• Dear neighbor with the chihuaha. Please stop strangling your dog. The echoes off the brick in the alley are bothering me. #
• Sleeping on the sofa tonight because the bedroom is way the heck too stuffy. #

By this point, I think everyone probably heard about Jay Lake’s colon cancer news. The man is a cancer survivor the likes of which the world has never seen. When I heard the diagnosis, I emailed him asking if there was anything I could do for him from New York.

Oh yes. Yes, there was.

Jay asked me to build a puppet of his tumor, because he wanted to be “smarter and funnier” than his cancer. Before I had materials in hand, it was clear that Jay had kicked the tumor without the need for puppetry.

The colon, on the other hand, is a troublesome thing. So, I’m building Jay Lake a puppet of his colon in a jar. Today, I went shopping for specimen jars. Besides needing something the right size and shape, it also needed to be plastic so that I can drill holes in it with abandon. Tomorrow I’ll start the mech for the “mouth” of the colon.

This may well be my strangest commission ever

I’ve been a professional puppeteer for almost twenty years now and I’ve never seen anything quite as disconcerting as ventriloquist, Todd Oliver and his dog Irving.

That’s right. A ventriloquist with a real dog.