It's been a while, hasn't it? Too long, I know. But listen, it's because I been busy cooking up all sortsa new stuff -- what we useta call "content" -- for y'all. No, really. Busier'n a one-legged man in an ass-kickin contest. Would I lie to you? Yes, I would. But in this case, you should take what I'm sayin here as gospel. OK, then.

Now the first reason referred to in the subject slug above is this fairly mind-blowing statistic from the Amazon page for Hunter Thompson's book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. You ready? Well, here she is then:

For those of you unfamiliar with Amazon's sales-ranking scheme, this means that Fear & Loathing has reentered (if it was ever there) the Top 20 books being sold today. I just popped over to Barnes & Noble to check it there. Hmmm, only a disappointing #38. But still...

So there's reason #1 to off yourself, though this one only works for published authors (I'm thinkin, I'm thinkin). Plus, it really only pays out for your heirs, if any. However, I imagine our Good Doctor looking down from some utterly stoned-out Heaven and laughing his ass off at his posthumous sales numbers. And that's all I'm going to say about HST here this week. Actually, forever. RIP, dude, and congrats on the fat royalty check!

Reason #2 is not quite so factoidinal. Not hardly. In fact, reason #2 is what I've been working on in the background since last Friday night, if you can believe it. But yes, it's true; being single and undesirable gives me a lot more time than most people would be able to devote to this sort of pursuit -- though I'm sure there are many of you out there on fast-failing weekend dates who envy my wide-open options. In this case, to stay home and curl up with a nice warm HighBeam interface and like, you know, do research! Yeah well, here's what I started writing nearly a week ago now...

She's a babe. No doubt about it. But in the tradition I've established here in the past few months (and elsewhere online in the past ten years), let me digress at the outset and get it over with. We'll come back to the lovely Marianne Williamson, for that's who she is, momentarily.

Momentarily, sure. I wrote another 800 words after that, and never did quite make it back to Marianne. I sorta drifted off in a lengthy meditation-cum-experiment having to do with the process of search itself. I'm sure you're all waiting with bated breath (and yes, it's bated, not "baited" -- ugh, what an image! -- though you see that written all the time on the good old internet). Anyway, it's still not finished, the whole gonzo suicide thing having intervened.

So what we have here is a failure to communicate.

Cool Hand Luke notwithstanding, this monster-in-the-background has now grown into not just one, but two unposted posts, which I hope to have up here soon (and with all this preamble, you damn well better like em). Meanwhile, the only hints I'll give you are...

1. Marianne Faithful Williamson is the author of A Return to Love -- one of my favorite books to hate. And,
2. the following, which is the next bit I wrote last Friday evening right after the babe-intro bit quoted above...

OK, say you're willing to put in the extra effort. What you want is something like Total Recall...

So that's where the fateful diversion started to divert. And now I'm going to have to rewrite the lede when I finally post the damn thing. Or, I should say, things. The first will be about search, and the second about Marianne Faithful Williamson, who was, for some reason I no longer recall, the inspiration for that Who quote at the top of this. Hell, she doesn't even have blue eyes!

And now, if you'll forgive me, I have just enough time to take a bath before going to see my psychotherapist. Oh no, I'm late, I'm late...