Winter Star Party II-Sunday

Sunday: So here I am on Key Largo. About as far from Bogart and cigarettes and shots of straight whiskey as you could imagine. Well, it's too early for that anyhow. In a generic Holiday Inn, though I think it's actually called something else. A Home2. Perhaps a distant relative of R2D2. All plastic and pastel.

Coffee that has heat and caffeine but naught else. The cardboard insulator that protects me from the cardboard cup is stamped RYKOFF SEXTON PERUVIAN COFFEE but really, how can you know? I bet they could sneak in some Uruguayan if it was cheaper. So we're just about done with the eight-lane thruway plunge, and into the more interesting crawl down A1A. The morning fog is burning off, not quite 7:30.

I had a stomach upset for about half the night, but it's okay now.

Of course a family full of shouting, running munchkins just invaded. I moved out into the noise and fog. And birds -- doves hooting and crows cawing. Tweeters tweeting. And three feet underground, a nameless thing shifts its gelatin-smirched wings, readying itself for birth and death. Come. Come feast on the children.

Another ordinary day inside the head of Joe Haldeman, aka Robert Graham, hack writer and plagiarist. (That was on F. Scott Fitzgerald's business card.)

So we'll point the car's nose south and head in the direction of lunch. Used to be a nice drive down a two-lane road with ocean on both sides. Now it's four lanes, sometimes six or eight, from which you can sometimes see the sea.

But we should be off on a pleasant side road. It looks good in my mind's eye. We'll see what the more mundane optic detects.