Thank you to everyone who commented on my last post. I had no idea so many new readers were visiting my blog; I'd just assumed that the Internet had gotten bored with me, moved on to whatever the new hotness is, and I was writing for the few, the proud, the geeky who had been here forever.

Knowing that there are a significant number of you who are new to my words is incredibly inspiring to me, and I woke up early this morning (not my choice – more on that in a second) feeling pretty excited to fire up Typepad and write in my blog. I haven't felt like that in a long, long time. So thank you to those of you who have been here for a while, and thank you to those of you who are recent arrivals. I hope to make it worth your while to spend some of your time with me.

So let's talk about this morning, shall we? Last night, I celebrated the 4th of July the way the founding fathers intended: I went to the Hollywood Bowl with my wife, our son, his girlfriend and our good friend BURNS! (his actual name, with the ! and everything) to see Hall & Oates perform with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

It was a very short concert, because of the 10pm noise curfew, but it was still a whole lot of fun. Initially, Ryan and I thought that Darryl Hall looked like Hasselhoff, but we later decided that he actually looks sort of like Thor, if Thor were a rocker. Oates doesn't have his epic moustache, and I'm not going to lie to you, Marge: a little bit of me died inside when I saw that.

But then I was clapping along with Private Eyes (CLAP!)* and I didn't seem to mind all that much.

Even though we took the Red Line to Hollywood like intelligent people who don't want to spend an extra fifty hours** waiting to get the hell out of Hollywood, we still didn't get home until almost 11. We were all pretty amped up from the fireworks and clapping along with Hall & Oates, so we were all awake well after midnight. I actually ended up reading comic books in bed until almost 2, before drifting off to sleep to dream of maneaters and the M-E-T-H-O-D-O-F-L-O-V-E.

Four hours later, at six fucking o fucking clock in the fucking morning, my asshole cat decided that he was going to chase a ping pong ball around my bedroom, jump up onto my bed and attack my feet, and then make that one particular sound all cat — I almost said "owners" but we all know the correct term is "staff" — hear when the cat wants to go outside. So I dragged myself out of bed and opened the door for him to go do whatever the hell a cat does at six fucking o fucking clock in the fucking morning … which, as it turns out, is make that same noise again ten minutes later until I let him back into the house.

And that's the story of how I only got six four*** hours of sleep last night, but don't really care because I woke up feeling energized and excited, knowing that writing silly stuff in my blog is actually worth the effort, because you — yes, you — are still coming around to read it, even if it's only a stupid story about my cat.****

* They're watching you (CLAPCLAP!)

** Duration possibly exaggerated for comedic and editorial effect.

*** Okay, maybe I'm a little more tired than I originally thought. Also, math is hard.

**** But the writing is the thing, even if it's something stupid about my cat. I have to get this stuff out of the way so I can write the good stuff.