Did ya miss me?

I hope so, because I sure missed you.

London tales are coming soon - I haven't worked out the pretty packaging in my head just yet. Besides, I have lots to say about Chuck Palaniuk.

On the way back from Stonehenge, I finished Diary, his most recent novel. I'm not going to review it here, because I was not an English major and have no experience in that area. What I will say, however, is that I'd like to shrink myself down, climb into his head and hump the right side of his brain for 4-6 weeks. The wordsmithery of that man gets me hot.

I totally aspire to literary groupiedom. Imagine how dull my memoirs will be.

In his tweed jacket and sensible slacks, he wasn't much of a looker. But when he read, "Just for the record, the weather today is partly furious with occasional fits of rage", I felt my face flush, and a familiar tingle started somewhere down below. I was sure the crowd gathered at Barnes & Noble could feel my fire raging within. I had visions of Chuck Palaniuk taking me up against the books in the A-F fiction section.

What really happened was some subtle flirting during the book signing, followed by a moderately priced meal at a nearby Italian place. Then he invited me back to his hotel room, where we drank Scotch, watched VH1's "I Love the 80's" and had some rather pleasant sex early enough in the evening that neither one of us would be tired the next day.

Years later, he wrote this about a character named Red. "Just for the record, Red was partly sane with a 90 percent chance of total self-annihilation." Just for the record, that's me, thinly veiled. I've always wanted to be thinly veiled.

Hot stuff, right? Go wipe the sweat from your brow now, and come back tomorrow for tales of London.