As I write this, it is Sunday, Nov. 15th, and I’m about to fly to Las Vegas to give a talk about addiction. The good news here is that people sometimes pay me to talk to them. The bad news is that I have to spend a day and night in Vegas. (Las Vegas is my least favorite city in America. I dislike Las Vegas about as much as I dislike church sermons that try to connect the irrational fear of swine flu with the irrational fear of terrorism, which is what I heard today at my local Unitarian Universalist church, where everyone was coughing and sneezing and shaking hands and happily spreading disease in the name of liberal contrarianism. God help us.)

I will be flying Jet Blue, which I am excited about, what with all the movies and leg room. I will have plenty of reading material, too. I’m almost finished with my friend Suzanne Kingsbury’s excellent novel, The Gospel According to Gracey, and am eager to begin Dave Eggers’s nonfiction book, Zeitoun, about one family during Katrina.

I’m also bringing two magazines–The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair–along for the ride. Margaret Talbot’s piece about learning to rewrite bad dreams seems like it could be interesting, and I’ll be sure to read Ariel Levy’s essay about feminism and Elizabeth Colbert’s review of SuperFreakonomics. Vanity Fair gets the award this month for best cover lines: 1) How Grandmas and 12-Year-Old Girls are Corrupting American Culture. 2) Is Living Nude the Best Revenge? There’s also that old standby, Hunting an Internet Sex Predator, which is actually a good story by Mark Bowden. It almost makes up for Vanity Fair’s unsatisfying piece a couple of months ago about the Craigslist Killer. That story somehow included this sentence: “In this new kind of murder, the Internet was front and center at every turn.”

Finally, on the plane I’ll be thinking about the weekend that was in sports. My flag football team, The Perps, lost in the last seconds to The Teal Patrick Harris’s, in a rain-soaked game that meant nothing, since the seedings for next weekend’s playoff games were already set. We finished the regular season a stellar 12-5, and Vegas has us as favorites to upset 14-1 Freshly Squeezed in the SuperFabulous Bowl. First, though, we have to get by the underachieving Black Eyed P’s & Q’s in round one and then the winner of Goldie We So Hawney vs. Siler-Ware You Out in the quarterfinals. I play quarterback on offense and safety on defense, where I’m known to give up the occasional big play.

In other sports news, my beloved Northwestern Wildcats moved to 7-4 on the season with a victory over Illinois, which inexplicably still has Ron Zook as its head coach. And speaking of acid trips, my friend Jonah Lehrer pointed me toward this wonderful video animation recalling former Pittsburg Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis, who threw a no-hitter while tripping on LSD.

(I tried acid once, in college, but freaked out because I thought that my friends, who were playing chess, were conspiring against me with every move.)