Regular readers of this column have emailed and phoned, both to me and to Seven Days, wanting to know "where I am" and what has happened to "Crank Call" in the last few months. There is an answer, but I'm not yet ready to speak of it fully. The reason for my absence is still a little too raw and traumatic, not to mention too lengthy an explanation for this space. But that story will be told in time.

So here it is, the week after Thanksgiving, way up in the hills of Vermont - well, Charlotte. We've "seen some sunshine" recently, as the meteorologists say, but it's been the kind of fleeting, "almost" sunshine you can easily miss. In Vermont, at the end of November, you often have to rush outside to see the sun. That exceeds the limits of sun worship, as far as I'm concerned,

So, we'd better face it: Winter's on the way.

Oh, frabjous day!" as Lewis Carroll wrote in one of the Alice books. It's all so wonderful you could scream, or do somersaults, or anything you want. Such as head a "mega-church" in Colorado Springs and have sleazy gay sex at the same time, and buy crystal meth and throw it down the toilet, if that's what makes you happy. At the moment, I don't care what your fetish is, just knowing that at last the people of these states knew what they were doing and threw the bums out.

Hey, can we talk about the weather this week? I don't mean "global warming," which people talk about a lot - though nothing seems to get done about it. I'm sure you, like all of us, are doing everything in your power, in your little bitty way, to prevent the looming calamity of climate change, such as switching your light bulbs and walking to work. But let's face it: Until the whole screeching, screaming, over-producing, mass-consuming culture of predatory capitalism comes crashing down around us, this planet's going to keep on heating up.

So, what's your guess? Do you think the Republican leadership had former Representative Gerry Studds (D-Mass.) murdered over the weekend? Or do you think Studds just dropped dead from shock, hearing right-wing pundits, members of Congress and assorted raging nutcases bring up his ancient affair with a fully consenting, of-age, former male page on Capitol Hill, in an effort to blame "the Democrats" for the scandal now surrounding disgraced Republican Congress- man Mark Foley of Florida?

Well? Do you think the Republicans had Studds killed in order to get his "sordid tale" back in the headlines? I wouldn't put it past them.

All politics is local, right? Or do I have that backward? Maybe "all locales are political." It certainly seems like it whenever I drive along that particular stretch of Spear Street in South Burlington where, over the last dozen years, all those recklessly developed, hideously designed, overblown, tacky, tasteless, gaudy, showy, in-your-face "McMansions" have been thrown up on razed and flattened lots.

Leave it to me to get to New York City just after the woefully patriotic celebration of the fifth anniversary of 9/11. I've always been a bit behind the news, which makes for better writing and more interesting stories. But it deprives me of the chance to be penned up by Homeland Security, with hundreds of others of my profession, in a specially guarded, yellow-taped corral near Ground Zero, watching the buffoon who currently occupies the White House lay a wreath and drop a tear, with his lovely wife Laura by his side.

"The terrorists are trying to stop our progress. And we'll ultimately prevail because they're - they have - their ideology is so dark and so dismal that when people really think about it, it's - it will be rejected. They just got a different tool to use than we do."
- George W. Bush

"And now, my beauties, something with poison in it. Poppies . . . Poppies. Poppies will make them to sleep.