I’ve had better days than today.

I took a half vacation day, because I’d made an appointment with a plumber to look at a water pressure problem in my shower. His diagnosis was that I need my entire pipe system rebuilt.

That wasn’t the answer I was looking for. I’ll put that one off. For years, God willing.

As I left work to meet the plumber, I exchanged a few words with a co-worker. As he turned away from me to go inside, he walked straight into a column in the entryway and gave himself a bloody nose.

I know in my heart it was my fault.

I also noticed a couple deaths in the news. One was Robert Goulet. Goulet has become a sort of a joke in recent decades, but when I was a kid I thought he was the coolest guy in the world. I wanted to grow up to look like him and sing like him. I also wanted to be married to Carol Lawrence, his wife at the time. (They were slim, dark-haired people. When I was a kid I never understood all the excitement about blondes. I lived in one of the most Norwegian towns in America. Blondes were a dime a dozen in Kenyon. Dark-haired people were exotic and beautiful in my eyes.)

I did not succeed in growing up to be Goulet, but I’ve learned to live with it.

Also Hank Reinhardt died Tuesday. You’ve probably never heard of him, but he was the founder of Museum Replicas, Ltd., one of the foremost purveyors of replica swords to reenactors like me. I have several pieces of equipment from his company. He was also, as it happened, married to a senior editor at Baen Books, who is now Managing Editor, so I had one degree of separation from his acquaintance.



But there is one piece of good news. Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church, the egregious “God Hates Fags” people, lost a big case in federal court (thanks to Blue Crab Boulevard). They’ll have to pay the family of an Iraq War veteran whose funeral they disrupted.

I can imagine ways in which this judgment might lead to bad precedents, but if anybody has it coming it’s the WBC crowd.

God hates ‘em.