BOOKS: Honk! Honk! All Aboard the Chickenshit Express!

Here's the thing about me: I am a total pussy.

Oh, I talk a good game, and to the casual observer I probably come off as one of these modern, post-riotgrrl, cussin', dot-commin', post-feminist thugs who are cluttering up the media landscape. But I repeat: I am a total pussy.

Now, I'm cool with spiders (despite having been nastily bitten once), and with heights (I've climbed parts of The Chief), and even with public speaking (which, according to all the experts, is our number one fear, a fact which has always stymied me... like, what, you'd rather face being ripped apart by wolverines than a lectern and a crowd?).

No, I'm pretty much mostly afraid of made-up shit. Scary movies. Scary books. Hell, even scary comics can get me all twitchy.

For some reason, my fear of imaginary shadows is a nerve I've been tempted to poke throughout my life. It started with horror comics. (Books like the Goosebumps series didn't exist when I was a kid, or trust me, I would've been all over them.) One story -- about a boy who channels dark forces by rocking maniacally on a rocking horse -- haunts me to this day.*

When I was about ten, I graduated from horror comics to horror novels after discovering my grandmother's huuuge stash of trashy books in her den. All I had to do was say, "Grandma, can I borrow these?" and I was allowed to trot away with a shopping bag chock full of evil. Given that the grown-ups in my life had no problem whatsoever with exposing my tender sensibilities to the worst that Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Robin Cook had to offer, I don't think it's hard to pinpoint the exact moment in my development where things went wrong.

I read fairly widely throughout my teens, but horror was definitely a staple of my literary diet. I still have no idea why, since these books never lost their ability to terrify the living bejeezus out of me. It was not uncommon for my mom to find a book on the hall floor outside my bedroom, where I'd put it in the middle of the night after realizing I couldn't fall asleep while it was in the room.

(FYI: Rationality was not a watchword of my youth. I once made myself walk through a cornfield after watching Children of the Corn. And I used to sleep with the covers pulled up to my ears, thinking that the vampires would first have to pull the blanket down to get at me, which would at least give me a fighting chance to fend them off. I was sixteen.)

I left my fascination with the horror genre behind when I left my teens, but the one thing I did not leave behind was my tendency to get batshit scared at the slightest provocation. More recently than I should probably feel comfortable admitting, I only agreed to see The Sixth Sense with Wing Chun and Glark if I could sit between them. At one point during the movie, Wing was kind enough to reach out and pat my hand reassuringly as I was curled sideways in the fetal position in my seat. I may also have been whimpering.

So why, oh why, did I pick up Firestarter a couple of weeks ago?

Firestarter by Stephen King (#43)
Now, I've read Firestarter before -- many times, actually -- but it's been years and years. And back in my horror-reading days, if you'd asked me, I probably would have told you that it really wasn't that scary.

But oh my god. This time around I got so caught up in this book that I could hardly put it down. And when I did put it down, it occupied a roomy corner of my thoughts.

If you're not familiar with the story, it's about young Charlie McGee, an eight-year-old girl whose parents participated in a government-funded drug test when they were in college. The drugs left them with low-grade psychic powers and with permanent chromosomal damage. The result: their offspring has an incredibly powerful gift for starting fires. (Surprise!) A secret CIA-type government organization called The Shop has been observing the family for years, and one day murders the mother and tries to kidnap Charlie, who escapes with her father, Andy, and goes on the run.

The rest of the book is about their attempts to evade the government. I won't tell you how it ends, but I will give you one hint: there are a lot of fires.

Okay, it's a schlocky premise. Sure, I'll give you that. And King is hardly a subtle writer. But he has an ability that is rarely acknowledged, and that is his ability to take his schlocky, supernatural premises and use them as a framework upon which to hang stories that are actually about the horror and damage that people bring on each other and themselves.

Cujo, for example, isn't just a story about a rabid dog that traps a woman and her son in their car for days. It's about infidelity and treachery (the woman was actually cheating on her husband, and for circuitous reasons to do with this, hadn't told him where she would be) and it's about a parent's fierce need to protect their offspring, and it's about the fact that [SPOILER]you can't always protect your children from harm (her son dies)[/SPOILER], and it's about guilt and payback. Harsh.

Exhibit B: The Stand. Yeah, yeah, yeah... a killer plague wipes out almost everyone on earth, and then there's a supernatural battle between good and evil for the souls of the survivors, and then everyone who reads this plot summary simultaneously turns into a puddle of incredulous goo because the portion of their brain that allows for suspension of disbelief has completely imploded.

But what's actually going on amidst this grandly implausible series of very unfortunate events? The Stand is about how people are plenty evil on their own, without supernatural intervention, thankyouverymuch (even though the disease kills people quite nastily, far more nasty is the myriad ways the survivors maim and kill one another). It's about how there's always chance for well-meaning people to go wrong (people like Harold Lauder, for example), as well as for people to be redeemed (again, Harold Lauder). And it's about how people need each other for survival, despite how we bring out the worst (and also the best) in each other.

And what about Christine? Just your classic story about a murderous, possessed muscle car? Nope, a dark premonitory warning about how you can only push a victim so much before he retaliates with horrifying violence.

I'm not going to be too great a Stephen King apologist here. I stand by the fact that his premises are incredible in the fullest sense of the word, and that his approach is about as subtle as a dull pickaxe to the noggin. But I have to give the man credit for being able to scare me on several levels, which is harder to do than it sounds.

So... what makes Firestarter so scary?

