Will the snow ever go away? I am already thinking of our (warm) trip to New Orleans in April, hoping for a supernatural and odd experience. I've been reading a book on ghosthunting (when I should be finishing the Mandela autobiography for the book club) and it suggests purchasing a digtial voice-activated recorder as a means of getting entities on tape. The woman who wrote the book actually left her recorder by her bed and had conversations with a seemingly maleviolent entity. I have no desire whatsoever to find out whether ghosts are having conversations in our bedroom while we sleep. Somewhere else, maybe, further away, like New Orleans. I think our house is pretty clean anyway. I don't get the creeps here at all. It's mostly a quiet, happy house. Now, watch some psychic come and tell us there was a murder in it somewhere.

Speaking of ghosts, I am going to begin a short story about someone who has died and does not quite know it (yet). I've always wondered how certain earthbound spirits cannot know that they're dead, but I suspect their reality is much like the reality we experience when waking up from dream sleep and immediately falling back into it. I often discover I have been thinking hard, often intricately about something, before I wake up, so much so that my head hurts and I cannot remember about what I was ruminating. I think it has something to do with my ambitious, obsessive personality making plans while I sleep. Anyway, that seemingly logical dreamy sequence of thought is what I imagine spiritual earthbound intelligence to be like. Sometimes I wonder how I would discover I was dead if I didn't immediately know. For instance, if I came home and K. didn't answer me when I spoke to her, I would just assume she was mad at me, and therefore it might take me a few hours (or days) to discover that she really couldn't hear me.

I may also revisit my ELF-like terrorist organization/Chuck Palanuik novel. I feel weird not writing a novel now that I've finished The Accidentals. It was always something to work on between stories, so maybe I'll treat the ELF novel the same way and the research/development won't seem so intimidating.

You've been rather slow submitting to the spring issue of JMWW. I've made up some fliers (call for submissions) to tack onto various boards throughout the city, and I need to explore cheap online advertising. (I'm thinking of more guerilla-like tactics of going onto the discussion boards of other online journals and asking posters to submit here.) I have a feeling once this journal does get started it will consume more of my life than I'd like it to, but, well, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Onto more mundane topics. I have worn one of my last pairs of boxer shorts that I sleep in. They lasted almost eight years (actually, they were K's). What's the longest time you've owned and worn something? I have a couple of t-shirts from college that I still own but rarely wear, so they don't count. Anyway, I must go to the store and buy some sleepwear, but I hate pant sets because I get hot and they get twisted in bed. I feel the same way about nightgowns. Maybe I just need to learn not to toss and turn so much.