substitute

Woke up somehow hung over without having consumed any alcohol.

Cat barf on carpet.

First attempt to make coffee unsuccessful because I did not use water.

Opened cat food can in wrong direction so that minute particles of wet cat food went in my eye. Eye care advice: do not put cat food in your eye.

Inexplicable communication from government agency regarding money.

Rushed shower to meet friends for lunch. Therefore had not completely removed soap from hands before putting in contact lenses. Eye care advice: do not put soap on a contact lens and then place it in your eye.

Lunch with friends was good!

Santa Ana wind gusts to 60 mph. High tension lines flailing in traffic with arcing and explosions. Trash cans bouncing down the street like Rover from The Prisoner. Big-ass brush fire up off Santiago with at least one severe burn victim.

Inability to clean house; spiral of shame.

Kéan Coffee: Good coffee. Ibuprofen and ranitidine. LA Times food section full of inexcusably bad writing, particularly from S. Irene Virbila. I maintain that she is one of the Andy Kaufman clones or possibly a tulpa manifestation of the narrator of The Debt to Pleasure. Examples today:

A fresh spirit is blowing through the Paris dining scene... ...A friend who loves wine told me about Le Villaret, a small bistro with stone and half-timbered walls in the the 11th arrondissement, Paris' equivalent to Silver Lake.

Also, a recipe for Blanquette de Veaux (HOW MANY VEALS ARE TO BE USED?)

Another writer suggests fancying-up mac 'n' cheese: My personal cheese advisor Steven Jenkins, who wrote the definitive guide "Cheese Primer," suggests bringing the dish up to 2006 cheese-aisle standards by using a fresh goat's milk cheese, mascarpone, Gorgonzola dolce and a sheep's milk cheese from Spain (manchego, Idiazábal, Roncal) or from France (Ossau-Iraty). The combination is almost other-worldly, much more nuanced than the predictable original.

Start the reactor.

Back to cleaning; spiral of shame deepens. Fortunately, maternal flight delayed from 7 until 10:30 pm. Then, flight delayed further. Uh oh, I know where this is going. Yep! The flight will now miss the curfew for SNA and be diverted to LAX.

Folks I'm going to drive into L.A. to meet a flight at LAX at 1 am now. I wonder what I'll put in my eye first?

I just spent the four hours from midnight until now waiting for a large technology company to fix their end of the giant mechanical badger we're building together so that could start it up again. Waiting for someone else to do something for four hours is much more annoying than working for this amount of time.

During this time my eyes started to really tear up and I decided to remove my disposable contacts. When I went to do so I couldn't find the left one and thought it had fallen out when I was rubbing my eyes in an irritated way earlier.

Just now, hours later, I discovered that this rogue contact had been hiding in one corner of my eye which is why I still couldn't see too well and was itchy and wondered if I had Eyeball Rot. But no, there was a small piece of plastic stuck up in a corner there somewhere.

I'd give all of you an eczema update but I think I've been erotic enough what with the giant mechanical badger and the eyeball issues.

Good night!