How Do I Know I'll Be Shown the Proper Respect?

That title has nothing in particular to do with this post--it's one of our favorites from Ted L. Nancy in his series of books, Letters from a Nut, in which he writes bizarre and random letters to various corporate and government entities just to see how they'll respond. He has an absolute knack for writing missives that sound real and yet are utterly insane, like writing to restaurants to ask if it's okay to bring his own waiter, or warning hotel chains that he has a rare condition that causes him to eat his own bedding. From his proposed chain of Hungry Mosquito restaurants in New Mexico, to his concerns that San Antonio is going to change the name of its basketball team from the Spurs to the Paper Towels, to his thanks to various foriegn nations for their superb department store staffs that have variously helped him out of air conditioning ducts in which he invariably got caught while attempting to retrieve a lost shoe, the letters are amazing pieces of staged oddity. The title is from a letter to a hotel in which he asks, many times and in various ways, how he can know that he's being shown proper respect from the staff.

That was a lot of explanation for a title that doesn't have anything to do with the actual post. In truth, at this point that will end up being most of the post, as you'll note the timestamp at the bottom of the entry reads something in the neighborhood of 4:10am (if I can wrap this up with some alacrity). I have been asleep again, only to be awakened an hour ago by my long-suffering and ever-patient wife. I'm still hoping to catch an hour more sleep before I get up for work, but I knew my true duty lay here, with my gentle readers. As always, the blog has become a kind of touchstone, a duty to which I look forward and a tiny piece of the kind of life I hope to be living someday. I'd explain that but it's too early.

I had an entire other post planned. Actually, I'm in one of those fecund stages where I seem to have dozens of post ideas, but I had geared myself up to deliver a book review and get that idea out of my brain. That'll have to wait until later today--I'm determined to post earlier today come hell or high water. I've got to get some kind of real schedule working here in the near future or I'm going to stay stuck in the creative rut in which I've been meandering for the past decade.

It's off to sleepy-bobos for me. Keep your eye on this space.

ps--You know, one day I'm going to write a post about the constant cliches I use and how I ruthlessly beat those out of my students' writing and yet continually engage in them myself. Can I get a shout of "hypocrite" from the crowd?

Thank you.

Okay, you can stop now.