I do not have the H1N1 Virus… I think. It all started on Thursday night over a steak and wine dinner with some close friends. A barely-there cough emerged that evening and I did my best to ignore it. But it got worse overnight and come the next day I was like something out of a George Romero movie — my skeleton ached. My brain felt like it was melting. My five senses were blurred in a confusing haze of total homeostatic failure.

At the foot of Haleakeala (Hawaiian: House of the Sun), the volcano under most of Maui County, rests the small crossroad town of Haiku. Living there enabled the author to catch up on postcards while winter fell elsewhere.

I hate this picture. It was taken when David was 6 months old. I know, he looks much older, but he was always big for his age. He was almost ten pounds when he was born. The nurses were joking about how they were going to just eat him up, he was so plump, like a little rugele. We’re in front of our first house on Davis Terrace, and it’s October so I’m wearing my fox stole. Minnesota autumns already have that snap in the air that signals the winter to come. It’s the last time I wore that stole, too. I pawned it that winter when Peter lost his job and David got pneumonia.

Let’s put aside the grammatical heartbreak of text messaging (or, txt msng, if you prefer). English, that great weird bargain bin of romance languages, Teutonic asides, and Latin root verbs, is starting to slide into obscurity. Don’t worry—this is not a disguised ode to William Safire’s “On Language.” This is more about the fact that this whole alphabet thing—the 26 separate letters representing vowel and consonant sounds—is starting to vanish into obscurity, to be replaced by a much more compact and efficient written language system, a la the kanji utilized in Chinese.

The Long Beach Museum of Art is preparing a new exhibition titled Sweet Subversives, which will open October 16, 2009 on the first floor of the Museum’s gallery pavilion. Sweet Subversives is a unique gathering of 31 drawings by Southern California artists who explore their personal vision of what a drawing means to them and how they achieve this vision.