Maybe it's because I want the kind of average, rough-hewn looking guy to win, being a kind of average, rough-hewn looking guy myself.

Two New Year's ago, I took Rod, that character in a novel that pretends to be myself, to Cancun, Mexico. This New Year, while residing in New Orleans, The Plan has become to move this spiritual hejira of mine to Mexico until I return to Europe. It's going full circle, I feel, in that when I made my last major life decision (marriage) I had been planning to go to Mexico and write The Great American Novel. That impulse to live in Mexico has never really died. And those letters from the women of ArtCamp have had their effect upon my imagination.

So, come the Spring, it's Mexico.

Which means that I want to believe that by the Spring I'll have some luck other than bad.

As the title of this epistle suggests, I didn't get last week's wish. New Year's Eve sucked for me as much as Christmas Eve and Christmas. I suspect New Year's Day will be another major non-starter. Same reasons as last time, too. With one exception: Cameron did pay me back on New Year's Eve night, even if the terms of the original agreement did change slightly.

It's New Year's Eve, actually, as I begin writing to you again. After going over this a few times, my last major chore of the edition, I'm sure the clock will have tolled midnight and I shall be in 2002.

The fireworks are going on outside already and I hear from people going out to party that there are already gunshots, the bane of New Orleans on this special evening.

Matt was telling me about a guy on the news who has been on a personal campaign to stop all the shooting because of injuries caused by falling bullets. The story goes that the first year the guy started he heard over 3000 weapons' reports while standing in his yard. Last year, I'm told, he only heard about sixty. So progress is being made.

The sewer stench? Well, it was pretty intense last night, but I haven't really noticed it much today. I was doing laundry. That helps.

Happy New Year, Rod

I plan to take a look myself, though it is quite overcast here tonight. The cloud cover, uncharacteristically, has had little effect on the cold snap we're experiencing. Siberian chill from the jet stream, I'm told.

I'm a bit concerned, as the last hours of 2001 past, that I have no more poignant stories to tell you. Perhaps I'm storied out. Perhaps it is just the sheer weight of this situation bearing down on me that keeps me from waxing whimsical or reminiscent the way I could years ago. Now, the editing chores here being almost a matter of being on auto-pilot, I find it is all I can do to write these short epistles reporting what passes for my life here in Louisiana... AND I guess there isn't that much to tell, actually, or that I can tell with any discretion. What I have shared with you is bleak enough; you certainly don't need the daily minutiae.

The New Plan is my source of hope right now. The only one. One reader writes in our Poll this week that I manage to survive "... against all odds ..." perhaps not knowing how very close to the truth that statement is. Every day is a gift, as they say. Some days it feels like a gift from the Greeks, like the Trojan Horse.

I tell myself on nights like this that it must all mean that I'll be lucky at cards.

I'll just have to wait around for the chance to play cards.

That's your "laugh line" for this week.

Now a bit of shameless promotion:

My friend Lionel Rolfe, the Menuhin scion, is doing a book signing in Los Angeles in February. Yeah, that's his picture over there. Here's the skinny: A publication party is scheduled to happen on 3 February at Skyligh Books, 1818 N. Vermont Avenue in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. For info, you can email "calclass@earthlink.net".

New Year's for Butterfly Soul

Here's what happened:

• At 11:00 p.m. Barbara and Rich called from Berkeley, Cali, to check in on me. I thought that was sweet. It was the close of a wonderful evening for them and somehow they had decided to think of me and see how I was doing, knowing that New Year's Eve used to be my favorite holiday. It was enough to tell that I was sitting alone again writing to you.
• At midnight, I broke off to find Jupiter. The overcast had only increased. It was colder than the brass monkey balls in the proverbial joke. I stood out on the stoop and watched the fireworks of revelers in four directions, but blocks away, and enjoyed the bursts of gold, red, green, blue on the gunmetal sky. I went back inside and substituted chocolate ("Chocolate is a vegetable") for champagne.
• I turned off this Memory Machine, forgetting that chocolate is a vegetable that contains caffeine. I tossed and turned on the thin pallet which is my bed. Restless.
• At 5:00 a.m., as I had fallen into a light sleep, I was startled awake by another parade of the J.C. through the hallway that is called my "room."
• At 5:45 a.m. I decided that I should perhaps take a couple of Sominex so that I could go to sleep. (I keep sleeping medicines on had for nights like this.)

In my semi-delirium this morning, I composed a song in that half-asleep/half-awake stage where dreams and reality are indistinguishable.

I see you crowding 'round the stage door
You're thinking I have what you need
Circling like sharks around the backdoor
You know that all I do is bleed

I know that I ain't got no answers
Tired is just about all I am
No flash, low cash and all the dancers
Have done taken it on the lam

CHORUS: Just let me leave
That is all I'm askin'
Just let me rest and go home
In the spotlight there's no baskin'
Just feeling pinned-down and alone

SECOND VERSE: I saw you listenin' to my stories
Imaginin' I could sing for you
But all I did was share my worries
I 'd prick my toe on seeing 'Truth'

I'm hopin' one day at the stage door
I see a twinkling in an eye
Not not blood-lust and bleeding hunger
But someone who can tell me Why

REPEAT CHORUS

Merle Haggard I am not. But I think you get the general idea. Crappy New Year.

THINGS ON THE ROD-LIST THIS WEEK

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was also principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS magazine, which appears both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.

Rod lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, right now. The new home of the magazine. But he plans to return to Serbia next year.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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