Grits

Hey! Remember how I fretted that McNeil was never going to present us with any more of his special Bogie bits? I should have known that he had his reasons! The 700-page biography of Humphrey Bogart, from which the bits were extracted, got really sad toward the end, he tells me. Then he gives us what I assume are his last few bits, and they are grim ones indeed. Grim bits, or "grits" as I call them for short. You have been warned! Writes McNeil: "I pick it up every once in a while, but it's sad when he's old before his time, and his wife is probably running around with Frank behind his back - and there's nothing he can do, really...except die." I told you it was grim! And as I have discovered for myself, after reading probably hundreds of celebrity biographies under the auspices of the Million Dollar Book Club, they all get sad toward the end. But I never learn my lesson. Hardly any celebrities get taken up bodily into Heaven like Enoch in the Bible. We should move on to happier things! Like, Adam sent Dr. Theresa and me a package of treats when we were sick. And, a week or two later, when Dr. Theresa was breaking down some cardboard boxes for recycling, she found a package of cookies in one them. A package of cookies we had overlooked somehow when we unpacked Adam's thoughtful gift. A package of cookies! Like a miracle! Is that a happy story? Because I can imagine a peevish reader, you know, Elon Musk or his teen BFF Big Balls, saying, "So what? Where's MY cookie?" Well, let's see. Speaking of the Million Dollar Book Club, we're on Kafka's diaries. So yesterday I was reading about a dream Kafka had about "a greyhound-like donkey, which was very restrained in its movements... its narrow human feet were unappealing to me because of their length and uniformity." This here donkey Kafka dreamed about had a "silvery shining breast." You know what I thought of! The supernatural creature the Padfoot, of course, a description of which provided the epigraph to my story collection MOVIE STARS. I'll save you the trouble of "clicking" on the "hyperlink": "In the neighborhood of Leeds there is the Padfoot, a weird apparition about the size of a small donkey, 'with shaggy hair and large eyes like saucers'... to see it is a prognostication of death." So we're back to death again, you're welcome. Grits!