I am concerned about all of the mixed signals that our children are receiving about dragons. The film Dragonheart would have us believe that they are misunderstood, persecuted creatures with Scottish brogues. The new Reign of Fire insists that they are post-apocalyptic bastards with a mad-on for clock towers. Puff the Magic Dragon claims they just have a good eye for real estate. And who knows what our childrens' dungeon masters are telling them? The fact is, the cultural consensus on dragons is completely fucked up, and no one other than me seems to be worried about it.

I am still employed, but the early summer crazy is heading toward a mid-summer exercise of martial arts, if you know what I mean.

In order to get my certification as a stone-cold motherfucker, I joined a bowling league. I have talked about doing that for a long time, and now I am a member of Diversey River Bowl's Team #12, which is tentatively called Team Pajama Party, pending the resolution of a dispute over whether or not the cute girl on our team agreed to wear fire-engine pajamas to league night every week in order to gain a psychological advantage over the competition. (If not, I am going to recommend that we be re-named The Carpet Professionals for reasons that are not clear even to me.) Our three-member team is brilliantly assembled: one member supplies talent, another supplies heart, and another supplies confidence which can be modified into raging egomania, as situations dictate. Were league bowling more like Voltron, we would form the ultimate bowler, lacking only a beer gut. Last night was my debut with the team. Let me tell you something about stone-cold motherfuckerdom. It is a place that, last night, I called home. When I was through with Bowler_67, my direct opponent, he was a hippie guy with a bald patch and long hair, which was perhaps essentially what he was prior to the match, but he was without holy hell, because I beat it out of him. Frames 6-8 of the first game were a time of glory wherein my first ever turkey was earned (three strikes in a row). I have an average of about 120, but last night I averaged 140, 20 pins above my average, which is really a stone-cold motherfucker of a thing to do, if you think about it. The league uses handicaps, which I don't entirely understand, so we won't know the exact results until next week. Probably, we lost, because Big B, the other team's ace, also had an understanding of stone-cold motherfuckerdom as applied to league bowling, and our ace hurt her toe before the match. But we competed well, and I received my certificate.

If someone does not send me one of these within fourteen days, I will be forced to conclude that everyone hates me.