My friends, my faithful, my significant few . . . I have an announcement. After six months of unemployment, I am finally EMPLOYED!! Yes, I have a full-time gig with the John Brown University bookstore. The place smells like new books. It is wonderful.

Alas, all is not happiness. For next week, Heather and I are going with the Speech and Debate team to nationals (in exciting Ohio!), and will be forced to miss two amazing concerts in this area. We will miss Project 86 in Tulsa and we will miss the Solid State tour (including the beautiful, wonderful and amazing Beloved and Haste the Day and Underoath and Dead Poetic) kicking-off in Fort Smith. Good shows around here have become RARE and I have to miss two of them. I'm weeping as I write this.

But anyway, tonight I get to see Nate Parker. He is reading his poetry tonight at the request of the English dept. I went to school with Nate when he was at JBU. Well, he has returned, with an MFA in Poetry from University of Alabama. He was an excellent poet before he left and now he's an amazing one. . . . I rarely covet what people have, because I usually covet what people are, and tonight I will go feeling like a dog beneath the dinner table, wishing I new what it was like to dine up there.