In the car and up Portland. Listening to wacky drive-time radio guys! Drinking coffee from a travel cup! Just like everyone else! Parked the car (four dollars a day: damn cheap. Cheaper than the train in DC, I think) Hit the door at 9 am. Someone from human resources handed me my schedule for the day.

Explanation of benefits / ID / Parking policy: 9 - 10 AM

Computer training: 1 PM

The first part was done in 20 minutes.

After rushing like mad to get there, after giving myself the bare minimum of sleep, after setting every alarm in the house so I wouldn't oversleep, I now had three hours and forty minutes to kill.

So I wandered around downtown in a sleepy fog, plotting out future lunchbreak cafes. As opposed to St. Paul, which has about three and a half places to eat lunch, the Minneapolis skyway system has over a hundred small tasteful bistros that serve anything you want. I fear I am going to get fat now. The place where I had lunch has a salad / pasta bar the size of Monaco, and for $4.29 you can have whatever you can fit on your tray. Height is not a limiting factor. You can pile it up until it totters over your head, and you have to stoop to get it through the door: $4.29.

After lunch I reacquainted myself with the horrors of Atex, my old computer nemesis from the Washington days, and then I learned how to use the library system. Mostly I just floated around and talked to people. It's quite a shop. Messy, as you'll find with any place journalists live, but messy in an interesting way. The furniture is quite handsome, there are big floor plants stationed around small groupings of neat-o sofas and chairs, to create a nice oasis effect (nice, and I believe generally unused, but the thought was welcome) and there's a small cafe at the end of the floor. The cafeteria has likewise been upgraded, although there is one holdover from its early days that impressed me more than anything I've ever seen in a workplace. There is a coffee spigot on the wall. A faucet that says COFFEE. It's my dream: infinite coffee, on tap.

My desk is a masterpiece of ergonomic engineering. Two substantial motors in the base raise and lower the desk and keyboard tray to any desired height. The desk area is horseshoe-shaped, with two motorized componants, and a 12-inch wall for notes and postcards. I do hereby vow to keep the place clean and neat. But I know that will never happen unless I spray the desk with silicone and use the motorized segments to knock everything off.

All in all, a good place, and I like the people.

Drove home to an ecstatic dog. Jasper may have believed I was gone forever, and gave me a fabulous greeting of whimpers and barks and tail wagging so severe I worried that his hindquarters would fishtail and knock him over. I ate supper, fell asleep in an instant for a solid hour, and I'm still tired. I've finished most of the Newhouse column, and all I have to do now is two hours of radio. But tomorrow I don't have to be in until 10. I can sleep until 8, walk around the lake in the early morning and be only reasonably exhausted at night.

Is it Saturday yet?

Okay - if I spend seven minutes doing this, I should be able to play with Jasper for ten minutes before getting in the car and heading to the Diner. I have this luxury of time because I have already ironed tomorrow's clothes and I was wise enough to make tomorrow's lunch as I was preparing tonight's supper. But since playing with Jasper means I can't spend ten minutes looking for my passport, I will be an illegal alien tomorrow in my employer's eyes - assuming the police don't pull me over for an expired temporary, because I haven't had time to put the new plates on.

It sounds worse than it is, really; for all the running around and frantic aspects of the day, I've managed to work in the two necessary components essential for mental health and a good mood: I took a long nap, and walked around the lake. The nap was punctuated by one fundraising call, which I groggily dispatched, and one request from a politician to put up a lawn sign for a city council election. The woman who's running earned my ire by braying that she was a member of the local Neighborhood Revitalization Program, when I distinctly recall her parachuting into our NRP Task Force at the end of the miserable process. She must have wanted a nice neighborhood credential on the resume. Well, no vote from me. I informed the solicitor that putting up her sign would tend to conflict with my vote for her opponent.

"Oh - you're voting for the other side?" he said.

"That would be correct," I replied. End of conversation. I was not a DFler, and hence I was a raving gun-toting bible-thumping lunatic who had best be caged.

