It's not even that I've been lazy. It's just, I feel like I have nothing of consequence to say these days. This will happen to me periodically. My brain will empty itself of all weighty subject matter and I find myself drifting along in some innocuous fog for a week or two, unable to do much more than watch sitcoms and a baseball game when I get home at night.

I've been bitten by the inertia bug. Forgive my silence; more posts will follow soon, I promise. Please don't hit me.

Tomorrow night at 7 p.m., a strange man named George will come to my apartment to massage me in my own living room. I'd love to say that I usually don't have to pay for massages that take place in my livingroom, but 'tisn't the case. My free rub downs are very few and far between.

I am in desperate need of a massage because I seem to have developed the deltoid equivalent of lock jaw. My shoulders are frozen with tension. Accordingly, my neck is crunchy with pain. This is about as sore and stressed as my upper back has ever been, and I've certainly spent years exploring the upper echelons of shoulder and neck tension.

And don't tell me to try yoga. Yoga on Sunday is what got me into this mess.

How embaraskin'. Today during yoga, I was in the middle of a lunge and noticed that my front leg wasn't moving as far forward as it usually does. Turns out a roll of stomach fat was blocking the way. I had to get out of the pose and move the fat roll to the side. And I'm not at all fat. But apparently I'm becoming a bit more droopy.

There is no good reason for it, but I've been in a foul mood the last two days. Feeling askew, feeling misanthropic, feeling isolated, feeling blue. (Nothing a relaxing Yankees-Red Sox series can't cure, ha ha.) Days like these, I wish I had a dog. And a fireplace. I would go home and curl up with the former in front of the latter.

I apologize for the last posting. I am a child. My regression progresses apace.

Does everyone know about this chicken man? You tell him what to do and he does it. It only took me about two minutes to stump him though. I asked him to pick his butt and he merely wiggled it.

Crikey, I have a gen-u-ine readership. Three people have written me in the past few days saying they've run across my blog. And none have yet said they hate it. This is exciting!

And yet, the pressure to perform is causing me to sweat rivulets and of course, to avoid blogging.

Yesterday I wrote out a fastidious little To Do list, hoping to motivate myself to get through some mop-up work that always comes at the end of our publishing cycle. Today I came in and had no idea what one of my to do's meant. "Changes, treatment," it says. No clue. Unfortunately, I also put a star next to it, which means I was supposed to finish it today. Crikey.

(I think from now on I'll bookend the occasional blog with some antiquated exclamation. Look for "criminy," "crumbs" and "rats!" in the near future.)

What fatal disease possibilities are you looking at if you are tired all of the time? For the last two weeks or so, I have been tired all of the time. Therefore, I am convinced I have a fatal disease.

Due to the fact that I was tired all weekend, I didn't do much. The one jump in my two-day flatline occurred Friday night, when I was out to dinner with Dan at a somewhat-schmancy restaurant. Halfway through the meal, I spotted Charlize Theron coming in with her fey boyfriend. Now, I live for any celeb spotting, but the spotting of a young beautiful actress or model is my favorite sort of "get." With these, I get to make such authoritive declarations as, "In real life, she is not at ALL pretty"; or, "She's too skinny and actually has really bad skin."

Well, I am here to report that Charlize Theron was very cute but hardly beautiful; that her skin was a little ruddy and washed-out; and that she was skinny but not skeletal. A very important get, indeed.

Okay, I'm going to give the Sox a pass on today's game, considering the players probably averaged about two hours of sleep apiece. But if things don't look up tomorrow, then my baseball ulcer may be flaring up early this year.

Friday afternoon is undoubtedly a time for some quality Internet-stalking. But I'm starting to run out of people to investigate or check in on. And Friendster, with its new three-tier friendship system or whatever it is they've got going over there, is proving to be less of a help than it once was. So in essence I am sitting slumped at my desk, trying fruitlessly to pull some long-forgotten names out of the rectum of my brain. No one is coming to mind. This is the downside of not having dated very frequently. Okay, well, this isn't the primary downside, but it is a tangential one.

