I love banana peppers. I'm talking about the sliced up kind stored in vinegar that go well on subs (hoagies?). This morning the first thing I did upon waking was wander zombielike into my cousin's kitchen and teased out thirty or forty sliced pieces of pepper straight from the jar. Who needs coffee when you have banana peppers?

Yesterday when I heard Reagan died I immediately flashed on a line from a Talking Heads song, written in the 80s: "Our president's crazy/ Did you hear what he said?/ Business and pleasure/ Lie right to your face/ Divide it in sections/ And give it away..." After that I realized that I'd bought into Reagan's stuff, too: I'd told my students in Estonia that Reagan was largely responsible for bringing down the Soviet empire due to his covert encouragement of Solidarnosc. Which is ridiculous. Why would one American get all the credit, instead of a bunch of death-defyingly brave Poles? But it goes to show the gravitic pull of his rhetoric. I think of Reagan as a kind of bridge figure from the authentically Libertarian strains of the Republican party to the current set, who perversely couch expansion of government in its rhetorical shrinking. I don't think he can be held totally responsible for that, either, and if the Republicans' nobler angels had prevailed, we'd probably think better of him.

My first memory, literally my first, I would've been one year and two months old, is of my parents fighting over whether to vote for Carter or Reagan in the 1980 elections.

This weekend I'm here at my cousin S.'s place holding down the fort. Last week I was introduced to this addictive dating site and I've been using all the free cable access here to chat with and at a couple of brilliant, mostly 19 year old mostly British women. They're the only ones who talk to me, for some reason. I often wonder if I have some encoded dysfunction that older women see and know to run away from. There is a 26 year old Dane who didn't. Nothing will probably ever come of any of this, since Floridians don't seem to like me (and really? That's OK by me) but it's fun anyway.

I see myself in 30 years, like the Michael Douglas character in Wonder Boys, still trying to get into Katie Holmes' panties.