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It wasn't a wedding. They weren't families, plural.

One family, one big, wet, sloppy reunion. The worst just turned out to be the noise and the complete takeover of the pool, the capacity of which exceeded any state or federal guidelines. Last night, looking forward to a 4 am wakeup call to catch a flight back home, the screaming continued well past bedtime. I pulled a pillow over my head and prayed until I lost consciousness.

Presently, I'm in the airport, sitting at an empty gate, waiting to get home. I don't mind travel much, but travel without Fran is weird- I'm just used to having her to share everything with. It's good to know, though, that she's at the other end of this trip, she and Ella the World's Most Famous Cat, waiting patiently to play fetch with her little foam soccer balls.

Ella, that is. Fran doesn't play fetch.

See you in L.A.

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Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I DID make it back, none the worse for having spent a cross-country flight on a plane the DirecTV system on which was malfunctioning.

I like there. I love here. Here's home.

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On TV right now, there's some show about, well, I haven't been paying attention long enough to figure that out, but it had a segment about the man who invented sliced bread.

Didn't know there WAS a guy who invented sliced bread, did you?

There was such a man. He invented the bread slicer. Before him, nobody could figure out how to do that without cutting the bread manually (and irregularly). He did it and changed the world. "The greatest thing since sliced bread"- that phrase tells you how great his achievement was. Anyone said that around him, he'd swell with pride.

He invented sliced bread.

He changed the world.

His name?

I have no idea.

And neither do you.

And thereby lies an essential fact of life, something about which I've been thinking about lately: I don't matter. Neither do you. Nor does anyone. Oh, I'm not saying that life is pointless or meaningless, but think about it. If the guy who invented the invention that the world holds up as the paragon of achievement, the guy who came up with the "greatest thing," is completely and utterly unknown and forgotten, what does that say about the rest of us?

I guess I've been feeling mortal lately- I've been dealing with life insurance issues, and wills, too. One of the will provisions allows for an epitaph, and instructions for your grave marker. I don't have an epitaph ready and I don't care about the headstone, either. Once I'm gone, it doesn't matter- whatever makes my family happy is fine with me. But I don't want to end up like, well, everyone else and become just a name on a rock that provides the people who take rubbings from tombstones a new one for their collections. I'd love to think that I'll leave more of a legacy, but I've kinda wasted time on that, and no more than a handful of people out of billions make the kind of mark that lasts centuries, let alone millenia. Unless I discover a new inhabited planet and name it after myself before I'm through, that ain't me. Or you.

So I've been particularly cheery lately. My religious friends would tell me that this life is merely a way station on the road towards something greater and more meaningful, and they may very well be right. I hope so. But if not, I can take comfort that I'm not alone. I'm at least as famous as the guy who invented sliced bread. That oughta count for something.

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Wicked screensaver.

Thank you!

What a day. What a g-ddamn day. Well over a thousand- a THOUSAND!- worm e-mails and counting. Every time I checked the inbox, another hundred or so e-mails were waiting: "Re:Your details." "Re:wicked screensaver." "Re:Approved." "Thank you!"

Imagine if you really wanted to send a thank-you e-mail to someone today. You'd be sending it straight to the trash can.

On the bright side, the annoying habit of these worms (there are evidently two making the rounds) to lift e-mail addresses from infected computers' address books has one beneficial effect- I now have personal e-mail addresses for people whose e-mail addresses aren't public knowledge, including a couple of extremely high-placed radio and cable executives. Not that I'll use them. Not yet, anyway. That would be gauche.

What struck me, however, was this: the worm occupied virtually all office workers' attention all day. It was huge- I wrote "The Letter" e-mail for All Access about it and immediately received notes from similarly afflicted folks- and it actually impacted people's lives. But where was the news coverage? There was virtually none before very late in the day, late in the afternoon, on the wires, and most newspaper web sites had nothing. CNN buried it- I couldn't find it there. Nothing on Fox. The New York Times didn't cover it, although you could find the Dow Jones/AP story with some digging there.

And that's what the problem with the news media is. It's not bias- oh, there's bias, but that's not the real problem. The trouble is that editors and reporters have no idea what regular people are up to. They don't put themselves in the shoes of the average guy, working in a cubicle or at a construction site, pounding away with a jackhammer or on a keyboard, thinking about the mortgage and the kids' education and what's on TV tonight and the zillion e-mails he had to spend a half hour deleting while they threatened to overload his computer. They don't know what real people care about, because they don't know too many. They know...

...each other.

If you edit the New York Times, do you hang out with the guys at the bar watching the Giants? If you're a pundit at CNN, are you likely to know what it's like to work in a cubicle farm for embarrassingly low wages and try to support a family on that? Do you know what normal people have to deal with on a daily basis? Probably not. You know the barista at Starbucks, the friends who share your joy at finding a nice Two Buck Chuck's Merlot at Trader Joe's. You live someplace among people like yourself, people with the same education, the same economic status, the same politics as you. And you don't know any other life, not as a participant. You've always been this way, through suburban high schools and private colleges and j-school. You wouldn't have gotten to this level spending time any other way with any other people. After all, you don't network with dry cleaners and forklift drivers and accountants and assistant managers at ShopRite.

So when something comes along that affects those "other" people, it isn't important, not like the big, important issues like Iraq and Israel or the juicy true-crime stories like the Peterson trial or Kobe. Let the tech reporters handle it. No rush. And that's how millions of people worldwide found themselves snowed under a pile of worm e-mails and the biggest media outlets somehow missed the story. It wasn't on their radar. It wasn't important. YOU'RE not important.