Good second day at work - lots of wall coffee, lots of arranging the cubicle items, lots of meetings with people about this mysterious column I'm going to write. Sat in on a morning meeting that was a nice introduction to the paper's jargon; apparently the editors begin every day with a self-criticism session of sorts. The paper is nailed to the wall along with other front pages from around the country, and they discuss what worked and what didn't. I like belonging to a paper again - working at the wire service, I felt as if I belonged to no paper, and I never really felt part of the Pioneer Press after I came back. I learned today I will actually get some promotion - some radio ads, some vendor box cards. That's a first. It's intimidating, but fun. Some day, if I'm good, I'll get bus ads.

Off to the Diner. It's Canada Day: hail the maple tribe.

Yesterday's show had a peculiar start: Jeremy informed me that "Dave Barry called and he's going to bed." I didn't know Dave was going to call last night, but apparently he's off book tour and ready to drop by the Diner. If he goes to bed every night at eleven, though, we'll never have him on the show.

Right now I am trying to wake up, and it's proving to be a tough job. I took an extra-hard nap after supper, and I really must have rolled into the slumber trench this time. Cumulative sleep over the week is probably down seven hours from normal; I now look forward to Saturday like a starving man dreams of a banquet. (The difference is, of course, is that after I get all the sleep I want, I won't throw it up.) I've barely seen my wife this week - she had a late night at the office on Tuesday, and not even a fire on the floor could dislodge her from her work. (It was a big fire, too - most of the floor above her is closed for smoke damage.) If it had burst into her office she probably would have waited until her PC caught fire, and then she would have hurled herself out the window and rolled on the grass, proofreading as she did so.

At least we now get up together in the morning, which we haven't done since DC. It's fun. But every time I find myself performing some sort of workaday cliche - the rushed breakfast, the goodbye kiss, the trotting down the walk with the briefcase - I feel as though I am just playacting at this, that I'm pretending to be an actual adult. I give myself two months before I permanently go off the tie-and-dress pants routine, and settle into a jeans-and-cool-shirt mode.

But I'm getting everything in, dammit. The daily walk around the lake. The nap. The work. The radio show. (Note the priorities.) Today on the walk I came up with the opening segment of the introductory column, and since I've been wondering all week how the hell I'm supposed to start this thing, it was a great relief. Now the only problem is getting the files from my home Mac to the office system. I have come up with a truly beautiful solution. I could e-mail it in, then plow through the bowels of the office system to find the mail, and dump it into the appropriate program. But I'm going to post it as a web page on a private address, and then just copy & paste into the word processor. Beautiful! No need to worry if the system crashes; all my backups will be on AOL.

Which of course never goes down.

Well, time for a walk in the woods with Jasper, then a round of playing fetch-the-hedgehog, and then off to the Diner. I have a few extra minutes to relax tonight, and I'd like to spend them down by the creek. This summer is speeding by like a mad fast creek - every time I walk into the woods or the lake I throw up a few rocks against that rushing stream and slow it down for a while. The rocks are gone and the water is faster the next time I show up, but you have to try.

Damn: finally. It's steaming outside right now, muggy as a DC July afternoon. Even if I was back in the life of Riley, I'd still want to be inside, soaking in a cool pool with a perspiring glass of iced tea at my side. The workplace has its benefits, including: Air conditioning.

Today has a minor triumph: I got my first ration of clear push-pins. I can't put up anything on my wall without clear push-pins, and they're a valuable commodity around here. I had to make a special request. Otherwise, the office-supply cabinet is a cornucopia of delights - as I may have previously mentioned, you can tell the prosperity of an organization by the fact that a dozen fresh Zip discs are sitting in an unlocked cabinet. It's a temptation akin to the Devil bothering Christ in the desert, but I will not weaken.

I'll just fall over. Working on less sleep than usual, even in this zombified week of the working waking dead. I couldn't relax after last night's show - had too much fun. (I have been hinting for a few days that the Canadian Garrison next to the Diner has been alarmed by something they dug up while constructing their embassy; I had no idea what this was when I started talking about it, but figured we'd find out as we went along. Now I know what it is, and tonight I have to play out the story over two hours, as best as I can.) So I stayed up after the show and watched a documentary about putting a tiny wheeled robot up the air shafts of the Great Pyramid. (I'd seen it before.) It's not worth the lack of sleep. It never is. But I just can't come home and go to bed. I need to sit on the sofa and watch TV and eat popcorn and sip Absolut. Otherwise the day is just one rush from one thing to another. Odd that in my exhaustion, the only thing I refuse to rush to is sleep.

