I have just loaded up Appetite for Destruction into the ol' WinAmp, and am covering my office door with identical printouts of James Carville. This means something big, something HUGE, I'm sure, like I'm only one misfired synapse away from the crisp white straitjacket that's been my destiny since I graduated from high school. For now, however, I'll chalk it up to lingering side effects from my recent hospital stay and the four-year-old narcotics I took in lieu of oral antibiotics upon my release.

There is good news: I seem to have achieved an overwhelming victory against all those fucking bacteria that took an extended vacation whitewatering throughout my circulatory system. The interlopers were an easily killed variety of staph, not the hardened version of the beasts that infected Rosie O'Donnell and made her chop off her hair and discontinue her shrill magazine. My doctors pursued the revolutionary treatment regimen of sticking as many needles as possible into every available square millimeter of skin surface, all the while taunting me with shouts of "baby," "milquetoast," "reactionary believer in small government." Hateful therapy, really, but effective.

So after a week abed and a week of further medication, I declare myself ready to return to this awful website thingee that thousands — no, millions! — of you have readily ignored for so long. And as Axl implores me to return him to Paradise City, and I tape up the twelfth Ragin' Cajun to the door, I find myself happy to be back.

I've been in the hospital for a while, fighting off an infection. I'll be fine. More to say when I get out. No, it's not monkeypox, and no one's more disappointed than I.