showing of The Wizard of Oz with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon as audio input at Uncle John's Band. That he must walk across the street to talk to a neighbor, and I two blocks northeast to mail a letter, means less boredom-driven blather and more carefully weighed-out communication. Cool. I think.