Where have I been, you ask?

A District girl with a heart of gold, a mouthful of Rod and a hooka load of collie weed? Good question, dear, good question.

I've had a long, tough road ever since I became a star, the Clyde to Ken Beatrice's Bonnie in a fear and loathing month into the heart Vicente Fox's nuevo Mexico (all aboard the Zapatista Xpress, welcome to Chiapas, where the only thing stronger than the M16s is the peyote salsa), and the surrogate love interest of Rod Strickland and Chico DeBarge---often at the same time, but only in the back of Rod's El Camino in the parking lot of TGIFridays in Bowie.

I got my GED, enrolled in Montgomery County Community College for a Automotive Air Conditioning Specialist Certificate, and have generally stayed off the streets---except for Friday nights at Fifth and E streets NW, outside the U.S. Court of Appeals, where you cannot beat the "judge money." I dress up as a transgendered male, and in one evening I make more duckets off dudes in robes than Peter John Ramos does over the course of one weekend being tested for deformities in Abe Pollin's In Vitro Farm.

Yet even so it's been hard to be happy, what with all the winning and all. Because the team is so good I can't even call in to radio shows to suggest trades like I used to, my original claim to fame!!! I called Scott Jackson one night this year to suggest a trade of Kwame, Gilbert, Antawn and L Boogie for Mitchell Butler and Michael Adams, but Jacko said, "Smoke some more weed, Dana" (so I did) and hung up on me.

But now that my emotional moisture has returned, I'd like to think I've returned. Or more better, the have returned in me. What this means is that I'll see all of you in the cheap seats, the truck beds, and the hard woods, as well as on the basketball courts.

Then again, all it takes is one delivery of El Tocino Revolucionario (a bacon-scented peyote that cannot be resisted) and I might disappear again into "Samaki's World."

Also, don’t worry, Ken Beatrice is still alive! He told me some months ago that he was going "Schiavo," which means that the Scandinavian spa styles he so loves must finally be working!!!