Well, it's been a busy few weeks. Most excitingly: last Friday, on the evening of the Fourth of July, I was picking shrimp membranes out of my teeth and swilling rum punch and watching fireworks over the side of my uncle Wally's fishing boat in my old Kentucky home (which isn't in Kentucky, of course), when my cell phone sang out "You're A Grand Old Flag" (which my Daddy's daddy's daddy wrote the music for, actually; George M stole it from him) and then the croaky, weepy, morphiney voice of a strung-out and happy IR revealed, over miles and satellite miles, that Oisin Vertumnus Witkin was born, not diffiultly but with much drugs, at 8:30 PM on July 4, 2003, weighing 10 pounds, 14 ounces.

"He is a big red fucking baby," she breathed into the phone. "He's on my tummy and I can barely breathe."