First coat: If life is forward motion, then I'm feeling more dead than anything else of late. An overheard conversation in a convenience store between a cop and the clerk: "Yeah, we caught a car full of spring breakers, they had jell-o shots in a cooler ready to go in the backseat," New York outlaws the simple pleasure of a smoke, and they want to x-ray me to get down into my bones before I board a flight of imagination.

Second Application: Wonder what's going on in Saddam's bunker right now, the damn thing's designed by Karl Esser—a German security expert, fer chrissakes, and he says "it could withstand the shock wave of a nuclear bomb," like the one coming down on us as Gale Norton refuses to give up on drilling for oil in the ANWR. The poor caribou don't stand a chance in hell against "wildlife management," nor do we against our own predators, even though NYC detectives bagged the laundromat thrill killer last night we're not holding the tide of bloodlust. Lamar Price is a poster child of irrelevence, just wanting to take out as many as he can, like Blair and Bush hoping to break the collective will of somebody the sailor, if they could just figure out who that is. Or is it Curious George and Groucho Marx? Wrong mascot, wrong time to be stumbling through a sandstorm of ill-tidings, like helpless grunts cutting off their hair because it's the only thing left they can do that makes any sense. "But it's been a lot more hostile than that," says Col. Gentry. We know what he means.

Buffing to a Lustre: The woman of the hour is Mrs. Anthrax, the American-educated Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, a bioweapons expert who's been sitting close to Groucho lately, letting us all know that Baghdad is the center of the Earth, and the temperature's rising with our proximity to the nexus of resistance. The evil wench's wearing epaulets for the love of Sinatra, and probably vacationed in Vegas, where "what happens here, stays here," like some Mafia-fueled dream of chips and laundered vigorish.

Detailing: I put the Blackbird into neutral and with an easy pressure roll her out of the garage into afternoon sunlight—the reflection from the roadster's pure-black surfaces almost blinds me, each pane of glass and mirror windexed and rainexed into a microscopic purity that repels nature at the quantum level and a cocoon of howling steel says "let's go." All I need is a destination.

3:11:59 PM