I Swear I Loved Her Before I Saw This Video.

But it didn't hurt.

Good. Lord. The word hawt is inadequate.

(And, thank you, David Linden. DJQ has been making me music compilations since he was in graduate school. No, wait—undergrad. I still have most of 'em, and the cassette tapes are holding up well, in every sense of the term.

"No good deed goes unpunished." Last winter after a visit with him and his fam [during which I think I might have been particularly selfish and boorish, but perhaps my lack of manners was within the normal margin], I more or less demanded that instead of waiting for my birthday, he make my next music CD right then and there, before I caught my flight back to L.A. It was ready by the time I got back from blogging in the room outside his office.

The Shivaree track was on it.

Every music collection he makes for me is my favorite, with the possible exception of all the other ones he's made for me.)

Now that I've pulled my head out of my ass long enough to see that an incompetent contractor has basically tossed his beautiful, beautiful office, let's all buy more copies of The Accidental Mind in a show of solidarity.

It turns out mine is in Arcadia. When I called my favorite San Gabriel Valley furniture/decor place to get the new condo measured for blinds, I was informed that both the women who work there had been "enjoying" my book.

"Um. I went back and got that after I left it behind, right?" I started to feel a bit queasy, then.

"No. You said you would, but then you didn't. So we've been reading it, and we really like it."

"Cool. A friend of mine wrote it. But you're sure I left my copy at your store? 'Cause I thought I'd gotten it, but my husband had just put it into storage, with all the rest of my valuable . . . um . . . stuff."

"It's here. I'm looking at it right now; we put your name on it. But we'll give you the book back when you come in to pick out the blinds for the new place."

"Okay. That'd be . . . that'd be great."

To my credit, I didn't ask them to flip through Accidental Mind and figure out whether short-term memory problems in one's 40s are predictive of future senility. I wouldn't have remembered the answer, in any event.

UPDATE 2: To me, the photos suggest that David's tiny antique tea table probably survived the disaster, along with his fetching little cranium.

Is it possible that the Johns Hopkins contractors need to spend more time watching Modern Marvels? Just a thought: I must go, before I get upset again. I'm actually pretty mad, and this thing happened, like, a week ago or something.