Rialio mano, papatcengo!

The Great Days of Winter have arrived in Portland, Oregon.

We're in final days here. Final days. All sorts of things are happening if I were into astrology.

I'd say Saturn is returning or there's some sort of planetary alignment happening in my life because lots of things are coming together here where as you know we're getting ready to leave Portland and meander back towards Spain.

We won't get to Spain till March. We get our apartment back March first. So we'll have a couple of months to kill January and February.

Not sure if we're going to go to Southeast Asia or maybe Colombia, maybe Mexico, some place warm for sure.

We'll see how that pans out. I haven't really given that much thought yet. But we're going to go somewhere warm and wait for our buddy to leave our apartment in Spain so we can move in.

We'll be in Spain for the spring, which is a really nice time to be in Barcelona.

The book is almost finished. I just printed out all the chapters the other day. And so now I'm looking through them and trying to get a tighter organization.

And I'm in the stage now where you cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, tighten it up, tighten it up, reorganize. Because when I'm writing, I just I don't try to think a lot about where this is fitting in and does that really flow from when I just finished because that

slows down the creative juices. And when I'm writing, I just want to write, write, write, write, and worry about it later. And now it's later. So now is when I spread it all out and read it again and and realize like

I wrote this chapter called Welcome to Lucky Plastic World. And the title comes from a photo I took in India. There was in some market in India. There was a booth.

And it was called Lucky Plastic World. There was a big sign and he sold like buckets and plastic shit. I just thought it was hilarious. You know how happy he was about plastic world.

And I wrote a chapter with that title and it was all about this experience I had in New York when I lived there in the 80s. I met this woman and we went out for dinner and had a really good time.

She was older than me. I was in my mid 20s. She was probably in her mid 30s. And we had a really good time. And then sort of you know at that stage at the end of the evening where you say, hey, we should do this again sometime. You know, that was a lot of fun. And she got real serious and said, okay, I need to I need to explain something to you. Here's my situation. And her situation was that

she was married or just a long term relationship. But she lived with a man, her partner. And she wasn't cheating on him. She was, he had leukemia and had been getting chemotherapy. And it had basically wiped out. It had made him infertile. And before he was diagnosed with leukemia, they had been getting leukemia.

They had decided to have children. And so they were trying to go ahead and have children anyway. But he wasn't biologically able to be the father. And so she was basically interviewing me for the job of biological father that evening.

And so she dropped all this on me and said, I'd really, I'd love to see you again. But I'd love to invite you to our place. And you can meet my husband, boyfriend, whatever. And that's our situation.

And now, you know, that was 25 years ago. I've, I've had a lot of interesting and bizarre proposal since then, our propositions, I guess is the word.

It wouldn't freak me out as much today. But that was pretty shocking at the time. And my first impulse, of course, was to flee. But I don't honestly, if I'm being completely honest with you, I can't tell you to what extent it was just really wanting to fuck her that made me ignore the bizarreness of the situation.

And to what extent it was interest in anything weird, some combination of blind horniness and reckless curiosity, which pretty much sums up my 20s now that I think of it. Anyway, I went to dinner and met the guy. And, you know, to say it was awkward would be understatement of the century. It was very strange.

I was the first finalist who had made it to the have dinner with the husband stage, apparently. And, you know, as soon as I met the guy, any sliver of possibility that I was going to participate in this was gone. The guy was seriously sick, you know, all his hair was gone. And he was white as a ghost and very, very thin.

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