5:35 p.m. Today I would like to talk about the manly art of procrastination. But I'll have to put it off until later, because right now I'm trying to get started on an article I have due for tomorrow. Of course I haven't started it yet ... that would be counterproductive to my topic today, and the topic always comes first.

I don't even know yet what kind of picture to put on today's entry. How do you illustrate putting things off? By the time you're reading this, of course, I will have chosen something, scanned it if necessary, fuzzed up the edges if I thought that would kill some more time, and generally fooled around with nonsense while pretending to be working.

Earlier today I had my desk chair upside down, a can of WD-40, a screwdriver with multiple heads, and the instructions for how to lower the seat. I know: I can scan in the instructions. I haven't put them away yet -- I've been procrastinating on that, too. Be back in a gif.

Uh oh. I just noticed that the chair is manufactured by the Hon Company of Muscatine, Iowa 52761. And you want to hear something weird? The very article I'm procrastinating on, I kid you not, is due to be sent in tomorrow to none other than Gabby Hon, the producer of Metajournals. True. If I didn't already have a topic for today, I could talk now about coincidence. Serendipity. Synchronicity. Or, at the very least, the toll of a guilty conscience as it clangs against your empty skull.

7:27 p.m. A coward dies a million deaths. A procrastinator gets a million tasks accomplished in lieu of. Such a busy, busy little day.

After web wandering and browsing for a bit (to get some inspiration) I raced up to the roof to take some pictures of the setting sun for Naked Eye headers. That's the ticket. Then, of course they have to be sucked out of the camera and made ready for the page. At which point, I can clearly see that not a one of them is good enough. Not a Catherine-quality photo in the bunch.

Funny thing about being up on the roof.

10:15 p.m. Well, not ha-ha funny. You see, before I started this online site on June 21st, the longest day of the year, I was truly at my wits' end. I'd tried unsuccessfully, yet again, to lure Igor into my office and force him to look at the growing heaving loaf of Lucy bread that my writing had become. It was filling up the hard drive, popping the spines on loose-leaf binders, bulging out of file boxes. If I so much as pulled out a file folder and spread it on the desk, I swear he would run screaming from the room, holding his head.

So I went up on the roof, all teary and frustrated, and believe me, I don't get that way very often these days. It takes a lot to drive me to contemplate giving up. Just chucking it all and ... you know ... taking the big leap and getting a job.

But I didn't and instead I started this site and the rest is carefully laid out in historical fashion on two capacious servers at Earthlink. The regimen of this daily journal entry has saved me, I tell you: It has saved me.

I feel like a real writer again, rather than a frantic pretender. A real writer who writes every day. A real writer who has an actual audience again. A real writer with real deadlines ... a real writer who puts things off until the last possible minute ... a real writer who just has to take a bath now and hope for inspiration before the bubbles melt and the sun comes up over the rooftops once again.