1. It’s a great and startling thing to make Helen Jane laugh.
2. It’s a great and startling thing to be old enough to have dinner with someone you’ve known for over twenty years.
3. Second hand, unverified: It’s impossible to sell used Philip K. Dick books on Half.com because coding on the site prevents people from trying to sell porn.
4. There’s a store in San Francisco in which the first half is nothing but bongs and the second half is nothing but gay porn, meaning that some people have a strange idea of what constitutes “getting the munchies.”
5. Apartments don’t clean themselves.
6. Novels don’t write themselves.
7. If you put a Weber starter chimney in a Weber grill and use no-light briquettes, the result is a column of flame so high that Zeus is likely to peer down from Mt. Olympus and snap “Look, I’ve left you all alone for the last several millenia, so do you think you could return the favor and stop burning my ass?”
8. If this upcoming Bay Area evening is even a tenth as gorgeous as this Bay Area day, I retract all the grumpy, cynical posts I’ve ever made on this site.*

*Except the ones I really meant.