I have a countdown. The deadline � tentative � is Friday, August 22. I mean the Gastro quitsville deadline, as opposed to the bacon shacksville deadline of August 12. Something about flying to Germany on Saturday the 23rd and returning jobless to the U S of A on Sunday, September 13. This could change. In any case I�m not going to start counting down the days just yet. Also, the 20-euro fares are proving elusive, but Steve knows people who have gotten such cheap intra-European air deals in the past, and he is going to pump them for information. I should care about that aspect of the planning more than I do; I am fixated on the alpha and omega of I�m going.

I am not going to be able to write tomorrow because the doctor who left town leaving me with an inadequate spec for less than half of the of the project that no one in the hospital apparatus has the software to execute without superhuman pixelfucking workarounds or the hardware to render the images pixelfuckable in the first place will be back � from an all-expenses-paid weeklong trip to interview at another hospital, which by the way is a scam because she doesn�t want the job and conceived of the trip as a way to see her family and not have to pay for it or have it count against her month of vacation time � and she will be expecting major, major subservience, she is not going to have any patience for seeing anything on my monitor but bar graphs. (In the mail yesterday I got a flyer hawking "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," "a new essay by Edward Tufte on how PowerPoint affects thought." On the one hand, shoot me now. On the other hand, it is probably interesting, though I bet he�s cribbing somewhat from Julia Keller�s piece on the subject several months ago. For attempting to sell a 24-page essay for seven bucks, when his lovely hardcovers go for under $50, I can�t decide whether I like Tufte�s moxie or whether I think he�s a criminal.) Today I make hay while the sun shines.

First made hay this morning by taking my damn sweet time getting to Kinko�s to pick up the bitmaps. $81.94. And I have another one for the Don�t Even Listen To Me When I Say This department, because as I was heading back to my car on the morning after I pledged to cut down on my reading habit, I was suddenly seized by desire for the pseudonymous Costello, and I risked a parking ticket to backtrack six blocks or so to the bookstore and buy it. "Bag Men." It�s out in a new Turow-blurbed edition, capitalizing on the National Book Award nomination, that identifies its writer, and the about-the-author adds a detail that wasn�t in the one on "Big If," it begins, Mark Costello, who worked as a federal prosecutor� Now I did not know that; I remember the epigraphic brevity of the "Big If" blurb because I thought it was terribly sexy, and now I find myself peering at Costello�s unassuming black-and-white again, imagining him as a secret Elliot Ness as well as my kindred spirit from the Ministry of Information, imagining him with that shirt off, and I am thinking, Yeah, I�d do him. I opened the book at random and here is the first sentence I read, page 94: "The gun bulge spoke volumes." Promising. Also, in the context of the gun bulge there is a character called Manny, ditto. I don�t know any more than that because I�m not supposed to read while I�m driving � I managed not to get a ticket and I got in the car and hit the freeway to the hospital, cranking Rival Schools to avoid the KEXP-ness. I arrived satisfyingly late and now I am here.

The publisher�s copy on the back of "Bag Men" calls it "authentic, knowing, and bracingly cynical." I think if you have earned these words for your novel or your tombstone, you have done some living that I can admire. And driving through downtown, I was thinking about cynicism � clearly, someone meant us to read those words of judgment about the book and then be moved to read the book, that is to buy it. But look at the definitions on the page linked here; you couldn�t spin a positive connotation out of any of that: "sneering," "jaded," "scornful�" it could be the introduction to KEXP�s pledge-drive training manual. I know that the book is not characterized by sneering and jadedness and scorn, because those things are the opposite of complexity, and that is not how Mark Costello writes. So what do we mean when we and Marshall Crenshaw say "cynical" in a way that implies a less insular perspective than all that, indeed something to get excited about? Is there a better (typo: "bitter") word we should be using? The dictionary�s "cynical" is no, it is deflation and turning away and small-scale nihilism. It�s, well, junior high school. But when what goes with "cynical" are "authentic" and "knowing," then this is a strain of cynicism that has said Yes, and yes does not sneer, it is a rhetorical impossibility. This sounds dumb and na�ve now that I�m writing it, so I apologize. But I want to think about to whom the word means what and the act of making value judgments on the stance or stances it names, or the opposite act of embracing it as conducive to creativity. Would Scott Turow let a blurb onto his book jacket that described its worldview as cynical, even in the same phrase that acknowledged its authenticity and knowingness? Would Oprah have chosen a book like that for her Book Club? Is it a red states/blue states thing?

Here�s something that makes me red-states cynical, from a Joe Hagan Observer article today on Deborah Treiman: After Mr. Buford "discovered" Ms. Freudenberger-about 15 feet away from his corner office in the Cond� Nast building, where she was an assistant at the magazine-the then-26-year-old sold her first story collection for more than $100,000, turning down a bigger offer for fear of being crushed by fortune. Poor brave delicate Nell! I am sure that's exactly how the negotiations went down. I remember the fashion-shootish photo of Freudenberger from the Debut Fiction issue from two years ago, the one that more notably had Erika Krouse in it; the caption noted that she was snapped "at home," which d�cor evoked a Moroccan brothel, and she stared into the camera like Kate Moss in an Obssession ad. What do we think of the Treimaster so far, by the way? I want to like her, and I am in favor of someone other than a pontificating crusty old white dude at the helm, but I must say that in the last year or so, an inordinate number of New Yorker stories have been to my tastes like organic lemon-lime soda, and I have opted not to drain them to the dregs.

OK, maybe I am about the hating after all. Sorry. I am large, I contain multitudes.

I�m breaking up with Number Two this afternoon. She knows it�s coming, too, I can tell by her last phone message. I hope it�s not too awkward. I�ve never given the heave-ho to a shrink before, and I have a chip on my shoulder about how she thinks she�s only cracked the surface of my vast frozen bog of neuroses. But oh well. After that I�m headed to Steve�s, where he will have just taken the final for a CS class he�s been taking this semester, the plus-work demands of which have been, like, totally cramping my style, so I am elated at the prospect of him having evenings and weekends free again. I don�t get all of him right away, he�s warned me, because there are a number of people who have been the victims of his social neglect during these last several months of schoolboyism, but if there are going to be things like movie dates and road trips they are going to be with me. Maybe I will take him out to dinner tonight. That would be nice of me, wouldn�t it. And then in the evening we have something like a posse headed to the Sunset for rockaraoke, which is karaoke with a live band, I wrote about it once when I went long ago, it is awesome. I like karaoke as a spectator sport, though some of the people in our group are hammier and intend to take the stage.

I keep forgetting to mention that my father is coming to visit at the end of the month. I will not have seen him in almost three years. Uh, yeah. That�s about all I have to say on the subject.

Last night I mowed the side lawn � I�ll do the rest on Thursday, it really is a big job � and then went to Linda�s with Vanessa, where we were later joined by Stephen and Dave. No Todd. Our favorite waitress wasn�t working (which we noticed partly because our waitress was barely working) and neither was Steve�s wannabe favorite waitress. I should start a rumor that I killed and ate her. I forget what else I wanted to write about today so bye-bye until Friday.