Tuesday night a thunderstorm really gets going just as I hop off the bus by the Criminal Courts on 26th. I wait it out a few minutes inside the Popeye’s, then walk a couple blocks west, then south, behind the barbed wire of the jail, to meet up with the young woman renting me a car so I can drive to Michigan and pick up my books.

This app-based thing of people lending their houses, cars, tools, what have you, never feels quite legit. It’s pouring rain again when I spot her parked up 28th Street. She’s planning to take a scooter home but she’ll get completely soaked so I offer to drive her home in her own car.

I can’t sleep because my mind won’t stop cycling through the scenarios of how the book will turn out wrong and all the things I have to do after getting the books home even if they turn out right. I doze off near daybreak, then the alarm rings.

I listen to dopey cheeseball Michael McDonald’s autobiography, What a Fool Believes, all the way east to Chelsea, Michigan, then back west to Chicago. About 450 miles roundtrip and McDonald is only up to his thrilling account of recording “Ya Mo B There” as I park in front of my house to unload the 17 boxes of books. It may be the most boring and longest episode of VH1’s Behind the Music ever made. At least I didn’t kill any braincells reading it.

The books turn out well. After the nightmare situation with the last book, I was extra weary, but these will work. If this is my last book, it’s not a bad way to go out.

I spend the following morning signing, numbering, and packing up preorders. The next few months will revolve around getting this thing out to people.

If you’d like one for yourself, now’s as good a time as any. This one will only be available from me directly and at Tangible Books. It cost too much to print to offer wholesale to other stores.

That’s just the way this cookie has crumbled.

Got to catch ex-cabbie/Ethiopian jazz legend Hailu Mergia at Constellation. I loved it.

There’s a new print based on an alley painting available.

I talked to Ben Tanzer about myself for a while. Then I talked to Mallory about a shitty 80s flick called The Believers.