Tuning In.

So the novel damn near killed me. Or it is damn near killing me. And let's us not play the sad song of woe and publication—let's just say the book's existence reveals the smallest smallnesses in my life; sends me scurrying always off to check on things that should not get checked, or should not get checked so continuously; keeps me up late nights and hauls me out of bed early mornings hamster-wheeling through the wrong sets of lists and notes. Excellent preparation for our impending other doom, Edward James Olmos, she of the mid-June due date. Good to get a head start on feeling like this. I guess this'll clear up in about 22 years.

In the meantime, friends and fans of Carolina springtime, it quit raining and the azaleas broke out into bloom. We're on the tail end of the tulips, and the rhododendrons are just about wanting to come in back home in 27401—as well as out here in 27244, from which the forecast comes to you live, beneath the Chinese Fir, an intentional effort, out in front of what will be showers if they hold together long enough, to drag my ass out of my office and out of the inside of my head and out here into the weather. To anyone who's seen the inside of one of my classrooms this month or last: I apologize. To anyone who's seen the inside of my marriage: I apologize twice over. There's pollen thick enough on our front porch to leave footprints. There are house finches nesting in the ferns. Out here at the puppet show the trains go back and forth. I knew I'd maybe hit the wall an hour ago when I had to look up what the weather was supposed to be this evening. Because here is the one thing I'm generally meant to know, and I did not know. Now, though, outside, I know, and it is good: Cool. Half a breeze. Squirrels yelling at each other in the trees. HVAC shrieking away here on the side of one of the dorms. Clouds rolling in from the west, which is where they ought to roll in from. Fresh-cut grass. Kids walking by using the "me and" construction.

Tomorrow's weather: I will endeavor to let you know as soon as I possibly can after it happens.