I was in Clearwater Beach, Florida, the morning of the 31st, listening to coffee drip, looking out the picture window at a parking lot, and saw a squirrel sitting on top of a telephone pole at eye level 15 feet away, looking at me. On the beach, men with metal detectors searched for lost diamond rings and gold ingots. The squirrel had no good reason to be on top of a pole and I had no reason to be in Florida and the men on the beach kept moving along and not finding anything. We were all just spending time, and eventually the squirrel went racing along a cable to a nearby roof and I flew back home and I assume the men found something else to do, maybe watch football and drink Harvey Wallbangers.

Time flies by, the planet is spinning faster, it’s 11am and then suddenly it’s 3.30, so I try to eliminate wasted time, such as the hours I spend rustling around for postage stamps and meanwhile getting engrossed in a stack of rejection letters from editors. Time that if I saved it I could spend it on nobler things, such as writing less about myself and more about social responsibility. But first I have to clean out my email box, which is laden every morning with notes like, “The reason I’m running for county attorney in Rome, Georgia is …” and I, who don’t live anywhere near Georgia, nor do I wish to, must unsubscribe from that mailing list, which requires four separate steps and in the time it takes to do it, I see that four more fundraising emails have appeared, all written by programmers and sent to hundreds of thousands on mailing lists bought by campaigns and it’s like being attacked by a cloud of deerflies.

I hate wasting time, now that people my age are dying like flies. I DESPISE French cuffs, the trouble of locating cufflinks and dinking around trying to finagle them into four tiny apertures in the cuffs. I prefer black T-shirts.