Why?

Why did someone make a movie about this girl? Is she a figure skater?

Why did Oliver's passport sit at the post office for one week after being delivered there?

Why did Mickey, the post lady with whom I talked, tell me how sad this was for Oliver but that there might be a hidden reason that I landed up with my baby at home? There's always a reason for these things, she said.

Why did Mickey not get on my nerves despite her cloying cliches?

Why am I eating entirely too many donuts these days?

Why is Sophie's nose so stopped up? Is it a cold? Did her nose break when she fell on it over a month ago? Is she allergic to the marijuana plant?

Why do we carry worry when there's nothing, literally nothing, to be gained?

Why have I not gone to a yoga class in a year?

Why am I not flush?

Why am I so lush? (too many donuts)

Why can't I throw out the stack of New Yorkers that I have still not read?

Why did I dream of myself the other night as pregnant at fifty, milling through a party where other women carried shopping bags filled with guacamole that they insisted were their own babies?

Why can I not get Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road out of my head, and why do I still remember La Marseillaise, the French national anthem as well as Robert Frost's Two Roads Diverged in a Wood both of which I memorized in seventh grade for my batty old French teacher, Madame Marie Smith, but not my one true love's middle name?

...
Le jour de gloire est arrive. 
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L'etandart sanglant est leve

Aux armes, mes citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons! Marchons!
Qu'un sang impur!
Abreuve nos sillons!

In lieu of a real post

here's a silly post. I wonder how many times I've titled my post "In lieu..." -- no matter.

I still have nothing to say -- and everything to say, I suppose. But what I want to tell you is that today I had an appointment in Beverly Hills, and I hate going to Beverly Hills because with a few possible exceptions, it's a freak show over there. Crazy BMW drivers, mustard-colored Rolls-Royces, paparazzi on every corner, fifty year old women who are probably really eighty, slicked-back Porsche-driving metrosexuals -- well -- the list could go on and on and I just hate going there. But I had this appointment, so I drove my car into one of the large parking garages and as I climbed up the ramp in my car, a hot pink Beetle came down. On the side of the car was a large painting of one of those little Japanese dolls -- something like this, but just the head:

And the woman driving the hot pink car with the Japanese doll painted on the side WAS THE JAPANESE DOLL. Exactly. She looked exactly like the doll painted on the side of her hot pink car. I thought I might be hallucinating because I was in Beverly Hills overload, but there she was, driving her car like a normal person, right beside me.

It was fantastic. I have no idea who she was or where she was going, but it was fantastic.