Some readers expressed concerns that I went silent because I was beating myself up over the Caroline thing. I wasn't, honestly; I was just going through an uncommunicative phase. (Too bad she got fired, of course, but in retrospect, my boss made the right decision on that one.) Moving to Texas became a disaster with remarkable speed and uncanny precision, and it wasn't until early the next year that I managed to turn the whole experience around into a good one. It took me ages to find any kind of work at all, and expensive things kept breaking or getting stolen; the three-legged cat never came back, and all I ever wanted was to be alone. By October, I was so fed up that I grew a beard, got fat and spent entire days indiscernible from late-period Jim Morrison. I felt uneasy and paranoid outside of my apartment and low-rent Mexican restaurants. (Not the good ones, mind you. I got the fear in those.) So I was fairly uncommunicative for a while, unless you were a heavily made-up waitress asking if I wanted more salsa. (Why, yes! ¡Si!)

In October, I received an email from a man claiming to be Howard Hong. Last summer, after he spent $26,000 on artwork by Congo, a famous painter monkey, suggestions were made on this site that Howard Hong was a visionary genius and a shining light for humankind. I was going through an uncommunicative phase when the email arrived, unfortunately - this site was on hiatus, but even if it hadn't been, I'm not sure I would have even known what to say to a man I held in such high esteem. I mean, do you think any of these people knew what to say to their visitor? It gets overwhelming sometimes.

Howie (as he referred to himself) said that my "blogs" about my "obsessions" with his paintings were interesting, and he wanted to know what my obsession with monkeys is. Look, if I could articulate that, this would have wrapped up back in 1998. Sometimes art is like that. A great composer lives by the sea and tries for years to express in music the feeling in his soul from the perfection of the water; nobody, upon hearing and enjoying his work, understands that he is utterly failing to express it.

(news) Gypsy (L), a 50-year-old orangutan, draws a picture with crayons as her grandson Poppy watches during a Sunday afternoon drawing session at Tama Zoo Park in suburban Tokyo January 29, 2006. Three female orangutans at the zoo have taken up drawing with crayons since last December and Gypsy has completed about fifteen drawings using a combination of different colours, especially with her favourites blue and yellow, zoo officials said.

So that's your legacy, Howie. Pretty good, I'd say.

Near the end of the summer, I exchanged emails with the woman who bought the Emil Bach House, subject of an entry earlier last year. She told me about her plans to restore the house (a monumental task) and perhaps run a selective mini-bed & breakfast there; she invited me over for a tour, but I was already in Texas by then. She did say that the local urinating crackheads were apparently urinating somewhere else, because she hadn't seen them, so that's good. If I've ever implied that urinating crackheads do not appreciate classic architecture, let me take this opportunity to apologize. (According to my server stats, urinating crackheads account for about 14% of my traffic. Hey, I'm not shy about playing to my audience.)

A couple months later, the granddaughter of Emil Bach himself sent me a nice email to say she'd enjoyed the follow-up post about Frank Lloyd Wright and my old shoes. I was on the web back when it was a few people shouting into a large, cavernous, uninhabited space. Other than the occasional email, there was no way to tell who was reading the site - where they were from, or more importantly, how they were responding to it. Then server stats became easy, and you knew the numbers and you could even do some back-and-forth with other sites, but the non-corporate internet was still off in space, still inescapably separate from the world off-line. Now, if you conjure the right spirits and conjure them well, you might find yourself talking directly into the historical record. Perhaps I'm irrevocably old school, but I think that's splendid.

(Unfortunately, by the time she emailed, I was in the aforementioned uncommunicative phase, so I never replied. But thanks, Robin.)

In the winter, I received a legal threat from a lawyer who was angry about something I'd written several months before, and claimed that he could prosecute me under new anonymous internet harassment laws. The correspondence was strange: it was like trying to reason with a man who was angry that you were standing on his lawn while he was trying to mow it, even though you were actually sitting on the beach and his riding mower was a rusty pole with a cardboard box trailing behind on a string. Dude knew a lot about lawn mowers, but that didn't change the sand between our toes. I was kind of surprised and asked around for some advice before deciding to ignore it. The site was already on hiatus by then; even though I'd posted as recently as the end of December, it had effectively been out of service since the end of July. (I had to do the December updates because I was so amused about the hand-modeling thing, but I probably should have left it blank; as any English teacher will tell you, it's confusing to use the present tense to talk about something from the past.) So it was weird to get threatened over something that felt so distant by then; it was like someone calling you to account over an English paper you wrote in high school. What's the point? What are you doing, guy? ¿Donde esta tu pantalones?

More about all of that some other time. Now I am back in shape and bowling well, so things are all right.