I HAVE GOOD NEWS!

My tens of readers are getting a break. The wife and I are going on vacation for a few weeks, and so Izzle Pfaff will be mercifully silent until at least December 7. So y'all are going to have to get your RDA of strained metaphors, clumsy profanity and pointless, overfreighted verbosity from somewhere else for a while. Fortunately for everybody, there's always Fox News.

Where are you going? I hear you all asking. Is it somewhere uncomfortably humid and with lots of feces lying around? Somewhere unpleasant? Please let it be unpleasant. That's what everyone has been asking us. The guy who cuts my hair just asked me this, and when I told him, he was not pleased. In fact, he was envious. (Really!) He was so envious, in fact, that he literally stamped his foot with jealousy. I'm not sure I've ever seen an actual human stamp a foot before. But he did. Then he proceeded to spitefully give me the worst haircut I've ever had in my life.

(One thing I like about getting my hair cut is that it tends to make me look younger. In fact, minutes after the haircut was finished, I was buying some wine at the grocery store and the cashier carded me. "You're making my day!" I chirped. "Did you really need to make sure I was over 21?" She stared at the top of my skull and replied, "I needed to make sure you were really human.")

So anyway. On Tuesday, the wife and I leave for Italy. We're taking a lovely nonstop flight out from Seattle and then spending a few contemplative hours at Heathrow to have our rectums politely examined--hopefully from harrumphing, mustachioed fellows smoking briar pipes and saying "I say! No hexplosives up this one's bum! Roight!"--and then on to Rome.

We're only spending a couple days in Rome, though. We have been once before--for one whole day--in 2001, where we dashed around madly, managing to see the Vatican and the Colosseum before we had to madly dash somewhere else . . . I think it was Naples. (At the time, we were experiencing severe travel madness; this time, we basically have no excuse.) Anyway! Maybe this time we can bag us a new Pope sighting! (We got blessed by good old John Paul the Sequel back in 2001--along with about 10,000 of our closest friends at St. Peter's--so we figure if we can get blessed twice, we basically can give God a wedgie if we feel like it. This is leaving aside the fact that neither of us are Catholics, but hey, these guys don't have to keep blessing us.)

Our big destination for week one is a little town in Tuscany called Arezzo. Through an astonishing website that a friend clued us into, we are renting an actual apartment in the city; an apartment that opens right onto the fucking town piazza.

This is awesome.

One, it's not a hotel. It's an apartment. It has a bedroom. It has a GREAT BIG FRESCO OF JESUS in the bedroom, right opposite the bed, actually, which, uh . . . well, that might be distracting. BUT IT'S STILL AWESOME! ("Honey, you feel like . . . you know . . . ?" "But . . . He's . . . staring at us." "Sigh." "But this is awesome." "It's getting slightly less awesome for me." We'll see.)

For another thing, and nothing on giganto-cities, but I have found that most of the time when I am traveling, that I really kind of love the more village-y places, the small towns that you can walk through on foot, and where you see the same regulars in the same places every day. I'm looking forward to finding that place where, without ever quite knowing you've decided, magically becomes that place where you end up every day at 2:00 for a sandwich or a drink. I can't wait to meet all the characters who own the little shops who crinkle their faces in pleasure to see a new face, someone new that they can show off their stuff to, to say, This is what I do! I do it very well, don't you think? And I always love finding out that, most of the time, they're absolutely right, and telling them so.

I cannot wait.

Oh, and as if all this weren't enough, we're spending four days in Florence after that. Florence, home of the Uffizi Gallery, the tiny museum that just happens to house the most heart-stoppingly concentrated collection of Renaissance art that you can find--and comprehensively tour in under three hours. If I were even remotely religious, this place would be church for me.

And then, of course, there is also--walking distance away--the Accademia. Nothing special here. Just David. Just the most beautiful piece of physical art that I've ever seen in my life. Just the only inanimate object that I ever found myself falling in love with. The only thing that it was wrenchingly difficult to leave, to take my eyes from.

I have heard songs, seen paintings, read books, many times, that made me intensely jealous and awed. Jealous because I want to create art on that level. But I do not. Awed for similar reasons, but awe also for the artist: How did he/she think of that? Could I ever come up anything close to that? But I cannot. David, while it does these things, also provokes this in me: it makes me feel small. I am utterly unable to conceive of the creation of its perfection. Its beauty is palpable and unknowable and nearly inhuman. I am diminished and imperfect in its presence, and I am so small in the knowledge that such a thing is so beyond my ken--in its conception and execution and its existence--I have no choice but to simply rejoice in it, in my tiny way. For me, David nearly inspires something I would in other contexts call penitence. And I don't even know why or what for.

I have been longing to see Michelangelo's David again since the moment I stopped looking at it five years ago. I would posit that it is simply the most beautiful thing ever created by man. This is of course a matter of opinion, and is also of course intensely personal. All I can say is: I really look forward to feeling small again.

I can't wait to get there. And I can't wait to come back to write about it. You're never going to get a David out of me, of course. But the point of David is: You should try.