Anyone out there looking to get stalked?

There are so very many reasons why I should not give my soul over to the Sox this season. Those who know me well know how I handled the end of the last post-season. Not well, in brief. Part of the problem is that I have so very much affection for the players on the team this year (about 80 percent of whom made up last year's team) that I start to internalize their victories and setbacks as if they were my own. And then, of course, I am inhabited by the venomous desire of every Red Sox fan to see our guys rip the spine out of the as-is-spineless MFY and proceed onto an almost anti-climactic World Series win.

Sigh. I'm pissy because the Sox lost in extra innings tonight, and I blame the ump who didn't call about five different strikes thrown by Bobby Jones.

What do I do to unwind? I watch "Cold Case Files," the show that leaves me awake and paralyzed with fatalistic, fantastical scenarios running through my brain.

Okay, yeah, I just double-locked my front door.

In case the Boston Globe chooses not to print my letter (yes, there are some out there who do not enjoy my praise as much as y'all), I thought I'd reprint it here. For those who choose not to read through it, here is the short version: Dan Shaughnessy is a dick.

***********

To the editor:

Though he’s long fancied himself the lyrical magistrate of the Globe sports section (I’ve often imagined him strutting around the newsroom sporting a cape with the words “Agent Provocateur” stitched on the back), with his latest set of columns, Dan Shaughnessy has merely solidified his role as the white noise maker of the writing staff.

While we all seem to have temporarily forgotten that it is the Patriots, and not the Red Sox, who play a 16-game season, Shaughnessy has wasted no time in fanning the flames of fan unease with his agenda-filled, vitriolic rants.

Clearly, he no longer has any interest in offering insight into the game, or indeed, witnessing the success of the home team. Instead, Shaughnessy is driven by one unmistakable objective: to drive Pedro Martinez out of town -- preferably into pinstripes for maximum effect,

Proof? Consider his own column from June 11, 1996 (“Clemens throws heat at mates”), in which Shaughnessy praises Roger Clemens for leaving the ballpark before the end of the game after a frustrating outing.

Perhaps Shaughnessy has one more objective: to see new editions of Curse of the Bambino printed into perpetuity.

Meaghan XXXXX
Los Angeles, CA

At the risk of seeing a precipitous drop in my readership numbers, I think I may ask Dan to stop linking to my blog from his own. It has led to one too many "yours is funny, but his is FUNNY" comments that I just don't need. I'm not trying to prove that I can "do" funny, people.

Here's something I'm a little embarassed to admit, but hell, it's Friday and this day has been one big pile o' crap, so if I come across as a bit of a xenophobe in this upcoming rant, well, there's no way for you to get hold of me to complain anyway. So ha.

I cannot stand it when people in exercise classes refuse to follow the masses. Like if the rest of us are practicing punches in a kickboxing class and someone's doing full-on round-kicks. Or we're all moving in time to some music and there's a person a half-step off the beat. I don't know why it bothers me. It's like my inner chorus girl emerges and I balk at anyone disrupting the synchronicity of the room.

Well, anyway, I've started to notice that for the most part, the people who do this are, uh, not of American descent. There is a French woman in my step class who seems oblivious to the music being played, and floats through the moves at a from-another-planet pace, languidly flapping her arms when she feels like it. (It should also be noted that she wears a full face of makeup when she works out.) In that same class, a Russian woman will do push-ups whenever the mood strikes. And then there is a man of indeterminate ethnicity in my yoga class who grunts and groans when we're supposed to be silent and talks during meditation and stands too close to the person beside him and does, like, every single position wrong and doesn't seem to care about any of it and it drives me absolutely fucking INSANE.

This is terrible, I know. Perhaps deep down I desire nothing more than homogeneity and maintenance of the status quo? What have I really tapped into? Not my inner chorus girl, but perhaps my inner George W.?

No, no. I'm just a misanthropic jerk who looks too hard for patterns in the daily human idiocy that surrounds me.