Well, the wife is about to open another show here this weekend, so all week I will be enduring Bachelor Week. While she attends technical rehearsals--which involves mostly wasting actors' times while geeks in black t-shirts fret over things with ominous names, like "Fresnels" and "gobos" and "buckets of rancid stage blood"--I am left to my own devices at home.

Since the week also coincided with the start of baseball's playoff season, you might think this was a good thing, but as I do not give one fucking fig for any of the teams in question, it's really kind of not. I suppose that, at some point, I will of course reflexively begin to root against the Yankees, but right now I just can't bother to care. Go . . . Angels? Bah. Fuck the Angels; at least the Yankees know pretty definitively who they are and where to go home at night. Rooting for the Angels is kind of like cheering on Sybil.

At least the wife knows how to find the little moments where she can. She got a hold of me at work today and offered to pick me up; the idea was to go get a drink to celebrate . . . uh . . . well, not working any more, I guess, and also to celebrate the act of drinking. So we did! The wife had a demure glass of wine while I tossed back a couple of martinis. Hey, I didn't have to go to rehearsal. (Incidentally, if you're wondering, they were gin martinis. I'm not saying anything against those of you who enjoy vodka martinis or whatever, except to point out that you probably are ruining civilization.)

Then we went home and had a nap. By which I mean I had a nap, a real pillow-drooler, while the wife got 20 minutes of shuteye before heading to the theater to watch geeks adjust cabling. I'm sure I was dreaming loving things of her as she rushed out the door.

Like loving shots of an actual dinner. The worst aspect of Bachelor Weeks like this is the horror of considering cooking for one. Me? I just won't fucking do it any more. I am lazy, it leads to leftovers that I inevitably will not eat, and I am lazy. For instance, tonight I consumed a quantity of sour cream & onion potato chips and some canned chili. At one point I hallucinated I was Vince Vaughn, for some reason. Can you see Vince Vaughn grimly spooning chili into his maw while watching The Amazing Race: Jesus Loves America Edition? Try mentally putting him in a wifebeater. It helps. Anyway, as I Vaughned out, I assuaged some of my wifebeatery feelings by opening up a bottle of really great red wine. The whole thing was a big experiment with cognitive dissonance, and as those feelings deepened, I blackly started to think about Duchamp's urinal, and that guy who canned his own crap, and the whole thing got kind of fractured.

Probably the chili. OR . . . it occurs to me! . . . the ketamines. Nothing speeds Bachelor Week by like diving right into the K-hole. I WANT TO KILL YOU, MOTHER! (I don't really know what I'm saying. This is what I get for buying my PDR at Half-Price Books.)

Tomorrow night, instead of retreating into some hellish drug-induced foxhole filled with chili and rampaging Vince Vaughns, I have unexpectedly taken steps to spend time with friends. I am dropping off the wife at the time-wastery and then speeding off to hang out with pals at a place that specializes, apparently . . . in pot pies.

I'm not entirely sure what's real any more.