The sweet, sweet taste of confusion 

My heart is beating about a mile a minute and I can't seem to catch my breath and my palms are all sweaty and my vision is kind of blurry but less like a hazy hung-over sort of blur and more like everything is vibrating really really really really really fast.

Whew. It passed. Ever since Halloween, I've been having these massive sugar rushes, but I can't figure out why. Wait ... here comes another one

It might have something to do with the fact that I spent Halloween night running around San Luis Obispo dressed in a costume I made to look like myself and I stole lots of bags of candy from little kids--it was easy!--who probably didn't even know what a Transformer was even though they were dressed like one and so didn't deserve any of the sugary spoils they got from trick-or-treating their way around town.

And then at the end of the evening I ate every candy bar and every pixie stick and every chocolate kiss and even the raisins and I got the most massive sugar high and got confused and couldn't remember exactly where I lived anymore.

Ahem. Sorry about the run-on sentences. When my blood-sugar skyrockets, my brain gets as twitchy as my fingers, and punctuation flies out the window. Or it would, if I could find my window.

Yeah, I'm still homeless. Wandering. Even though my sugar rush is now coming in waves instead of one steady buzz, my mind's still a little fuzzy, and I'm not entirely clear which of the mass of houses, condos, duplexes, and apartments is mine. If you hear a sound outside, don't worry. That's just me on your lawn, trying to figure out if my house had blue trim and a brown door or brown trim and a blue door.

I can't imagine living like this all the time, trying to keep track of which house is which, but that's just how it is for some people. Like SLO County Supervisor Jerry Lenthall. That man's got a house here, a house there, and a couple more over yonder. Granted, he doesn't actually live in all of them, but tracking down which of them is his primo pad isn't as easy as sticking a key in the lock and opening the door.

One of the nameless mass of employees that clog the hallways here at New Times recently tried to pin down an exact address for the supervisor, but found a couple possible options between various lists and legal documents filed around the county.

Turns out that the supervisor's tax papers in particular had mistakenly been filed a couple of times for a house he doesn't live in any more--a simple matter of a clerical error. We've all done it. Forgotten to cross an "i" or dot a "t" or correctly list our primary residence on a financial form. It happens.

Which is why I'm saying we should give the guy a break. It's not like he isn't already frazzled enough, what with people always yammering on about the dunes or sewers or money or whatever else the regular activists get their panties in a bunch over each week.

I mean, even SLO County Tax Assessor Tom Bordonaro called Jerry's apparent oversight an honest mistake, and, if I recall correctly, he's sort-of buddy-buddy with the supervisor--or at least has been when it comes to political support in the past--so he should know, right? Whatever.

Wait a minute You know, I've gone a while now without suffering from the ill effects of candy over-indulgence.

I think the worst has passed, except that I still have a feeling deep, deep down in my gut. It could be the pound of saltwater taffy and licorice currently digesting there. Or it could be the feeling that after its recent vote, Los Osos has entered a new era--one marked by less bickering and more progress. While that's a comforting thought to the almost 80 percent of the voters who put their trust in and committed money to a forthcoming sewer system, the development chills me to the marrow.

If they fix this problem in that troubled little town, what am I going to write about when I have nothing else to write about?

Los Osos has always been my fallback, my safety net. If I couldn't find any politicos to mess with or shady doings to drag kicking and screaming into the light, I could just throw in some throwaway comment guaranteed to be timely and relevant. Something like: "Los Osos--What's going on with that place? Am I right? I mean, talk about problems involving a sewer!"

That simple phrase could apply to just about anything that's happened in Los Osos over the last couple of decades. It's always fresh, and it's always funny--at least to the people who don't live there.

But even though the population of Los Osos is more firmly on a track toward resolving their sewage issues than ever before, I doubt that the whole scenario will ever truly be wrapped up neatly with a little bow. Someone will complain no matter what happens next. And what happens next might still be years and years down the line, so at least I can milk Los Osos for a while yet. And that's truly sweet, because, I mean, come on! How about that crazy sewer, huh?