Today is my 26th birthday!

This one goes out to Cyan’s attorneys and accountant:

A Mafia Godfather finds out that his bookkeeper has, over the past three years, embezzled nearly ten million dollars.

The bookkeeper is deaf, which the Godfather considered an occupational benefit, as not hearing privileged side-conversations would keep him from ever testifying in court.

The Godfather goes to shake down the bookkeeper about the missing $10 million, and brings along his attorney, who knows sign language.

“Where is the ten million bucks you stole from me?” the Godfather asks.

The attorney, using sign language, asks the bookkeeper where the ten million dollars is hidden.

The bookkeeper signs back: “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“He says he doesn’t know what you’re talking about,” the attorney translates.

The Godfather pulls out a 9mm pistol, puts it to the bookkeeper’s temple, cocks it, and says: “Ask him again!”

The attorney signs to the underling: “He’ll kill you for sure if you don’t tell him!”

“Okay! You win!” the bookeeper signs back. “The money is in a brown briefcase, buried behind the shed in my cousin Enzo’s backyard in Queens!”

“Well, what’d he say?” the Godfather asks the attorney.

“He says,” the attorney replies, “you don’t have the balls to pull the trigger.”

[Special thanks to David Greenberg, who narrowly avoided becoming a lawyer himself, for the joke.]

“The rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
– Mark Twain

As I’ve begun to receive concerned messages from family and friends convinced I’m lying somewhere in the streets, having been perhaps flattened by bus or taxicab, I wanted to briefly say that, after a remarkably shitty first half of last week, I then had a remarkably better (though not terribly communications-accessible) second half / weekend out in Denver, watching my younger brother David graduate from college.

Now, however, I’m back in NYC, alive and on top of the ball. Things should be back to “normal” around here, whatever little that means. Carry on.

When ailed by a crappy week, there’s no medicine like a good soundtrack to your life.

God bless Steve Jobs and the iTunes and iPod product teams.

Over the past few months, my life has been packed past overflowing, leaving me to field every single productivity hack, every organizational system I know, in an a nonstop effort to make it all fit.

And while, in short, it never quite did, at countless points along the way I managed to get tantalizingly close. Each time, the universe, clearly as karmic retribution for the wrongs of my past lives, would toss in an unforeseen wrench that would completely derail me, send me back to building towards nearly-on-top-of-things, one step at a time.

I thought of that today as, after a particularly trying month, Long Tail finally seemed to be crystallizing into a real company, Cyan’s projects finally seemed to be chunking steadily ahead. And then, this very morning, I was pulled unexpectedly into a close friend’s serious personal crisis, which ate up the first half of my day, unhinged the second half, and will likely leave me scrambling the rest of the week.

As Martha Gellman once wrote, “the only aspect of our travels that is interesting to others is disaster.” In which case, if I can somehow find the spare moments to write about, this week should be surpassingly fascinating stuff.

I really hate it when a toilet autoflushes while I’m still on it.

I receive a fair amount of email in response to this site, or in response to specific posts. Most of them fall into three categories: “this is great, keep writing!”, “this is horrific, drink bleach and die!” and “I totally understand that post, here’s something similar that happened to me.”

Every so often, however, I receive an email that I’m not exactly sure what to make of. Here’s one priceless piece I received yesterday afternoon:

>From: Manuelle Moricet

>Subject: josh… dear josh…

>i am sorry, i am emma i am also french and i do not understand a single word of what you say… that’s totally amazing it looks like philosophy….. isn’t it??
>So i do not know you but you’d better stop quote all the time this is not a good way to make people beleive you got something inside yor brain… but i must confess, i am just french maybe i am not the good person to appreciate the subject!!!
>Bye and good luck

I set out to write a recap of my trip out West, but instead spent the last half hour staring at a blank screen, wondering why, on a spring JetBlue flight from Oakland to JFK, I would chose to wear the corduroy pants that now stick hotly to the back of my legs. I also wonder about my feet; from the sitting and altitude and lack of cabin pressure, they’ve swollen slowly against my shoes’ toe boxes, until I imagine they threaten to spill, as old-fat-lady ankles, over the tops.

My brain is swelling up, too. Maybe in sympathy, or because I’ve for too many days traded sleep against caffeine in a Faustian bargain of attempted productivity. But mostly because so many stories from the trip – from funny vignettes to grand sagas – are pounding against the inside of my skull, jockeying to get out, that they’ve bottle-necked at the brainstem, unable to make it down and out through my fingers and onto the screen.

It’s giving me a hell of a headache.

So, until my feet are normally sized and my pants cool and dry, until I’ve slept more than a few hours and drank less than a morning triple espresso, the stories will have to wait. By which time, in all likelihood, they’ll be superceded by some other cockamamie tales of more recent misadventures, leaving this trip completely unrecounted.

Which is a shame. Because most of it was pretty fucking great.

Sorry to have gone MIA; I’m out in California, squeezing in Long Tail meetings and Cyan meetings and Passover seders and trips to Santa Cruz to meet the CrossFit folks and drinking heavily with West Coast friends.

Lots of stories, to be recapped shortly.

Colin reports he received a piece of spam today containing the following rather delightful snippet of text:

> On Halloween night, in a car rushing down the freeway,
> the tobbacconist soiled his underpants, and
> bearing an hourglass, he removed his hat.