So this is writer's block ...

I wish I had something profound or even slightly witty to share with you, but I don't.

I could blame it on nothing going on in my life, but that's the norm, and I'm usually able to pull something - something - out of that, and I'm coming up completely empty here.

Plinky suggests that I name a place I'd like to show my child for the first time. First, we have to imagine that I have a child ...

Well. Let's modify it and say a place I'd like to show my best friend's kids for the first time.

I'd show them the arboretum back home. In some massive falltime fog. There's something Narnian about that place in the fog, bare limbs looming out of the mist like hands that are reaching out ... There's magic there in the fog. I'd swear it. Aslan is waiting behind the next tree. Go find him.

Next, I'd show them the ginormous window ledges inside the Arts and Sciences building on the UW campus. I loved crawling up into one of those and studying or reading for hours at a time. My sanctuary, with a Prexy's Pasture view.

Then, I'd show them Yellowstone in May, right after the roads have opened, before the tourists clog up the roads and interupt your visit with dumb questions like "Where's the knob that turns Old Faithful on?" and "Where do you keep the animals at night?" You've gotta be there when the spring meltoff is at its heaviest, when the waterfalls are at their most powerful, when it could still dump a foot of snow on you and when everything is so .... so green. When you hit play on the "Last of the Mohicans" soundtrack and just drive.

Anyway. As soon as the writing funk is over, you'll know. The only real thing I could share involves my dreams, which are actually nightmares, and which I'd actually rather not dwell on too much. "Bad" doesn't cover it. Not close.