Soooooooooooo,

Riding 2am at pu-er high.

I was just at QFC, Andrew hour, standing in one of two checkout lines with a bunch of other nocturnal shoppers and waiting for something exciting to happen, which it did! Some guy tried to pinch a Hostess pie. Only, it's not like he tried to pie-and-run, he let the checker scan the pie and then he muttered an excuse for why he wasn't going to pay.

"Sorry man," the checker said, "I can't let you go through here like you was holding a pie for someone else."

The pie guy twitched a little—a short circuit—like he just realized what he'd done, and quietly left.

As he de-scanned the pie, the checker gave me a look like he hadn't seen anything like that happen before. But he's the same checker that's there every night at that hour. That man has witnessed every half-baked theft scheme the dilapidated can muster, and each time he acts like it's the first time he's seen any such maneuver.

Speaking of half-baked shemes, I'm baking brownies—german chocolate brownies. They're cooling now.

The bowl is licked.

It was Davis at Kuanyin making tea tonight, and he's new to gong-fu so he improvised a lot. He's younger than he looks and a self-proclaimed lucky bastard with standardized tests. I thought he might be a contender for Pam (1 + 2 = trist?), but now I think he's just too young. Anyway, it's good to meet other tea freaks. And, it turns out we know some of the same people.

I wrote Birkby and chided him for a recent gong-faux pas.

"I understand you had a little tea party at your house, and imagine my surprise when I found out about it and realized I wasn't invited!

"Injurious insult aside, it looks like our orbits are near perigee. I met a guy named Davis at Japanese tea class who told me about aforementioned tea party in the Birkby wood. He said he knew you through Teahouse Kuanyin and that he was in tight with the likes of Nigel, Scott, Jim, and Julia.

"What gives man?"

Birkby replied with this: