Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: The Holy Roman Empire--Neither holy, nor Roman. Discuss.

I have reached a novel-writing impasse.  I had to skip a chapter and start an altogether-new one, completely out of sequence, because I just can't figure out what's supposed to happen at the end of the last one. I don't know what that means.  I'm going to just keep writing stuff.  It'll turn itself into a novel.  That happens all the time, I'm sure.

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Sometimes, you think you know who's calling, so you answer the phone with a funny greeting.  And sometimes, the person on the other end is not the person you expected.  And then you feel silly.

That was just a general observation about something that happens sometimes.  Not a dear-diary entry about something that I actually DID.

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Random questions, addressed to no one in particular, and certainly not to anyone in my household:

1. Is the concrete floor of the not air conditioned and not especially clean garage the best place to store a watermelon?  Or any other food?

2. When you cook something with a cookie sheet, should you then clean the cookie sheet, or return it quietly to the oven, crumby and just slightly crusty?

3. If you have an extra $5,000 hanging around, because the Brinks truck is always backing up to your house and dropping stacks of cash in the driveway, is expensive jewelry not just as good an investment as a 36-year-old Mercedes convertible with a rust spot on the hood?

Purely rhetorical questions.

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But even rhetorical questions can be answered, right? In a purely rhetorical sense?

1. No.  Come on.
2. What the hell? I mean, COME ON.
3. Come on, man.

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I'm reading a book about the Rothschilds.  As much as I love history, I am terrible on details, especially details about European dynasties, and ESPECIALLY Hanoverian and Saxonian and Prussian kings and princes and electors and Thanes of Cawdor and whoever else ruled those itty-bitty Germanic roosts.  And there were a lot of Rothschilds, too, who were fond of a few family names that were handed down from generation to generation.  I'm going to keep reading, because it's interesting, but don't ask me details about which Rothschild advised which Wilhelm of Fill-in-the-Blank German hamlet, because it's all a little fuzzy.

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Sometimes, if you just stand in front of your computer and write about whatever pops into your mind, you'll clear all of the mental cobwebs,  and the resulting moment of crystal clarity will lead you to the solution to your writing problem.  And sometimes, you'll just end up with a pile of old cars, overripe fruit, inadvertent reverse prank calls, and Hohenzollerns.