1:11 pm | 22 January 2003 | stabble stabble stabble

Whoof, what a rough night. I went to bed around 1:30 and slept restlessly until 4am, when the phone rang. At first I thought it was the alarm and I was pissed. I picked up the handset.

"Whahaa?" I intoned, cotton-mouthed.
"Hey!" his voice came excitedly and no doubt drunkenly.
"Wha�Uh, what�s up?"
"Hey, um, I really liked that story you wrote. It�s really good."
You know, I appreciate and all, but it�s 4am, dude. "Okay, thanks. 'Night." Click.

I went back to sleep twenty minutes later, which meant I had an hour-and-a-half of really awful dreams involving rotting bodies and leopard attacks and the like. In addition, Guinness kept half-barking�"ugrrrhh, a whoorrrrwhoo"�and running to the door as though someone (no doubt a deranged lunatic) was coming in (with an axe), and even though I had the knob locked and door chained, I know that the knob is a piece of shit and the chain�s feeble promise is only that it will delay my horrible, blood-spattered death by a few terrifying seconds.

So I sleep with a knife under the mattress now.

This seems like a good solution, and I mean this earnestly. I have a nervous disposition; my father was a butcher when I was young and taught me how to sharpen the hell out a blade, and to handle it with precision (at least enough to tell the difference between stabbing someone�s liver and kidney); I�m comfortable gouging those who might accost me or my loved ones. My only regret is that the long-coveted and finally-inherited white-handled carver�s handle is too lumpy for easy sleep, so I had to switch back to my clunky old Insignia, which does, indeed, possess "extreme sharpness." Take that, would-be assassins. clm.

Coming soon: this girl knows what i'm talking about.

"Mom, romance is dead. It was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece by piece."

-Lisa Simpson