I turned in the book to my ex-agent's boss yesterday. As I explained to her, it shouldn't have taken me nearly a year to rewrite eight chapters but I didn't get a chance to touch it until three weeks ago. I've been incredibly lucky just to have that contact and now all that's left is the waiting.

I resolved at some point last month to write three screenplays by the end of the year. Screenplays are easy. But they're hard when you've decided that the entire motion picture industry is creatively bankrupt and entering end-stage collapse and even the idea of pushing together 300 pages for your friends to go shoot on a shoestring is fucking depressing but that's what all my friends do so we soldier on.

Now that all the stuff for other people is done, I started putting the motorcycle back together, which has been fairing-off/clocks out for the past year thanks to an inability to get it fixed in the last sixteen hours before I went to LA. Got it back together and it wouldn't start. Used statistically-significant search terms to find the post on the Internet I wrote three years ago about what to do when your Italian hyperexotic won't start, which of course I'd forgotten about, which of course I'd already amended once with the other time I was saved by my own Internet easter egg. A testament to those crazy Italians: I could let my kawasaki sit for a month and the fucker wouldn't start. The Benelli has been in the back yard under a cover for so long that the cover is sunbleached and ripped and the bitch turned over twice and exploded to life. Of course, it still doesn't turn off without yanking a relay under the seat so the thing I took it apart for in the first place remains unresolved.

I have three weeks.

Three weeks to clobber the honey-do list, to enjoy time with my family, to live a normal existence where I can hammock under my trees, sleep in my bed, run in my woods and enjoy my weather before returning to Solaris.

My daughter has a rippin' summer ahead of her. It took four days of searching and calling but I have assembled summer school programs to cover the period when she's done with her current daycare (June 30) until her pre-K starts (September 6). And it involves two locations and three waitlists for the last week but it's all prepaid and so's pre-K too so I know that kid's going to be enriched this year. No more McDonald's and Youtube.

But I also know that I better put some lithium grease on the sunroof so I don't return to a Dodge with a lake inside and I know that I'll be coming home primarily to mow the lawn and vacuum the floor and I know that it'll be another lonely two thousand miles full of audiobooks, sweat and deranged homeless people and I don't know if we're going four months, seven months or nine months and I hope it's the former but we could sure use the money from the latter.

Could be worse. I could be going on deployment. Instead, me, my Nexus pass and my VIP lounge membership are going to be giving Lyft another $1200 so that my daughter's Epipens are a $15 copay and so that my wife can do what she does best in the place that needs her most.

I told myself I'd go test drive a Porsche 911 after I finished the book. I can't afford a 911, not even an ancient used one. I can't quite afford a new Roomba.

But my kid's gonna have a good year.