Ever been possessed by the devil? Neither have I, really. I only bring the question up because I rented the Exorcist on video last week, and it really made me wonder who among my friends and acquaintances had ever been possessed. I couldn't think of anyone offhand, but maybe they just hadn't mentioned it.

Naturally. Being possessed by the devil isn't something you want spread around town. Like Linda Blair in the movie, I'd stay in my room if I was possessed. "Don't let me out of here!" I'd tell my wife or my mom, whoever it was taking care of me. Afterwards, I'd tell everyone I'd been down to Florida for a vacation. If they ask why I'm all bruised up, I'd say, "Well, I was in Florida, plus I fell down." If they ask why I don't have a tan, I'd say "I was in New Hampshire part of the time." You have to be a fast thinker to keep this kind of thing a secret.

You might have noticed that the Edition now has a fashion columnist. And you should see the way this guy dresses. I have pants envy of him. One day he came in with pants that ended four inches about his shoe line-and he got away with it. He looked dynamite, like a dancer, like Gene Kelly. If I tried that I'd look like a Beverly Hillbilly, though not quite as good. Some people can do what they like in terms of pants, and fashion. I can't.

Since I don't wear suits to work, I have to make a fashion decision every morning and live with it the rest of the day. The shirt I choose has to go right with my pants or I'll feel like a dork-and there's no turning back. "Boss, can I go home and change? I can't stand this ensemble"-that doesn't fly in the real world. I try to wear what I call "universal" pants: pants of solid colors that go with anything. So I have light and dark pants. These go with my light and dark shirts. But not always.

Babies hate my guts. That's what I was thinking as my girlfriend (er . . . fiancée) Barbara and I watched my seven-month-old niece Jane E. Frazier two Sundays ago. My sister had gone out for a few hours, leaving the infant in our care. For a while, Jane E. Frazier, honked off that her mom had left, cried and looked at me like everything was my fault.

I don't know nothing about baby-sitting babies. It's a good thing Barbara was around, because that baby would still be crying if I'd been there by myself. She'd be crying through adolescence and into college. I never would have thought of turning down the sound on the TV and putting on soothing music, as Barbara did. I would have continued to sit on the sofa, waving my arms around and going "woo woo" to calm her down. What a waste of time. The baby had no interest in my tepid riffs. What's seeing some guy bounce around on a couch making stupid noises, compared to nursing on a mother's soft breast? If I was a baby, I'd think, "There's no comparison." I'm just glad Barbara came up with the music idea.

Let's everybody put our little fingers in our ears and feel around in there. Do you feel a bone sticking out? I do. At the age of 32, I'm growing an antler. Some people worry about hair growing in their ears or their noses. Compared to growing an antler, these concerns seem petty, don't they? I'm talking perspective here. Think about me when you're troubled by nose hairs, think about me in the supermarket weeping quietly as I knock products over with my horn or my antler or what have you. Look, Mommy, the man has an antler! I know, Jimmy shh . . . Of course, that's the worst case scenario.

I think a lot about worst case scenarios. They rarely come true, so they're an odd comfort. For example. I think about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You may know that a few other cities are not sitting quietly by and accepting that Cleveland is the designated site for the Rock Hall of Fame and Museum. San Francisco and Memphis want it, too, and they're not giving up. There's no way of knowing what's going to happen with this thing.

Our sales manager came back from a party with a bunch of lawyers and told me that the lawyers loved the Edition but that one said he didn't want to read about my "navel flint." I laughed scornfully. So now these lawyers say that I'm writing that I have a flint in my navel. So now they claim that I say that I can press the sides of my belly button together and produce flame. What a joke. As if I'd try to pass off such a transparent lie. Lawyers make extravagant, nonsensical statements, so they assume everybody else does too. But I'm telling lawyers: Don't include me in your little world! I've got plenty to deal with in the real one!

Then again, our sales manager might have mispronounced the word "lint" as "flint" while relating this incident to me. The more I consider it the more I think this is the likely explanation, since our sales manager is kind of . . . well, you know . . . a sales guy. "Navel lint" makes much more sense within this context as the lawyer may have been referring to my habit of speaking about personal matters in this column. I would like to state here that I have never once written a column about my navel lint, though I have written about lint screens in dryers, which might easily have confused this lawyer. Yes, I know it seem ridiculous to confuse a dryer with a human navel, but this is a lawyer we're talking about, not a rocket scientist. Try to have a little compassion.

You know how some people are unflappable? I'm not one of them. I'm very flappable. I'm flapping all over the place thanks to incidents that occurred during my sexy hot trip to Southern California, which turned out to be a one-day jaunt to the teeming and ever-busy Chicago O'Hare airport and back again to Cleveland, which I was trying to get out of for a fun, relaxing trip to sexy hot Southern California, if you follow me so far.

I had scheduled a trip to Los Angeles, to stay four nights and three full days. This was a rare and exciting thing for me, not to mention expensive. I left my home early on May 20, hopping on the rapid. The ride to the airport was fine; indeed, it was the best part of the trip. I gazed at the glum scenery and felt a wave of affectionate condescension. "I'm going to be on the beach of the Pacific Ocean tomorrow," I thought, "and these people are going to be grousing around on Triskett Road, which is too bad. Heh, Heh."

As I was getting my hair cut recently I looked down at the tufts of silver hair on the barber's bib and thought in disgust, "They could have shaken that old man's hair off before they put this thing on me."

Then I saw the hair falling from my own head matching the scorned tufts. So this was it. The beginning of the end.

I thought about having to get brown hair coloring, like the guy on the Grecian Formula commercial, who after dying his hair kept an unsmiling picture of himself with gray hair on the mantle for comparison purposes. Where was I going to get a picture like that? Did I have to get a mantle, too, or was it all right to put the picture on an end table? And how gradual was the hair re-browning process? Would my entire head turn an unnatural, Ronald Reagan copper-brown, and look like I was wearing some dimestore wig.

Hollywood insiders are predicting a flat late-summer at the box office with an extremely uncertain crop of pictures being released in July and August. Among the higher-profile-and higher-risk-projects set to be premiered within the next two months:

Symphony of Fear Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, Macaulay Culkin, Gene Hackman, Whoopi Goldberg, John Goodman; directed by Sally Struthers. Schwarzenegger has to keep conducting a symphony orchestra that will be blown up by Culkin's bomb if Arnold steps off the podium or the music stops; Hackman, Goldberg, and Goodman play the strife-ridden percussion section.

Buzz: Insiders say this all-star orchestra disaster pic, shockingly given to Struthers to direct, is fairly effective, but preview audience members asked for "bigger dinosaurs," a troubling sign.

Outlook: Could be "crescendo" b.o. with poignant breakout performance by Goodman as a sexually-conflicted triangle player.