I want to laugh, but I'm afraid it would be translated as cruelty when it is really just astonishment. "Just" making friends, as if making a single real friend hasn't been my main life goal for the past 5 years, that always founders on the rocks of people's casual indifference to platonic frienship as a concept.

But I am looking for a new job, which will help a little bit, and I found a good place to share my guitar playing with other poeple.

And today I'm sitting by the screen door as the dog looks out into the rain for squirrels and bunnies and learning a song off an LP on clarinet. I haven't pulled out my clarinet since I had some teeth removed several months ago, and I didn't play it for very long before that. Today's song is Buttermilk Skies by Hoagy Carmichael from the Columbia House collection, "Songs of Long Ago and Far Away". I think it's in Gb, which so far has taken me about 20 minutes to remember. Don't have much hope for getting much above the center of that middle octave today.

Consider my nervous system regulated for now.