I'm warning you up front. It's the early hours of the morning, I haven't been up for long, my eyesight is poor and even worse when applied to screens, and as any of you who have tried Dead Letters can attest, proofreading is not my strong suit.

But I'm trying.

Actually, I should be working. And I'll get to it.

But in the meantime, I've been thinking about something I wanted very badly when I was very young, and that I think I largely got.

To understand fully, you'd have to know my mother. A few of you might have. The rest of you can't, as she died in 2011.

My mother was a wonderful woman in many ways, but in one way in particular she drove me completely crazy.

She was a woman who rated her quality of life by what she DIDN'T know.

I don't mean that she tried to be ignorant of culture or history or even the news.

I mean that she was very careful not to know the realities of things that would upset her.

My mother was one of those women who bought into the great post-War bargain for domestic bliss. She went from her father's house to her husband's, and her husband made a good living.

And he took care of everything.

She never paid a bill, or even knew what the bills were. She had a car and credit cards and plenty of cash, but she was in her 50s before she learned how to make out a check.

My father had a health scare, realized that if he died she had no idea how to function in the world, and finally taught her.

But what drove me crazy was that she was proud of the things she didn't know, proud of not knowing them, as if not knowing was evidence of her success at life.

She didn't have to know them. She was taken care of.

And I responded with a fierce determination to know EVERYTHING.

How to write a check, what the bills were, what the law was, how to travel on my own.

Everything.

So, no, I don't actually know everything. But I have managed to learn how to function in most ways that matter to my life. There's not a lot that I'm faced with that I don't at least know how to respond to.

Okay, I still can't change a tire.

But part of knowing "everything" is learning to accept the truth about it, and today I'm having more than a little truth fatigue.

There is the small truth.

Over on my Facebook fan page, I'm conducting an experiment that has taught me to give all those online marketers a little slack.

Yes, they're obnoxious and they nag people, but it turns out not only that the nagging works, but that it's the only thing that works.

There is also the larger truth.

The world is a cold and brutal place, and no amount of whistling into the wind about how everything has a purpose will change it.

Then there is my ordinary kind of truth.

It really is difficult to get a body into a plastic leaf bag, and that means that the method of this murder has to be fixed.

I'd better go fix it.