I have a theory that if you called in sick for one day, and then called in the next day to really sell it, that you should definitely call in for a third day so there’s no question whatsoever that you were really sick and not just taking mental health days. Unfortunately, theory oftentimes runs smack into the brick wall called Reality, and in this case the reality is that I don’t think I have any sick days left, and even if I did there’s stuff I really do have to get finished this week in preparation for my next two weeks in Bozeman, MT.

So I’m going to work tomorrow. Weep for me.

This is a plea for help from bigger heads than mine. My favicon doesn’t seem to be working. I only want it to appear on Pie pages so it’s in the Pie root directory on my server (root of Pie — heh) but it doesn’t seem to be working.

Suggestions, anyone?

Stealing the phrase from my epal Mike, Oh look, Bill O’Reilly’s pants are on fire!

Sez Bill, “It makes me sick to see intellectually dishonest individuals hide behind the First Amendment to spread propaganda, libel and slander.” Man, that’s gotta be weird, making yourself sick like that.

I have a theory about calling in sick to work: If you call in one day, you really should call in the next day too.

If you’re only out one day, especially if it’s a Monday or Friday, everyone thinks you were burning a sick day to make a long weekend of it, nobody quite believes you were on your deathbed. Ah, but if you take two days, well then you must be sick, right? Two days gets much more respect that just one. It has gravitas.

Tomorrow, I think I’m going for gravitas.

I have to say, I’m not exactly thrilled that being the Emergency Go-To Girl and dealing with potentially exploding packages is part of my wife’s job description.

I might feel differently if they gave her a raise, though.

Fairness demands that I tell you that my drawing a parallel between a Springsteen concert and going to church was inspired by something Beth said at the show last night. I was thinking it myself as she said it and I agreed with her, but she did say it first … and then I beat her into print with it. So you can blame me for her not writing an entry about the concert — as she put it, “You stole my entry!”

Sorry, honey.

A Springsteen concert is akin to a religious experience — but I don’t mean emotionally, I mean literally. It’s like going to church. He works the crowd like a Fundamentalist preacher, the congregation raises their hands in the air in supplication, there are call-and-answer periods with required responses from the congregation… It’s the Church of Bruce. And, hey, I’m a believer.

So it was a pretty good show. Not a great one, but the old joke about pizza and sex applies to Springsteen concerts too: even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. Which is not to to say the show was bad at all, it just wasn’t as good as others I’ve seen. He’s touring to support a new album (The Rising) and I’m a bad fan — I don’t have it, I’m not familiar with the songs on it — so he did some material I didn’t know (and didn’t like all that much), and most of the old stuff he played wasn’t my favorite old stuff. No Jungleland, no Racing in the Streets, no Thunder Road … but we got Darkness on the Edge of Town, we got Rosalita, we got Born to Run. Pizza. Sex. Springsteen.

As he was getting into his standard two and three encores, my fellow L.A. crowd members began to horrify me: they started leaving. This was Dodger Stadium, where leaving in the 7th inning is standard, but leaving early from Bruce??? I was aghast. Look, if you’re going to be that worried about getting stuck in traffic or being out late, maybe you should just stay home. It’s a concert — it’s going to go late, there’s going to be traffic. Accept it. Fucking amateurs… But it was comical to watch all the early-leavers spin around and sprint back to their seats (or try to talk their way back in if they’d already left) when he started playing Born to Run.

By the end of the night my hands hurt from clapping and my voice was raspy from cheering. Beth and I had a good time.

And the raspy voice came in handy this morning when I called in sick to work. Heh.

I’m websurfing in my home office when I hear a commotion in the kitchen. I can’t make out the words but Zoe is sobbing — something awful has happened. I come flying out of my office, heart racing: “What’s wrong?!? What happened!?!”

Zoe is grinning, being a goof, parading around with her kitten Sparkle draped across her shoulders. “I have a loaded Sparkle and I’m not afraid to use it!” she declares.

Oh. Reach for the defibrillator paddles…

Yes, my wife is very cool. She went out and bought these for us a few weeks ago:

Springsteen at Dodger Stadium on a warm summer night. How cool is that?

I’m losing track of how many times I’ve seen Springsteen in concert. I think this will be #6. My Bruce history:

1. On my birthday at L.A.’s Sports Arena on the Born In The USA tour. Up ’til this point, I had always mocked Springsteen and his fans. I just didn’t get it. But my college newspaper buddy Derek and I used to go to his apartment after class, get drunk, watch Jeopardy, and he’d play Born In The USA over and over and over and over again until I knew every word and liked some of the songs. So when Derek found out it was my birthday and we weren’t doing anything about it, he suggested we go to the Sports Arena, where Springsteen was playing that night, and try to get will-call tickets. We did, we got great seats, and I walked out a to-the-bone Springsteen fan.

2. A few nights later, same venue.

3. A year later, L.A. Coliseum, still the Born In The USA tour, now gone stadium-sized. I took the aerobics instructor I was dating at the time, we rode my motorcycle to the show. She did not appreciate the wonderfulness that was Bruce. I stopped dating her soon after.

4. A few years later, again the L.A. Sports Arena, again will-call tickets, on the Tunnel Of Love tour.

4a. Sigh… The show I missed. During the dotcom era I was working for drkoop.com and they announced an internal essay contest for two tickets to see Springsteen when he came to Austin on the E Street Band’s reunion tour in 2000. I wrote a funny yet moving entry about why I should win the tickets and whoever read it agreed that, yes, I should win the tickets. They were going to fly me and Beth to Austin, put us up in a hotel, chauffer us to the concert, and then fly us home again. It was going to be sweet. And then I got hit by a car. After that, I was in so much pain there was no way I could sit in an airline seat for three hours (it still hurts to sit in those seats for too long), so I told them to give my tickets to someone else. (If you follow the link to the roadkill story, let me warn you against following the “next” link at the bottom of that page — it will lead you to a picture of my naked ass. You don’t want to see my naked ass.)

5. A few months later, same tour, L.A.’s Staples Center. Beth claims she surprised me with the tickets for my birthday and I didn’t feel much like going — I thought maybe he was too old, we were too old, that the old magic would be gone, but that I loved every minute when we got there. This sounds insane to me, but Beth’s memory is better than mine so I’ll grudgingly stipulate that maybe I had a brain cloud or something that day.

6. A few days later, again at Staples, again will-call tickets. We had brunch nearby that morning and decided on a whim to see if we could get seats. We did, good ones. Seriously, will-call tickets are the way to go. I’ve gotten great seats every time — and only paid face value.

7. A few months later I was in NYC working for PaineWebber when I realized Springsteen was playing Madison Square Garden. Bruce in New York. His home town. I had to go. Our team had some big teambuilding exercise going that night where attendance was mandatory. I asked my boss if I could be excused to go to the concert and suggested he should say yes since I was going either way. He said yes. (Although it’s my then [and now] coworker Gavin‘s memory that I got in trouble for going.) This was one of the best of his shows that I’ve seen. High point: hearing them do 41 Shots and feeling the surge of anger and sadness rush through the crowd.

Okay, I’m wrong. Tomorrow will be #8. I can’t wait.

Okay, I don’t want to come across as a conspiracy theorist or nutjob or anything like that, but the US northeast is currently in darkness from the biggest power outage they’ve ever had. Officials and politicians and spokespeople are offering various and sundry theories as to why it’s happening, but they all agree they don’t really know for sure yet — and Bush steps up to assure us all that, “One thing I can say for certain, this was not a terrorist attack.”

Um… If nobody knows why it’s happening, how can you know what it’s not?