Blogito ergo sum

I must say

--what with it being the veritable mid-point of summer
and I'm sitting here in suit
and tie
and really need a haircut
and god knows if I'm going to be successful in fighting off this GI malady
which has so mysteriously beset Graham for a whole week
and may even account for Mary answering
neither the land line
nor her cell phone because she is, at long last, at the doctor's office--

I'm hot.

Apparently I'm not alone here, as people have been migrating from office to office in search of better AC. Lunch conversation focused on the thermostats in the individual offices? Are they real or are just palliative placebos? Let Dilbert be the judge.

Sometimes when I go through periods with nothing really to write about, I think of all the criticism of blogs, how self-indulgent and useless and onanistic they are. But that's what's interesting about them, after all, access to another's consciousness, as they say, surely not disintermediated in any given instance, but in aggregate, if you keep reading, you get there. Descartes was never quite sure about that, right: how do I know that moving body over there isn't really isn't really an automaton. Garden variety solipsists have the same thought by the dozens. Blogito ergo sum, says I.

Up at Canandaigua, I took down an odd volume of Thurber and read a couple of stories, and it occurred to me that so much of the New Yorker aesthetic (Thurber, Cheever, Updike, keep going) is really a predecessor to the Seinfeld premise of being "a show about nothing." In some sense, the craft of writing has often been seen as antithetical to narrative. The trick is to do something interesting on the page without describing much in the real world. My immense blog traffic, could be, bears me out. If not, fuck it.