To me, the bathroom is a refuge, a place where I can read the paper, or shave, in peace, still nearby and available should there be an emergency, yet apart and seperate in a space of my own.

Of course, there’s always an emergency so someone is always talking to me when I’m in the bathroom. If I’m lucky they leave the door closed when they do it. Even my mother-in-law got in on the act last night.

So when my wife leaves for a week on business, as she did yesterday, this is the silver lining, the single only good thing about her being gone – otherwise I miss her terribly. But, eh, 30% more peace in the bathroom.

So this morning, I was standing there taking a leak and my cell phone rang. Etc etc.

The title of this post refers not to any of this, but rather to the best review of Macbeth I’ve ever read, by Francis S. up in Sweden.

One thing there is no shortage of on the Internet, I have found, are people who tell you “that’s a great idea, go do it” when you tell them some hare-brained thing you just cooked up. Come to think of it, there’s no shortage of them anywhere; I remember saying that to my brother often. “Go do it, ‘it’ll be fun’,” I’d say, and he’d run out and break all the windows in the barn or something.

So my big blogger-body-image campaign, the Zona Nuda Naked Blogger Project, well. I was thinking of actually going through with it after receiving submissions from quite a few people (michele? the barstool one? that is not a “non-pornographic frontal nude”. D? I had no idea you could do that with a turtle.) but I came to the realization that nakedness in real life, or “in person”, i.e. actual, physical nakedness, which I think is a good thing, is fundamentally different from posting naked pictures on the Internet. Duh.

My main problem, though was simply the “fake” issue. How do you ensure that participants are over 18 or 21 or whatever? How do you ensure that the picture blogger X submits is actually them? Maybe it’s a fake picture. Or, even more problematic, it could be a genuine picture of blogger X, submitted by someone else pretending to be them, with a spoofed email or whatever.

So I’ve decided not to go through with this project. If anyone wants it, they’re welcome to it for a small fee and a link. Thanks to everyone who was so supportive, thanks to those of you who sent in pictures – I’ll be setting up a Cafepress store pretty soon and hopefully you’ll be able to buy yourself on a t-shirt very soon.

I am cleaning out my closets and generally throwing stuff away. Today I came across a ton of brilliant and largely unpublished manuscripts I’d written during the last decades. Here’s one from 1988:

Twenty-two novels by Miguel

New shoes at the Shoe Project.
Thanks, Juul and Lessie& Lamar.

How my fingers smelled like lavender
three hours after crushing a twig.
Getting body-slammed by my daughter,
the only way she currently shows
affection.
Sounds, even my ringing ears.
The feel of water.
There are things you expect to miss.
But I even miss the misery of puking
my guts out, the cold relief of the porcelain
against my clammy forehead; or my
back threatening to go out if I make one
false move. The smell of diesel exhaust.
The smell of farts! Mosquito bites.
Arguments, thorns. Drills.
How much better than nothing it all was.

…because you might become it.

For example, I hate clowns.