Book tours are debilitating. My body clock is so screwed up that, on consecutive nights, I woke up in the middle of the night and had no idea where I was. My right thumb has swelled to 140 percent the size of my left thumb. My back is crumbling like blue cheese. My immune system might turn me into Patient X of Swine Flu 2.0 before everything's said and done. Even my BlackBerry mouse no longer can move to the right.

The good news: All of these things are fixable. (Well, except for my right thumb. Can't feel anything. Might have to chop if off Ronnie Lott-style.) What can't be fixed is my formerly hot NFL picks season. Sayonara, My Best Record Ever. It's gone. Out the window. And all because my book tour prevented me from properly following football. Or, because I suck at picking games and was destined to go cold. It's one or the other.

Because I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy, I have decided to blame the tour for my picking woes. In 11 days, I went from Washington to Philly to Bristol to Manhattan to Boston to Los Angeles to Chicago to Phoenix to San Francisco to San Diego. I would do it again. See, the worst thing about being a writer is that you can't see the people who are reading you. They are just nameless, faceless people with e-mail addresses. Book signings put a face on these people. That's why I like them. I also happen to have an exceedingly nice and appreciative group of readers. Which makes it so much fun to go visit them.

Of course, when you bang out 11 signings in 11 days, memories invariably jumble together and stop belonging to a sequence. They become … jumbled. Like one of those smoothies that have 11 different fruits in them. I can't even tell the fruits apart anymore. So here are the jumbled memories of my book tour. I could not present them any other way. It's all one big unrecognizable smoothie.

For instance …

- I slept in nine different beds in four different time zones. Two of those times, I rolled out of bed and immediately appeared on a morning show. Like, immediately. Like, I hit the snooze button three times, begrudgingly woke up, peed, then groggily called the show. They will not be sending these interviews to the Radio Hall of Fame.

- I brought my Dad to every signing this week. In Chicago, someone noticed him and joked, "My God, David Crosby has lost a ton of weight!" That was followed by the debut of my Dad's "Wait, I didn't know I was going to be heckled on my son's book tour" face. High comedy.

- In Philly, I met the legendary NBA statistician Harvey Pollack, one of the few remaining people who witnessed Wilt's 100-point game. He even made the "100" sign that Wilt held up. He is Yoda old. I loved him. We exchanged books. We took a picture. My night was made.

- Two Mondays ago, I woke up in D.C. at 6:20 a.m., went to bed 22 hours later after a signing, woke up five hours later, fell asleep in Philly at 1:30 a.m. after another signing, woke up at 5:22 a.m. to catch a plane, then banged out two more signings in Bristol and New York City. After that last one, my friend Jacoby took us to a Russian bar and ordered us a round of beers called Baltika 3. They were delicious. They were going down like water. I was so overtired that I kept drinking them. At one point, someone said, "Don't you have to be on 'Morning Joe' in a few hours?" My response? "Yeah, but it's not in HD." I went to bed at 2:45 and woke up less than four hours later. At this point, I looked like holy hell warmed over and caramelized. Was "Morning Joe" in HD? Of course it was.

- We flew from Philly to Hartford on something called Republic Airlines -- or as I mistakenly called it, "Raconteur Airlines" -- on a plane so small that when it started dipping during a thunderstorm, my friend (and PR guy for my book) Lewis and I started spouting out "Almost Famous" lines. I once ran over a man in Dearborn, Michigan. I can still see his face …

- In San Francisco, I rode a trolley car with my father and took a picture of Alcatraz, which remains one of the secretly coolest "Wait, there it is!" landmarks in the United States

- In Washington, fellow Holy Cross grad Jon Favreau (Obama's speechwriter, not the actor/director) gave me and my friends a West Wing tour. It's like a bed and breakfast with offices. Much smaller and creakier than any of us expected. Also, the Oval Office is much happier than I would have imagined. It's on the first floor, with three bay windows behind the president's desk, so you can see the yard and grass behind it. Should I have just said, "Wow, this is much happier than I expected" instead of "Wow, this doesn't look anything like the Oval Office in '24'"? Of course. I'm an idiot. But you knew that already.

- The alarm for my BlackBerry doubles as some techno song that Stewart Copeland made specifically for alarms. I heard it so many times over the past two weeks that it runs through my head constantly. It won't go away. On the other hand, it's a step up from the "Max and Ruby" theme.

- We ran out of books in D.C. again. Second straight time. This gave birth to a new face: the Bill Simmons "They Promised Me This Wouldn't Happen in D.C. Again" face. I still feel awful. I will be back, D.C. I will be back.

- Two Grizzlies fans showed up for my San Fran signing. I thought this was so strange that I snapped a picture of them. There are Grizzlies fans? Really?

- In Bristol, I made a cameo on "SportsNation," where they shot my book with two different guns. The book stopped the first bullet on page 552. The second gun blew it away. I vaguely remember making a joke about climbing on a limo like Jackie O to pick up the pieces of the pages, followed by Michelle Beadle quickly changing the subject. I should not be allowed on live TV.

- Before my first New York signing (a nighttime affair at Professor Thom's), we had three hours to drive from Bristol to Manhattan, check into a hotel, change, then get to Professor Thom's. My book company hired us a driver for this trek. He was between 72 and 135 years old. Every few minutes on the highway, he'd start drifting into the right lane, followed by someone angrily beeping at us, then the car jerking back into our lane, then Lewis and I glancing at each other in unequivocal panic. It went like this for two solid hours. And yet I still felt safer than I did on Raconteur Airlines.

- Somehow I saw my four oldest high school friends, my two closest college friends, my two closest Boston friends and everyone in my Vegas crew. Just worked out that way. Like "This Is Your Life."

- The World Series started and finished during my tour. In the Newark airport, Lewis and I watched the second and third innings of Game 2, then had to board a plane not knowing whether Pedro would survive our flight. The plane landed in Boston an hour later. I glanced at my BlackBerry. The...