A number of readers have asked about the nature and purpose of my alternate blog at www.toetagdiary.com.
   My answer is simple enough:
   It's the best I can do to preserve my sanity as a writer in a world I never made and understand less and less.
   In other words, creating an alternate reality to South Florida's dysfunctional gestalt works way better than booze, hard drugs, religious fanaticism, or filling my life with existential Bling.
   No shit.
   Like believing a duck died for our sins makes as much sense as Pat Roberston blaming Haiti's mega-death earthquake on a 200-year-old pact with the Devil – or that God gave the Jews the West Bank.
   But don't take my word for it.
   Instead, I suggest you spend a few hours in one of the two epi-centers of Broward culture: (1) the Swap Shop or (2) Sawgrass Mall.

       
             Swap Shop                 Sawgrass Mall
   Oh yes.
   During each of your expeditions, consider the words (and emotions) the poet William Wordsworth gave us more than two centuries ago:

  The world is too much with us; late and soon,
  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
  Little we see in Nature that is ours;
  We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
  This Sea that bares her bosom in the moon,
  The winds that will be howling at all hours,
  And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
  For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
  It moves us not. – Great God! I'd rather be
  A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
  So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
  Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
  Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea
  Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
 
  Yeh.
   I know.
   Ain't nobody been knowing what the fuck any of that poetry shit means at Nova Southeastern University's H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship.
 
     Greek God Triton          Broward God Wayne