So, like, I’m on a book tour.

It’s been pretty uneventful thus far—if meeting Elton John counts as uneventful, I suppose, although that had nothing to do with the booktour and everything to do with a good deed performed long ago, a good deed I won’t go into here, since I’m less comfortable fellating myself than many folks suppose. I will say this, though: Being introduced to Elton John is a bit like meeting the Statue of Liberty—you don’t know exactly what to say. “I love your work. Can’t get enough of those huddled masses/glorious pop songs.”

Anyway, Terry was with me for a few days, and we ran around and had fun and checked out boys and went out to eat in pricey restaurants and it was swell. But now I’m all alone in my hotel in Tribeca and I’ve been seized by the dread and dislocation that practically defines a booktour. Back before I wrote a single book, I occasionally listened to writers bitch about their book tours—the nice hotels, the room service meals, the tab picked up by the publisher you had somehow fooled into believing your book would be one of the very, very few that earned out its advance—and thought, “What whiners!â€� But after having been on a few—shit, this is my, like, sixth or something—I’m firmly with the whiners. You’re utterly alone, you’re interviewed for half an hour, you’re utterly alone, you’re interviewed for an hour, you’re utterly alone, you do your reading in a bookstore, you go to your hotel, you’re utterly alone.

So you order up some crud from room service and you allow yourself to have just a drink or two from the minibar—which you never, ever do when you’re paying the hotel bill (somehow $15 for a wee bottle of vodka seems more reasonable when it’s all on some massive corporation’s credit card)—and suddenly it’s midnight or one and you have to get up in a few hours and get to the airport so you can get to another city and do your interviews, be utterly alone, do your reading, and then head back to your hotel.

Anyway, I had a reading tonight in some tiny town on Long Island—no idea why my publisher thought that it would be a moral boost to have my first event in some bedroom community two hours from Manhattan by car—and spoke to a tiny crowd, and sold a few books. Depressing. Then I came back to my hotel—a fancy new place in Tribeca, the neighborhood where you could see John F. Kennedy Jr. back when he was alive, where I decided to eat at the bar, and was rewarded with a cockroach running across my plate—and now I’m in my room, a little tipsy, tucking into the minibar, wishing I was home.

Oh, and shit… a little unfinished Seattle business. Greg Nickels sent me back my money—but not all of it. I donated the $300 at a fundraising breakfast, so they only returned $275. The Nickels camp charged me $25 for some lousy food that I didn’t even eat. For shame, Team Nickels, for shame.