You have to be careful with this heart felt stuff or you come across looking the fool. No, let's change that to "idiot", fool being pretty far along on the enlightenment path somewhere out near Chicago. Or Duluth. Or Detroitus. I have a certain fondness for the fool. I had a friend once who defined a good day as any day he could get up out of bed in the morning under his own steam and tie his shoes. I thought about that at the time and realized it was a pretty good rule. Life is amazing all by its very lonesome and all the things that worry us during the day, all the "they've got this" and the "I've got that", all the houses and the cars and the clothes and the kids don't really mean a hell of a lot when the year is over and you're sitting here alive and in one piece: not too much pain, the kids safe, no leaks in the roof, everybody's had dinner and you're getting ready to go to a bed with enough blankets to keep you warm all night if you don't thrash about too much. That's good. That's success. Everything else is nice, but not necessary, maybe not even important.

(Not even important?" What's this guy been smoking?) Well, maybe that's Christmas Eve talking, the end of a day with a trip to downtown Oakland to pick up a prescription and eat breakfast as its only claim to excitement, a day with a nap and then another nap. A day, perhaps, to think about attempting a task or two tomorrow, Christmas day, pay the last two installments on the medical bills I've been paying over this last calendar year, think about work next week and what I should be doing to get on with the after Y2K reality. There is clearly, well, not a battle to be fought, but a task to be accomplished in rebuilding our company desktop. Not just the addition of Office 2000 and Windows 2000, the thought of which bores me to shit, but a total reworking of how we do our business with our computers. The web, my son, the web. That's a little different. I've been disengaged at work now for some time, primarily because of Y2K and the company reorganization, and although I believe I'd like to get back to projects and deadlines and maybe even contributing something to the business, how is that really going to happen and can I really generate the interest? We'll see. After the New Year. After the world doesn't come to an end through computer malfeasance or wild eyed apocalyptics. Tomorrow. I'll think about it tomorrow. After breakfast.

I hear there is some sort of journaler gathering Sunday on Boxing Day at Nancy Birnes' house. Terrible day to fly, the day after Christmas, but how come nobody told me about it? Is it something I wrote? Or something I should be reading?