I am the lizard king

Welcome to this week's Reno News & Review.

I want to thank everyone for the kind wishes regarding my Bell's Palsy. I'd also like to thank the people who told me it doesn't matter if it gets better because I look kind of bad-ass. I'm good with getting better, and it's improving slowly but slowly.

I'd also like to thank the people who expressed their schadenfreude that I deserve it because my lifestyle encourages physical inflammation. It's not that they're clueless. They're not. But I already eat whole foods and avoid processed foods. I already take Omega 3s, 6s and 9s, and supplement fiber. I'm as regular as Big Ben, I swear.

I personally think it's more fun to think that it was a cosmic joke. I mean, 52 years old, and nobody ever wanted me on CNN before, and there I was with half a face. I looked truly bizarre. Did you see me with Jake Tapper? http://youtu.be/1wH5WGlsPNk Hilarious. I did wear the RN&R shirt. Represent!

And you know something? I actually consider myself lucky. If I'd been on there with my regular face, I might have been worried about how I was coming off. As it was, I went in knowing I was going to look like an idiot, and despite the fact that I had makeup rubbed in my paralyzed eye, and I was in an unfamiliar environment, I wasn't nervous, not in the way you'd expect me to be anyway.

My luck is ludicrous and peculiar. I came home for lunch on Monday to the biggest lizard I ever saw sunning itself on my front porch. I'm basically a boy at heart—I mean, truly immature in hard-to-imagine ways—so I had to catch the thing. Turned out not to be an actual dinosaur, but a bearded dragon, not a lizard that exists in the wild around here. I named him Stay the fuck Away from Me, which Hunter thoughtfully turned into the acronym Sam. Kelly calls him Sinclair, after the gas stations that had the dinosaur on the logo.

I don't really want to keep him around, but I can't give him away until I'm sure his owner isn't one of my neighbors near Cashill Boulevard. Drop me a note if you need Sam in your life.