Just a brief note of happy happy joy joy . . . I headed to my studio today to resume covering the walls of the new space with primer, but had a couple errands to run first. On the way back I decided to stop in at a beer store, a place advertising something like 700 different brands of beer. My mission was to see if they stocked my favorite beer, which had disappeared from the neighborhood grocery store a couple of years ago.

This beer is called XINGU, and it’s imported from Brazil. It’s a rich, zesty black beer, very tasty and smooth. The U.S. importer has a website for it.

It turned out that yes, the store stocked XINGU, and had a supply that was refridgerated. I bought two bottles and a bottle opener and returned to my POS car. As I got in, a car pulled up and the driver yelled, “Hey man! Ready for pizza?” And I thought, “You know what? I am.”

The guy was selling fresh pizzas out of his car for five bucks a pop. He claimed to work for “Good Guys Pizza” around the corner, which I haven’t noticed before and which may well not exist. But I remembered that when I worked at WotC, a pizza driver would turn up some days around lunchtime with a random assortment of pizzas for $5 each, and the receptionist would make an announcement on the P.A. and geeks would rise meerkat-like from their cubicles and lumber towards the entrance in search of the mighty discs.

So I bought a medium pepperoni pizza and got back in my car. That’s when it hit me: “I have FUCKING BEER and I have FUCKING PIZZA and I’m going to spend the day PAINTING MY FUCKING STUDIO!”

And this suddenly became one of the finest days of my life.