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So, I'm out here on book tour, and one of the anecdotes I've been telling is about how, once, in a darkened theater, someone in the crowd kept yelling for me to speak up, and every time I'd start to speak again, she'd interrupt me and say, "You're mumbling. You're speaking into your chest!"

All I could see of her was one of those red cowboy hats that is typically packaged with two little chromed plastic guns. So, on the fourth time she yelled, "Speak up, you're mumbling!"

I yelled, "Well, your hat is stupid!"

Then a man stood up behind her and shouted, "She was coming to your signings when there were only three people!" And he started to push her wheelchair out of the theater. I yelled at an old lady in a wheelchair. And, to be honest, twice, because as she rolled by, she screeched, "You're still mumbling!"

And I said, "Well, your hat is still stupid!"

So, not my best moment. But I am vindicated later. You'll have to check tomorrow.

But ...

I turned fifty a couple of months ago, and this is my first letter to Santa since I was five, so I have a long list...

Dear Santa:

I know you haven't heard from me in a while. Sorry. I hardly ever write real, paper, letters any more, and besides, I didn't think it was really fair to write if I was only going to ask you for stuff. I mean, just out of courtesy, I should have written to ask after Mrs. Clause and stuff. So, you know, my bad. (But in my defense, someone who can fly a sleigh beyond the speed of light, and manipulate matter so he can get his big ass down multifarious chimneys, should probably have e-mail by now. I'm just sayin'.)

So in the interest of courtesy: How are you? How's Mrs. Claus? How are the elves? Reindeer? I hope you are all well. I'm assuming things are behind schedule for all of you in the toy shop, as you are no doubt building big-ass pontoons to float all of Santa's Village on when the North Pole melts. For all of my fossil fuel burning co-humans, I'd like to say, "oops." Please ...

You guys realize that you are only about a year away from being vaporized by a death-beam from outer space, right?

So let's talk about Christmas.

I got about seven hundred gift catalogs in the mail today, and every one of them featured some sort of item with GPS built in. GPS, as you all know, is the Global Positioning System — a series of satellites in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth that send out signals by which, with a proper receiver, you can be located. With a GPS you can find out where you are, anywhere on the planet, at any time, within a three-foot radius.

I bought one. I get lost a lot. Should you buy one?

You already have.

All cell phones must have a GPS chip in them BY LAW. It may not be activated, but it's there. Haven't you watched CSI, or Bones, or Crossing Jordan — the "Buried Alive" episodes — where the hero/heroine is buried alive and they find them by their ever-diminishing GPS cell phone signal? Never mind that my cell phone won't work if I can see ...

Okay, so 'tis the season and whatnot. And everyone's always axing me: "Did you have any event in your childhood that might have fucked you up and made you like you are so you write these completely sick stories about zombies and Christmas and stuff?"

Yes, childhood! You're small, stupid, and totally powerless. It's like being, I don't know, Lichtenstein at the United Nations, or, like the Littlest Pope. (Didn't you love that book when you were a kid, about the littlest Pope, and how he was crowned head of the most powerful church in the world, but all he really wanted was a pony? I loved that. Especially when he has the Irish inquisition torture all the Leprechauns to death because they called him a wee Papist wanker. How about the part where the Daili Lama kicks his ass at Pope school because he knows kung fu? Great book!)

Anyway, Christmas.

So, as I stated in yesterday's blog, I had a little problem sleeping when I was a kid. This was largely due to the fact that my parents had been replaced by robots and I always had to be on ...

So, I was watching Tin Man last night on the Sci-Fi channel, which is a sort of reinterpretation of L. Frank Baum's OZ books. (It kind of cracks me up that the characters refer to OZ as the Oh-Zee, but they deliver it straight-faced, so it's not as fun as it might be.) Anyway, in this version, the Dorothy Character finds out early on that her parents — the ones she has known and who have nurtured her all of her life — are actually robots, who were programmed to nurture her and prepare her for the day when she freaked out at finding out that her parents were robots. And as I was watching it, I was saying, "That happened to me. I was totally convinced that my parents were robots, too ."

I guess I was about five when I realized the temporary nature of life and was visited by a deep anxiety at my own mortality. What was the point, really? Here we were, cast upon with ball of dirt for our three-score and ten, only to suffer, die, return to dust, nothing to show for our having been ...

So, I think we're all pretty much aware that it's just a matter of time before we are all enslaved by automated machines bent on: A) wiping us off the planet or B) turning us into human batteries to feed their energy appetites and C) making us give them lube jobs. Our defeat at the hands of our robot overlords is as inevitable as inflation, melting icecaps, or the Republican presidential nominee being a nitwit. <sigh>

But even in the face of the inevitable, I feel we have to make an effort. Perhaps we won't overcome them this time, but maybe in the future, one of us will rise up, disconnect the pipes and chains from our in and out ports, and revolt. Perhaps it will take a Battlestar full of psychopaths whipped into a frenzy by a cocktail of stimulants and post traumatic stress syndrome, perhaps it will be a lone time traveler who braves a cruel past, naked, only his wits and his abs to battle the evil machine empire, but we, the humans, a crude

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