The Big Bad thinks I'm slipping. Most of my posts have been links with little commentary. Only occasionally do you get the window into my continuous misery. Well of course it is. Because I've been trying to lead a normal life. I go to work. I come home from work. I go to the gym. I make myself dinner. I go to bed. For variation I take down the trash. I go get coffee. Once every two weeks, I go to a bar. I go see a movie. Even the Doberman doesn't come over anymore. He's been here once in two weeks. I don't go out drinking on Tuesday nights and end up kissing some guy on the West Side at five o' clock in the morning and still make it to my eleven o'clock class prepared. I don't kiss guys at all anymore. I don't even bother to feign interest. I just stay home and prepare Dante for eleven hours or Shakespeare or some other dead man who can't leave because his words are carefully tucked away on my bookshelf. They're my bitches now. But such exploits hardly make for good posts.

It makes for an even worse life.

Do you readers understand what I have to go through to write these posts? Not just the adventures? Not just the negotiations with my friends about what to write about and what not to write about and what's fair and what's not and dealing with the potential fall out should there be a miscalculation. That's just part of the equation. As Dante made clear in the Inferno, to write a story is to relive it. Only worse because you know what is going to happen and you have to put yourself back in that place. You have to recreate the situation in detail and at length. You have to reconstruct your hell and then put yourself there. And one needs strength to do these things, and above all hope. And I have neither. Which is why I stay home with my cat. And why my posts have dwindled to links. And why I am sitting here in tears going to have a glass of wine so I can settle my nerves well enough to read student papers. The leopard, the lion, and the panther guard my path and no guide appears to help me finally find redemption.