Dear Reader (including those of you who don’t understand what WWE stands for),

In yesterday’s edition (🔒) of his always excellent, if not always uplifting, newsletter, Nick Catoggio wrote, “The hardest part of my job is finding a topic each morning.” 

I know of what he speaks. If there’s something I really want to write about, I can sit down like Schroeder at his kiddie piano and just start banging away. And the nice thing about this “news”letter—unlike my syndicated column or, frankly, the stuff we pay Nick to write about—I feel no particular obligation to be “relevant” to the news of the day, the week, or even the millennium. But sometimes my muse is sleeping one off and I have to go looking for something that gets me excited. And, sometimes, my muse is all hopped up on ketamine and Dr. Pepper, and, like Roger Stone on a bender in Bangkok, looking for opportunities to get really weird. But sometimes, like Roger Stone stuck in customs at the Suvarnabhumi Airport trying to explain why his bags are full of handcuffs and leather chaps, my muse lacks immediate options to indulge her appetite for weirdness.

So, as Stone’s intern said when he finally got the ball-gag out of his mouth, “What I’m trying to say is I don’t know what to do here.”