Woke to a huge storm banging outside in full fury, with great rolling peals of thunder; took Jasper on a truncated walk then took the highway into work for the first time, meaning I got here earlier than usual. To my amazement, I promptly started working. I mean I cracked open the laptop and just poured it out. I have this awful feeling that I will come up with my first column and it will strike them as Wrong, so I'd best come up with some alternative approaches to the first edition.

If I don't go upstairs now for a big ration of wall coffee I am going to fall face down onto the desk and pass out. And so I go.

NOTE: Diner fans may be aware of the impending role of the Melchezidekians in the ongoing Diner-Canada dispute. Here's an early draft of the piece I wrote for the Washington Post. A more complete version with the rest of the story can be found on the Post's web site. (I think.)

It is a sad fact of the modern world that anyone with a fax machine and a few spare nuclear devices can declare war nowadays. France, for example, is threatened with atomic hellfire by the Dominion of Melchizedek - -a nation that isn't just the size of a post office box, but actually is a post office box.

This is not general knowledge. The Dominion of Melchizedek has a public profile slightly smaller than a comedy on the Warner Brothers Network. I would have spent my life ignorant of the Dominion had I not been working as a talk radio host one evening when the declaration of war rolled out the fax machine. NATION DECLARES WAR ON FRANCE, it said There was a Washington number for the Embassy of Melchizedek, and my producer dialed it up while I read the fax on the air. It said:

Under the Constitution of the Dominion of Melchizedek, WAR has been declared on France. On November of 1994, Melchizedek acquired sovereignty over one of the three Karitane islands in the South Pacific from the obscure Kingdom of Polynesia. The declaration of war because a necessity to protect Karitane from damage that has occurred . . . from the nuclear testing in the South Pacific. The declaration is made on behalf of all mankind. It is with reluctance that the Polynesian Melchizedek Dominion declares war on France, since up till recently France was considered a silent ally. The Ruthenian Melchizedek Dominion is considering aiming at France the nuclear weapons left behind in the Carpatho mountains by the Soviet Union as leverage in the war.

"Nobody at the embassy," the producer said. "Just some answering machine with a guy who said 'Shalom.'" The dateline on the fax was Jerusalem.

If talk radio was as ill-informed and dullard-stuffed as the major media believes, I would have gotten calls from people insisting this was a ruse to divert attention from ATF involvement in the burning of the library of Alexandria. The sole call on the Melchizedek declaration came from a bemused biblical scholar who informed us that Melchizedek was a priest who blessed Abraham.

"Whether this is the Melchizedek for which the nation is seemingly named," the caller concluded, "I cannot say."

I called the Melchizedek embassy the next day for more information, and was sent a fax that attempted to explain everything, including that inadvertent declaration of war. "There has been a leak concerning our pending Declaration of War which we have not yet released to France," the cover letter read. "Herewith please find our government profile with relevant exhibits." Signed, Mz. Pearlasia, President.

To summarize: the Dominion of Melchizedek is "an ecclesiastical and constitutional sovereignty based on the principles of the Melchizedek bible." It has three branches of government and a constitution. Its physical territory consists of a post office box in Jerusalem, an Gilliganesque atoll named Karitane ("reported to include some 14 square miles of paradise with sandy beaches, fresh water and three hilltops"), a claim on a chunk of Antarctica, and a vast swath of the Carpathians occupied by the Ruthenian people.

Who? Ruthenians, apparently, are ethnic and linguistic kin of the Ukrainians, with a few meaningless distinctions to justify calling themselves Ruthenians. (I say this only to spark the obligatory huffy letter from the Ruthenian Pride league, enumerating the vast differences between the cultures, ranging from the color of the piping on the national costume to the number of tines on the national salad forks.) According to the fax, the Ruthenians attempted to gain autonomy in the 19th century, but, well, who didn't? The Hungarians put a stop to their nation-building, and ever since then the Ruthenian people - now a million strong - have lived behind the various borders of Eastern Europe.

"Measures are being taken," said the fax, "to secure the boarders (sic) of the Ruthenian Carpatho-Rusyn Homeland, and to isolate nuclear armaments left behind by the USSR."

Perhaps you're thinking what my radio audience suspected: this is a joke, right? At worst, a parody of post-Soviet ethnic centrifuge; at best, performance art, perhaps funded by a grant from a major foundation and viewers like you.

