Winning line from the Friday night cartoons this evening:

"Ah devoted mah life to peanuts, and now the little goobers are wreakin' havoc!" - George Washington Carver on TIME SQUAD

So tonight has all the charged stillness of a calm before the storm, and rightly so. Tomorrow we spring out of bed, do our last-minute cleaning, and pop over the hill to the Small Press Expo, where I get to walk around with my mouth hanging open for several hours and be a dribbling fanboy at all the cool people who do cool things in the world of alternative comics, and hopefully make it out with Keith Knight's new book and assorted goodies. And then we rest up in the time remaining before heading down to Iota and Jim's Big Ego, where I get to be a dribbling fanboy at them (again). Squeeee!

All of which is much more exciting than what I did last Saturday morning, which was get up and grind all my Pumpkin Spice coffee like a big pooftah.

So no Jeffrey this weekend after all - he is caught up in family obligations, and broke besides. This puts the onus of getting my friends stupid fucked-up back on me. Of course, I don't have the touch of genius that elevates it to art-form level when Jeff does it, but someone's got to take up the slack while he's going to and fro in the world and walking up and down in it. Though the truth is that there's never a lot of arm-twisting to that. "Hey Matt - c'mere. Crazy Uncle Dan's got somethin' for ya." I must remember to take pictures.

But for now, I am inexplicably tired. Wound up taking a nap for a good deal of the evening, and not doing anything either creative or productive, both of which were on the agenda (in addition to massive ripe handfuls of slack, which is not at all the same thing as wandering off and falling over on your futon for two hours). Meanwhile, Stacy tears through Anne McCaffrey novels like a gamer devouring full-sized bags of Doritos, and I look at where the bookmark has come to rest in PERDIDO STREET STATION for at least the last three weeks and am much ashamed.

A week from tonight we'll be in Philly, ourselves walking up and down on South Street and pondering how many cheesesteaks from Jim's a person can eat and still live with himself, mingling with all the lovely freaks in the rosy neon glow. Life is good. Maybe I'll see if I can almost get turned away from the Liberty Bell again for looking like an anarchist. Fun fun! And if we run out of cool things to look at downtown, there's always popping over and listening to the lemurs whoop at each other at the Zoo.