If Mother Teresa Ran a Hotsauce Store

Four dollars a gallon turns out to be the magic number. When gas is less, people spend; when gas is more, people don't.

How else to explain the second weekend in a row of dismal sales? Especially since we were doing modestly well up until ten days ago.

Nothing else has changed.

Since gas is almost certainly going to go up to five bucks per gallon, it's clear to me that the business can't possibly survive.

Evolution is paved with broken dreams. Think of all those poor dinosaurs, at the top of their game. Bam! An asteroid comes outa nowhere, turns the atmosphere into a suspended ocean of pollutants and foul dust. Just like that – finger snap – dinosaurs are extinct.

I, of course, am more like one of the little mammals scurrying to keep from being crushed by the thundering hooves of the dinosaur herds.

But, well – not all of them survived either. Totally a matter of random happenstance – one hidey hole gets filled with dinosaur hoof dust and the little mammals inside all suffocate; another stays clear and several million years later its descendents all drive SUVs, watch American Idol and anthropomorphize "random happenstance" as luck.

You can't take survival personally.

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In other exciting news, I tripped over one of the dogs sprawling on the floor of my office yesterday and my computer and all its peripherals went flying. My Wacom tablet had its innards pulled out! My Wacom tablet is the one electronic device I am very attached to because without it I can't draw and drawing is the key to my sanity right now. I took a deep breath and chanted, It's only a thing, it's only a thing, but that really didn't help. Fortunately B can fix anything. I watched him do the surgery – the Wacom tablet is only a big circuit board – and half an hour later, Wacom rose from the dead!

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I keep thinking about Mother Teresa who apparently – at least according to her letters – lost her faith early on. For forty years she soldiered on in emptiness. The Christian theological interpretation of her behavior, of course, is that she was even more holy than we first suspected since she shared in Christ's own moment of desperation on the Cross (My God, why hast thou forsaken me? Etc.) The secular humanist interpretation is that she was a complete fraud.

I, too, have been faithful to you, JC. Even though I'm a Jew! In my fashion.