I shave my head and keep it shaved. Once, on a date that *I* thought was going swimmingly, she said to me "When you put that skin cream on your head you should really check that you've rubbed it all in correctly. You have a puddle of it sitting in the middle of your bald skull. You look like an imbecile." Well. Another thing: I have this crazed single hair in the middle of my forehead that I can't get rid of. It grows back and grows back and grows back so that I look like a unicorn. Maybe I should just resign?

You see where this is going, don't you? The psychology of vanity? Listen. Irving Wallace wrote a cheese novel in the 70s called THE FAN CLUB. Four jerkoffs kidnap a sex starlet, take her to a secret hideaway, and rape the shit out of her for days on end. They've planned so well that the authorites are clueless. Since they have her tied to the bed and nobody knows where she is, it would seem a wee bit hopeless. But you know how she regains her freedom in spite of these impossible odds? Can you guess? You can't? C'mon. C'mon. You can guess.

Speaking of long forgotten novelists - weltanschuung: Irwin Shaw. One of my next projects is to tell you how I connected myself to Irwin Shaw, reached back through the decades and fired the weathered guns of deep exhaustion. At this point in the proceedings I make a motion to apportion myself the haves of am. I have already warned you that my allusions do not end. You know how it is - it's like listening to Michael Savage play an audio of Dylan Thomas reading poetry aloud. Right? Am I right?

My specialty: featureless instigation. Roll it.

Campus of Brooklyn College, fall semester 2007. I have an appointment to examine the original typewritten manuscript of Irwin Shaw's 1950s novel LUCY CROWN. Life is relentless. You just keep on living and living and living. In the moment my balls are acquiring shocking networks of stark blue veins. I mean they would shock you. But they would not shock you as much as what I'm about to tell you about what I learned from Irwin Shaw.