SQUIBS: TEAM WUPPIE DRIVE TO NEW ORLEANS. December 21 - February __. In progress. Spend the week between Christmas Day and New Years Day at Graytona Lodge in Grayton Beach. The Saunders Brothers play at Cerulean's, in WaterColor. I pitch SQUIBS to LSU Press. I send the first week's work to Andrei Codrescu, Exquisite Corpse. The rejection slips for GULF COAST BLUES dribble in. I send the complete MS to River City Publishers. I am invited to enter a show called Texts at the Gallery Above. I write a pamphlet, Texts. I will sell it the next day at my book-signing table at booksALIVE 2007! I write a second pamphlet, Plagiarism. I see that SQUIBS is divided into three parts. Part One, Preparing To Go Into the Field (35,000 words), Part Two, In the Field (13,000 words), and Part Three, Back in the Lab. Brenda and I drive to New Orleans, New Iberia, and Ocean Springs, Mississippi. In New Orleans, we go by Dr. Bob's Bywater Studio. Be nice or leave. Dr. Bob is in Memphis, recovered from the beating he took when the police mistook him for a looter, and disarmed him, protecting his property from looters. Hazel plays a Dread Clampitt song, "Granny Brown," on her radio show, and Brenda tells an anecdote about the song. We see the Hurricane Katrina devastation firsthand. It's still there. The Walter Anderson Museum of Art is closed for renovations, but I buy a documnentary, Walter Anderson: Realizations of an Artist, at the train depot. Pottersville Press says they'd like to publish my Charles Willeford book, but don't have the money. They will publish it cooperatively with me if I have the money to pay the printer. I don't. I order 75 copies of Adventures in the Underground, at a 40% discount off the retail price of $15.95, to help with the printing bill for that book. It won't be ready in time for booksALIVE 2007!, but will be available in weeks, rather than months, and I will have a picture of the cover to take preorders for, at the book fair. A man who studied pottery with Jack Neff at Alford looks him up in Google and gets a hit on my website. He emails me. I had been thinking about Jack Neff since I saw the manuscripts of my stack in Larry's outbuilding. What happened to Jack's life's-work, or oeuvre? Did moths and rust get it? Was it thrown out? Is it moldering in some lonesome grave, like John Brown's body? How lucky I am to have a reader who treasures my work. Who has read every single word of it, and knows it like I do. Maybe better, now that my powers are fading.