I used to write on this damned thing all the time - a half-assed attempt at appeasement for a lazy writer who no longer writes. Now it sits here, dusty as the top of every bookshelf I've ever owned (and at least half the books on those shelves) and on random nights like tonight when I happen back upon it, I find myself at once depressed and amused at myself for everything I've written. In the spirit of the latter sentiment, this entry will contain no cohesive line of thought... circumspection has kind of been my M.O. lately anyway.

Not a lot's happened in my hiatus. I found out today one of the regular customers at the coffee shop where I work - a lovely, grandmotherly type whose coffee drink of choice (as I remember it) is a grande nonfat latte - plead guilty to stealing more than $100,000 worth of valuables from families who trusted her to walk their dogs in a cozy little upper-tier suburb called "Medina." It throws me for a loop thinking about it now - how I can see a person everyday, interact with them... both of us going through the motions of acting like we care enough that we each believe that the other really does - and yet that person's capacity for an altogether different reality, one far removed from the one I had created for them in my mind, diminishes all that artifice in an instant. Not that I had even created a reality for her - in my reality, she was simply one of those innocuous customers whose drink and name I could only on good days remember, but whose presence was never abrasive, whose words were always kind, and who I never really thought any more deeply about.

... it's probably what made her such a successful klepto.