a nice cool night - the whole summer has been cool and very very wet. the nineteen-year-old went to college today, so his puppy is very despondent and I'm kind of hanging around keeping the puppy company. at one point i just told him, this boy will be back someday but not for a little while. you'll have to get used to him being gone.

the puppy is resilient, driven, intense - but he let me take him for a walk, nothing of course like his boy used to do, but still, along a slightly different path but much shorter, and that seems to be what the puppies need to settle in for the evening, having gotten their fresh air and their time out in the open. he is really going to miss that boy.

i've had some success in the marketing world, not so much with my novel, which was kind of a success anyway, but with my short stories. i have nine volumes of them going back over ten years, and yet i've virtually unknown in the short story world; i've barely found it, and it has definitely not found me. but i finally found a community of people who read each other's work and now quite a few people know me as a short story writer. i've shown maybe half or more of my collections - and since people are reading them, they now have much better ratings. best yet, if feel like i have at least some recognition as a short story writer. before this, almost nothing.

through talking wuth friends, i've become more convinced that we're in sever trouble on this earth. places with fires, other places with floods, there just seems to be calamity around every corner. on that note i leave you, because of course i write, and even that doesn't amount to much, and if people threw the earth out of whack it's getting a little too late for me to do anything about it. notice, that's what i'll do. point it out. the way i put it tends to make people a little divided. but hey, let's just say that if the system didn't keep cheating popular-vote winners, we wouldn't be in this kind of fix. chou