If it's a joke, two governments have fallen for it: The United States of America, and the Central African Republic. Included in the Melchizedek fax was a copy of a letter from the CAR recognizing the Dominion and inviting them to open a Diplomatic Mission. (It's addressed to a name straight out of Ian Fleming - Minister Plenipotentiary Branch Vinedresser) You get the feeling that the Central African Republic's favors are not exactly a rare commodity, that recognition by the CAR is the diplomatic equivalent of a compliment from someone who's wearing fishnet stockings on a streetcorner in February.

But it's a real nation. So is the United States. INS sent the Dominion a letter - included in the fax package - that constitutes US government contact with the Dominion. The letter requests "some item of uniform insignia from your country's law enforcement services," to be displayed in an exhibition of law enforcement badges at the Atlanta airport. The INS is putting together the display for the 1996 Olympics, and apparently fired off a form letter to everyone. Janet Jackson probably got a request for the badges of the Rhythm Nation.

Not to say that Team Melchizedek isn't thinking about Atlanta: the list of officials includes Larry Axmaker, Governor of the Dominion Olympic Team, and co-founder of Dominion U.

Officer Micheal Johnson in this Atlanta office of the INS made the request.

"I blanketed the embassies in the Washington area. I asked for a listing of the embasssies. To my nearest recollection, that list came from from the postal service."

Does he recall the DOM? "I remembered noticing it when I made the request. I've heard the name associated with an order of priesthood of the Mormons, that's why it struck a chord."

Other items in the package included a certificate of incorporation from the state of California, a map of the Pacific showing the paradise of Karitane, a map of the Ruthenian territory with little stars to mark the "nuke sites," and a copy of the Washington phone book listing the embassy's number, right up there with famous countries such as Malta, Mongolia and Myanmar. See? See? They wouldn't put it in the phone book if it wasn't true.

Of course, it is true. They want to be a nation? Who am I to say they're not? They have land, laws, religion, and an unreasonable territorial claim - the textbook definition of your basic nation-state. But they say also have some items of particular interest: money and nukes.

"The island of Karitane was purchased for five million dollars," says David Korem, vice-president of the Dominion. (Melchizedek is the only country where the Veep has a real job: he works the front desk phones.) And where did the money come from? "From licensing to banks."

Ah: these would be the financial institutions that have taken advantage of the Dominion's accommodating fiscal atmosphere. According to the government profile, "the laws and statutes of the Dominion. . . have attracted several hundred bankers worldwide wishing to avail themselves of the tax and regulatory freedoms extended by Dominion Bank Charters." Net asset value of Dominion banking corporations, says Korem, is over $25 billion

"They're alternative banks, mostly merchant banks that deal in investments, writing letters of credit."

So much for the money: what about the nukes?

Korem hesitates. "They are available to us if we want to use them. But we're caught in a dichotomy - our principles are peace, and to use nuclear weapons would run against our ideas. We want to establish the government on earth that would be a model for other governments to follow. Melchizedek means king of peace and righteousness; we base our government on those principles."

Okay, okay, fine, but push comes to nuke, can you do it? Do you have the launch codes, the ability to gas up the bird, point them France, turn the keys and shout FLY MY PRETTIES?

"I really shouldn't divulge that information."

My personal opinion: This is not a gag. They can't launch nukes. They can give creative bankers a good investment alternative in ways I cannot begin to imagine. They do own an island. They will not sweep the Olympics. They have deep religious convictions; the pain of declaring war is ameliorated by their realization that nothing will come from it save publicity.

Happy to do my part. Yow! Am I an honorary citizen yet?

________________________________

I wanted stern unblinking summer, and I got it. The temps this weekend hit the sultry high 80s, with that soupy thick air I remember well from DC. Every day in the summer was like this - air so moist and sluggish you could scoop out handfuls of it and carve Humiditymen in the front lawn. It's dead silent outside now, at 8 pm; a few whining air conditioners putting their shoulder to the task, and the distant cannonade of an approaching thunderstorm. Of course: I just washed the car. In old days, tribal elders danced for the rain; now we just wash our cars. Same outcome.

