..: well, early in the evening and just about to launch into the some image-editing, whilst a fine, fine cool breeze touches me in soft greeting through the old XLab window… a breeze that carries with it the subtle smells of the canyon, and as you all know that is the Possum Kingdom. That is not the only smell that assails me; the shirt I have most recently ‘donned’ smells like sweat and garlic. All I can say is that it looked pretty clean.

‘Twas a busy day– got the Self-Organizing Map working on the LinuxBox, now ready for some Esoteric A.I./Audio fun; spoke to the esteemed John O’Connor– now hailing from Queens and lying about his rent ’cause he thinks that’s funny– whose work now numbers as part of the incomparable Museum of Modern Art; spoke briefly to the Parental Units, who are understandably concerned; set up the mini-Cluster and danced to its stuttering hums; brewed a fine pot of Coffee (it gets a capital letter, you see); held the nonfunctional Powerbook in my hands for a few delicate moments of indecision– do I rid myself of its potentially ‘dead’ weight, or do I dive in with screwdriver and scalpel and perform another Mac Surgery?; burned the oft-promised, never delivered John Coltrane (Live at the Village Vanguard) CDs for the brothy and cathartic PW Deegan; and cleaned the XLab, pushing the LinuxBox closer to the window to be more easily viewed by the prurient University Heights Public. All before 8 pm.

So why the devil, you may ask? Certainly sounds less like a day of demonic activity, more along the lines of a beaver, or hedgehog. But I say this: the Devil is not so black as He is painted. And there is more chaos afoot, even beneath the geometric veil of accomplishment, than could be borne on the productive, but alas rather narrow, shoulders of Castor canadensis.

Perhaps you are wondering, then, about the hedgehog. To which I must answer, I have nothing bad to say about the hedgehog. I myself love them dearly.

But still we must resolve to the totem of the punchy, the joyous, the devilish, the disharmonic, the chaotic spindrift fibers that tear away at the edges of things. Because, in the end, the Devil is in the eye of the beholder.