• Religion is the cologne many killers wear to mask their hate.

• I would like to know what segment of the viewing public was able to watch David Caruso play tough-guy roles, while suspending disbelief.

• It would be nice to have richer interactions with others than this blog affords.  In spite of the occasional appreciative comments, I seldom know who is reading and whether their reaction is positive or otherwise.  Stage actors can bask in the visible warmth of their audiences, but writers must be blind and impassive, like fishermen.  When fishing, you cast your fly, and maybe there is a fish down there and maybe not, but if there is a fish there, it may be hungry or maybe not, but if it is hungry, maybe it is in the mood for a worm and not a fly, or maybe it is the time of year it eats gnats, or maybe your fly just smells funny or swims by too fast.  So you pull in the line and most often you find nothing.  And you think, maybe what you need is a different lure or a new line or a cooler day, but you really have no idea.

• Making and keeping friends is something I have never been good at.  As a result, I don’t have many.  I envy those who do — they will outlive me, in days and in minds.

• On a more melancholy note (!) I must also confess that the older I get, the more I tend to procrastinate.  I see this as perfectly rational — I would rather have my obituary read, “He died while working on his final composition” than “He died while cleaning the garage.”

• With respect to cleaning, I don’t see small specks of dirt and crumbs on the floor as well as I used to.  And the ones I do see, I’m less inclined to pick up right then and there… I will vac them up eventually.  A tentative co-existence with imperfection is settling in.

• From the American Irony Board:  When my son and his wife visited for Thanksgiving, they brought along a book to give to my daughter: “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.”  After the holiday, as my daughter was packing up to leave, I saw she had neglected to pack the book.  I asked her, didn’t she want to take the book with her, and she replied, no, she probably wouldn’t read it.  So now I get to figure out what to do with this book about clutter that is sitting on my desk.

• Donald Trump, with alphabetic economy, has made a not-so-surprising transition from “You’re Fired!” to “You’re Afraid!”

• I really don’t want my blog to be bleak.  I do love life.  It’s just that so much shit — man-made, man-preventable or man-remediable — makes life not so much fun for millions of others on this planet.  My cognitive dissonance stares me in the face every day that I watch The Price is Right — and I stare it right back down as I try to outguess the contestants on the prices of designer leather goods, wine coolers and karaoke systems.

I close with an observation by writer Anna Holmes, with a bracketed insertion of my own:  “I believe that self-loathing is a reasonable response to the unfairness and arbitrariness of the profession [humanity] with which we’ve chosen to align ourselves.”