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.

Having said that, I realize that perhaps my life story may not be marketable worldwide. Consequently, I've begun to try to think of other money making projects. Why should all those other writers cash in on their stupid stories while I sit her grousing about lawyers? What have they got that I haven't got?

Saleable ideas, that's what. Ideas about atomic terrorists, robot cops, baseball-playing ghosts, Batman, Dick Tracy, hookers and stockbrokers. The best I've been able to come up with so far is "The story of a young man . . . " That's my big idea. When I'm really cooking, I get as far as "The story of a young man who . . . " and then I'm stumped. What does he do, anyway? Hold Washington D.C. hostage with an A-bomb? Embark on an elaborate scheme to con Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein out of a couple billion petro-dollars? Track down a serial killer who switches his victims' body parts? Be the secret Allied operative who, posing as a Nazi general, convinces Hitler to invade Russia, thus changing the course of World War II?

These may seem like hot ideas to you, but they don't do me any good, because I know I'm not going to write them. I'm more likely to write a story about a young man who steps into his TV, into an episode of Green Acres. What he'd do from that point I haven't the slightest idea. Unfortunately, the Green Acres idea is more my speed that the lucrative mass murder-Nazi-Middle East-hostage market I wish I could break into. But my brain doesn't work that way. I think more about crackers and cookies.

Really, the ideas I'd feel comfortable working on-ideas that let me write what I know-I just don't see making my fortune. I mean, I just thought of a story of a young man who sprays Formula 409 on a phone and ruins it. How am I going to sell an idea like this? Maybe if I souped up the story, like having the guy spray Formula 409 on Qaddafi. Oh, forget it. You see where my ideas head. Right. On the fast track to nowhere.

I'm going to stop thinking about this. You see what comes of listening to the babble of lawyers and sales managers?

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