I'm in a foul mood this evening. Just one of those inexplicable "it don't take much to set me off" states of mind one gets into from time to time.

Maybe it's learning that the only IHoP that's on this side of the river (and certainly the only one obtainable without operating an automobile to get there) has finally closed. Not a surprise, I think I was their only remaining customer and even I didn't go there too often. The problem is, sometimes you want exactly that kind of food. Low-rent breakfast-all-day food. Pancakes -- not fancy urban elite pancakes, I mean a stack of impeccable and fluffy but otherwise utterly plain pancake-flavor pancakes, no mango or arugula or hops or whatever other crap some restaurant five times the cost of IHoP is trying to cram into them, ready to absorb the gigantic scoop of soft butter they've embedded on top. I mean sleazy bacon. Not fancy bacon. I mean a red-brown, completely crispy stick of bacon cooked to a fare-thee-well. Preferably four or five or six of them. Eggs over easy, with either a mound of finely shredded, browned-outside-nearly-raw-inside hashed potatoes or a couple of slices of toast, so you have something to scrape up the egg yolk with.

There is a shortage of food like this in the Greater Boston area, and even more so late at night. I'm not saying I go to diners at three a.m. much anymore. I'm too old. But damn it, in Louisiana I could if I wanted to, and sometimes I did.

Maybe it's the political news. As I noted today, I have never yet muted a term on Bluesky but the past two days have tempted me sorely to mute "Platner" and ruin my perfect record. Some of us recognized a monstrous good-ol-boy type long, long before any of the bad stories about him broke. Some of us got thoroughly sick of the discourse months ago. Some of us think y'all greased your own road to hell here, so don't expect me to come by with a tow truck.

Or maybe it's that today was my first day of physical therapy and it was just as useless as I expected it to be and I've walked away with a set of exercises to do which will accomplish nothing except to waste a little more of my precious time. Sure, they'll loosen the knee. So will just about any other form of exercise. I've already proved that. I have arthritis and you can't really fix arthritis and I'm not sure what the point of this entire dance is, but whatever.. If I have to do it in order to eventually get someone to consent to give me a steroid shot in my knee once it finally does truly get debilitating, so be it. But it seems to me like we could skip a step or two.

Or maybe it's because i'm increasingly pissed off today about the friend of mine who has basically, as far as I can tell, decided he no longer wants to interact with me in any way, for no reason that I can fathom.

Or maybe it's the head cold that more or less destroyed my entire long weekend and which I'm apparently not yet fully recovered from.

Or maybe it's just that I already think I'm not getting work done on this story fast enough.

All of the above. Let's go with "all of the above." That'll work.