It's been a couple of days since I wrote ( not that anyone missed me except me). I had my eyeballs scraped, not exactly the correct medical term, but where once I saw but through a glass, darkly, now I can see my face and oh my, the clarity of the wrinkles is dazzling. Now I now in part what I have been missing: I can read the computer screen without BIG PRINT and I can read my notes without an extra magnifying glass. This improvement is going to improve my speed and eliminate (some of) my typos, if not the quality of my writing. So where was I? More important, where was the world when I left off? As before, halfway between then and now. SOW, I'm reading a recently published book about pataphysics, "A Useless Guide", written by a man and most of, if not quite all of, his references, examples add sources are male. None of them gets it. Neither did Alfred Jarry, the adolescent founder of the science. I could write a lot, now that I can see what I'm saying, but I'd like to wait and see if anyone out there likes me.

It's a losing battle, of course, the struggle to maintain a certain level of language and grammar. We've lost the fight for lie. Sleeping Dogs Don't Lay, was the title to a grammar guide a few years ago but it was already too late. I blame the child's prayer and Dylan for the compounded error. "Now I lay me down to sleep," it goes and people kept the Lay without realizing it has an object - me - who, which, that is being laid down. And Dylan sang "Lay, lady, lay" being another kind of lay, but people liked the sound of it, I suppose. Remember that line of Dorothy Parker's about some slut she knew: " If all the people she knew were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised."

. So you shout at your kids every night to lay down and perpetuate the mistake, drilled forever into their beds. Well, of course, no one knows the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs any more, so why would they care? I do. It hurts.