Today's one of those days where you wish you could temporarily suspend the concept of modesty, and just be naked. There would be drawbacks - I would not like to have the weave of my cast-iron porch chairs permanently embossed on my fundament - but it would be so nice just to go lay in the grass in the shade with nothing on. Barring that, you go find air conditioning. Sara went to a parade of homes with a friend today, a deathmarch along the barren cul de sacs of a new golf course development. It was a wonder people weren't dropping dead on the even green lawns as they trudged from mansion to mansion, or crawling on all fours for the oasis of an air conditioned open house. The homes, from the looks of the brochure, were all spectacular but empty, barren, modest ideas blown up to cartoon scale. They didn't have substance. A good wind would carry them away. Who lives in these places? You have to work 14 hours a day to afford them, and if that's the case you'd never have the time to visit half the rooms. The idea of living on a golf course isn't my idea of living, either. I suppose if you're hopelessly afflicted with the Scottish Curse the notion of getting up and seeing flailing duffers from the breakfast nook would gladden your heart. But if you have to work hard to afford the view, seeing other people pursue your favorite hobby would be a curse, like putting a monastery right on a topless beach.

I'm happy here.

For now.

Actually, I have some plans. If we stay here at Lileks Manor, I want to build a three story addition, redo the kitchen and make the basement habitable. If not, I want a place close by, perhaps on the creek, that I can gut and retool. Before I die I want a shower with glass-block walls. I just do.

I have little or no memory of what I did this weekend, except relax, clean the house, and drink. Drink drink drink. Water coffee lemonade water water coffee Absolut. Walked around the lake yesterday, I think - yes, I did, and there's a tale, now that I think of it. Encountered three hooligans in the park, shuffling along with the usual morose glower of children born into the freest, most prosperous society on earth. They had gold metallic markers in their hands, and they were tagging. They hit the wood bridge over the creek, then tacked off towards the basketball court. I would have confronted them, but there were three of them and one of me. And besides, that's what police are for. So I sprinted to the community center to call the gendarmes. And of course the community center was closed. For one moment I had the awful certainty that they couldn't afford to keep it open because of the cost of graffiti removal. Everyone has their urban hot-button issue, and taggers are mine. Some people go nuts over airplane noise, which I accept; others boil and fume over traffic, which I take as a natural consequence of city living. But when I see that thicket of cryptic squibbles plastered on a sign, I want to bring back the chain gang. I don't know why.

It's not as though I never did anything wrong as a kid. When I was ten, perhaps younger, and under the influence of the Daring Bad Kid across the street, we purchased a bottle of model paint and threw it at the backside of Northport shopping center. It splattered and made a nice blue star. I instantly wished I hadn't. I wanted it to go away. At night before I went to sleep, I could see it, throbbing like the tell-tale heart. I felt bad, because I knew my parents would be angry if they found out, and they'd be correct.

I'm guessing that today's parents are different; when they find a metallic marker in their kid's pockets they figure: How nice. He's taking up drawing. Moron kids come directly from moron adults. In the paper the other day a mother was protesting that the police were harassing her son because the police thought he was a member of the 2-1-Klick, that pathetic local gang of scrawlers, brawlers, thiefs and general delinquents. The son insisted he wasn't, but the police in the story noted wryly that every other kid in the picture was a gang member, and the kid had the gang's scarf hanging from his pocket.

Wow: the thunder is now constant. An unceasing rumble as though great stones were being rolled around overhead. The sky has a tinge of that sickly light it gets before the worst comes. Tremulous lightning to the west. It has gotten very dark very fast. Sara is out with Jasper in the creek; I hope they make it back.

It's almost completely dark.

It's getting darker.

It is now completely dark.

Bad wind high in the trees. Time to take the car and find Sara before she's swept away -

Later

Well, here I am writing in a storm again. Another typhoon, like the one we had a few weeks ago. Incredible violence - tree branches slamming into the yard, and what sounds like hail, and what also sounds like a civil defense siren. Huge booms. (Yes, it's the siren.) Sara did get caught; she was in the woods trying to coax a lost dog to follow her home. A small golden pup the size of Jasper, all by himself, lost. But he didn't want to come. And now somewhere in the woods the poor beast is cowering as this monster blows and shouts around him. It's enough to make you weep -

The power just went out across the alley.

I should go check to see if a tornado is headed this way. Always a possibility, you know. If so, time to put the backup discs in the safe corner of the basement , grab the camcorder and hope the next Bleat doesn't come from Oz.