Sorry, bud. Oh, are you still interested in the blackout? We have some stories about that now. Better late than never.

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You may have been following the stories about the murdered French actress and her under-suspicion boyfriend, the lead singer of a popular rock group. There was yet another article about it in the Hollywood Reporter- here it is if you need it. Somewhere in the middle of the article, there's this:

The shock was all the greater because Noir Desir do not have a wild reputation as hotel-wreckers living on the fringes of society. The band, whose last album sold more than 1 million copies in France, hails from the bourgeois French city of Bordeaux. Politically on the left, it has a long history of playing benefit shows and supporting causes, whether pro-Palestinian or against France's extreme-right Front National party. Cantat, a published poet had a broadly positive image and was seen as a role model by some fans, who find subtle meaning in his lyrics.

Hold on there. "Pro-Palestinian"?

That explains everything.

People who are pro-Palestinian in Europe are quick to defend Palestinians whenever another suicide bombing takes place. It's that yes-it's-sad-when-civilians-die-but-you-have-to-understand-the-reasons-for-it attitude. A bus full of families dies? That's nothing compared to the suffering of the Palestinian blah blah blah.

Understand this: Palestinian "freedom fighters" kill children. Deliberately.

They put their own children on the front lines, in harm's way, as human shields.

They kill children. Did I say that already? I have to say it again. They KILL CHILDREN. DELIBERATELY. The bombers are HEROES to them.

They KILL CHILDREN.

So this guy is a passionate defender of the Palestinians, and he may have murdered his girlfriend. The connection isn't too distant. It's the Left's dirty little secret- they've condoned, turned a blind eye to, even celebrated flat-out murder. And then one of their own does something like this, and they're shocked. They shouldn't be. If you can excuse murdering children, you can excuse anything.

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Some people don't know how to pick their fights.

Today's Don Quixote is Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, whose defiance of the federal courts over that Ten Commandments monument at the courthouse is, for some people, big news. It must be, because it's leading the news at CNN and Fox. Very controversial, very important.

OK, not important. Controversial but not important.

Let's first note that the actual contents of the Ten Commandments aren't terribly controversial. I'm God, no blaspheming, show up for church, respect your parents, no murder, no adultery, don't steal, don't gossip, don't do your neighbor's wife, don't get all jealous and stuff over material crap. Pretty benign, and you can kinda ignore the first three if you're an atheist. Not a bad set of rules, nothing that should freak anyone out.

Then, let's note that it IS religion, and it's kinda unseemly to stick religion into a public place, constitution or no constitution. If you're Christian, you wouldn't want a monument to Allah there. You get the idea.

Finally, the most critical element to your understanding of the complex issues behind this case: it doesn't matter.

The monument's existence doesn't affect the jurisprudence in the courthouse, not any more than the bibles used for swearing in witnesses affect it. It's just... there. On the other hand, if it's removed, it won't change the jurisprudence, either. The monument doesn't change anything by its presence, and it doesn't remove anything by its absence. It just is.

So I see people, including the Chief Justice, ready to go to prison rather than allow the thing to be removed. I see people treating the ruling as a major victory for their interests. And I see a total loss of perspective. Ask yourself this: in what way does the existence or removal of that monument change the course of your- anybody's- life?

It doesn't.

And that's not to say that the commandments themselves don't matter- they do- or that some of the people passing through couldn't use a dose of Thou Shalt Not in their lives- they do. But they're not gonna get that from a monument. It's not the Bible, folks. It's just a monument. Take it away, leave it, carry it around like the Stanley Cup, whatever you want- just don't bother me about it. I have more important things on which to spend my energy, like the new Bullwinkle DVD. Hey, you have your religion, I have mine.

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It would figure that I'd buy a car that a) runs on premium gas and b) has a 20 gallon tank at a time when gas prices are c) spiraling out of control. Today's fill-up- about three-quarters of a tank- came to $30., which was a bargain- it was Costco gas, at least 10 cents (and in some cases, much more) cheaper per gallon than your Mobils and 76es ad Shells.

I guess that driving trip to Vancouver's probably going to have to wait.

Each fill-up is another entry in the grand Guess What I Paid for Gas Competition. It comes up in phone conversations with family, it comes up while idly chatting with the Lotto ticket seller, it comes up over dinner- "I filled up the Volvo today and guess what it cost me? Thirty bucks." "Really? That's nothing- I filled up today and..."

Right now, fall short of $40. and I'm not impressed.

The reasons for the price hike appear to be that a pipeline burst and limited deliveries to Phoenix, and that, um, well, actually, the gas companies can jack up the price at will and people will pay whatever it says on the pump. I mean, you live in L.A., you gotta drive. I just wonder what happened to all that Iraqi oil that's now pumping out of the wells there- wasn't the war supposed to be "all about the oiiiiilllll"? That's what Janeane Garofalo said, so it must be true.

Whatever. We're looking at $2.50/gallon for premium at some pumps right now, and $3. just ahead. I'm looking at walking. Barefoot. Sneakers are getting expensive, too.

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Beautiful day today. Walking along the beach at Redondo, looking at the waves and the sand and the rollerbladers and skate punks and palm trees, I remembered once again why we decided, after years of moving from town to town ("up and down the dial..." literally), we decided it would stop right here.

You spend the whole week getting agitated over "suicide bombings" and recalls and taxes and gas prices, and then in a matter of moments it all melts away in the sunshine. And you remember that, despite everything you see in the news, life's pretty damn good.

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