Oh, just the fact that it reminds me that governments are hugely powerful and capable of rationalizing great evil to themselves. It reminds me that, no matter how much I love my spouse and child, in the grand scheme of things I don't have much power to protect them from fate and plain old bad, bad, bad luck. It reminds me of how easily one's safe, comfy family life can be ripped apart by tragedy, leaving you praying for death just so the pain will stop.

You know, just stuff like that.


*A hearty thank you to Confused and tabloidman for letting me know that this comic was based on the short story "The Rocking-Horse Winner" by D.H. Lawrence. It's available online in its entirety here if you want to ensure that your Halloween is just a bit more haunting.

ETC: Things I Never Thought I'd Hear Myself Say #37

While watching Bewitched...

"What this movie needs is Meg Ryan."

WEB: WriAShorStorWe

Just when I was poking around, looking for something to alleviate my post-unbookening blahs, defective yeti announces this:

Yes kids, October 31-November 4 is the blogosphere's first annual Write A Short Story Week!

Here's how it works: ummm, you write a short story. In a week. The End.

I don't know if I'll be writing a submission, but you bet I'll be reading them. Get more info here.

ETC: Now THAT'S Customer Service

I'm tempted to order more CDs* from CDbaby.com just to get another one of these:

Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office, where the entire town of Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, October 23rd.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year". We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Now that's what I call customer service.

*If you're the curious type, go here for a listen to what I bought. I checked out some reviews after I ordered the discs (because that's how I do things over here in Backwardland) and read this funny, dead-on little review by Ayun Halliday:

This is kids' music that's balm to every mother's savaged nerves, not to mention an honest antidote to all the sugar-coated, synthesized treacle-fudge that's pawned off as "fun for the whole family".

ETC: Happy Half-Birthday to Yooouuuuu...

...Happy half-birthday to yoooouuu,
Happy half-birthday, young Master Saaaaa-aaaaam,
Happy half-birthday toooooooo yoooooouuuuuu!

I love the idea of half-birthdays. They seem like something hobbits would celebrate as a way of squeezing yet another holiday into the year.

My friend Kris, whose son Rian is Sam's age, and I were talking recently about the expression "a face only a mother could love." We both recollected seeing our boys for the very first time and thinking, "Whew! Thank god he ended up so perfect and beautiful, and not funny-looking!" And then we both recollected the moment, months later, whilst perusing old photos, that we came to the identical realization that mother's love definitely makes you blind.

And then we both laughed our asses off and agreed, "Well, they sure are perfect and beautiful NOW."

Six months ago:

Today:

WEB: That Damned Dooce Made Me Cry

Your baby sleeps in your bed for three years and then one night decides he wants to be by himself, it’s like saying, “Here’s my groin, please take aim with your steel-toed boot.”

If you're a parent -- or childfree and sappy -- this will make you cry, too.

BOOKS: Going, Going, Going... and Gone. Sort of.

It was brutal, but we did it.

It was kind of like ripping off a bandage... except for the fact that I got into it in a really big, masochistic way, so a better analogy would be: it was like getting a hundred really good bandages -- say, Elastoplast, not those cheap-ass brands that fall off if you breathe on them -- and placing them over ninety percent of your body, and then haphazardly ripping them off while yelling through clenched teeth, "It hurts! But it feels so GOOD!"

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go here for context.)

When Rusty Iron saw me get like this, he asserted that he always knew there was a good reason why he wrote his name inside all his books after we got married: to keep me from claiming them as my own and purging them. I must admit to having been a bit of a bully. Here's a partial transcript:

"Why on earth do we have two copies of A Clockwork Orange?"
"Double the horrorshow."
"Waiting for Godot... yay or nay? I'm thinking nay."
"Well, it's only the cornerstone of contemporary theatre."
"Oh, Christ. Okay. Um, do we need to keep all this Camus and Sartre."
"I'm going to finally finish them."
"Hm... even Dostoyevsky?"
"Yes."
"If you get all existential and kill yourself and make me a single mother, I'm going to be really mad. Okay, can I at least turf all this Hermann Hesse?"
"What? Why do you want to do that?"
"Because it's embarrassing to be 35 years old and still have a copy of Siddhartha on your shelves."
"We should keep it. For Sam to read someday."
"Oh, God. All right then, I'm getting rid of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn."
"But that's Henry Miller! He's dirty!"
"Okay, first? We've had these for more than ten years and you've never read them. And second, Henry Miller is boring and overrated. I'll find you good porn if you want it, but this isn't it."
"But--"
"Sam can get his own porn."
"Fine. You're getting rid of the dictionaries?"
"Dude, we have the internet."
"What if we need to know the meaning of a word and the power goes out?"
"Good point. I'll put one back. I'm going to get rid of all these Richards Adams novels."
"Okay. Who's that?"
"The guy who wrote Watership Down."
"Oh. Oh! I've never read that. Keep that one."
"I have anxiety attacks just thinking about those rabbits, and you're going to make me keep it? What did I ever do to you? Hey, did you know we have, like, five bibles? Which one's your favourite?"
"That one. No, that one. No. Wait a sec. That one."
"Why that one?"
"I like the cover."
"What about all this sci-fi? Can we get rid of these ones?"
"Those are by Phillip K. Dick!"
"You know what?"
"What?"
"You can suck my Phillip K. Dick."

Despite Rusty's imperviousness to my bullying, we managed to cull a large -- some might say an alarmingly large -- number of books.

Not surprisingly, we divorced ourselves from I-was-going-through-a-phase writers like Emile Zola, Mordecai Richler (except for my personally signed copy of Solomon Gursky Was Here), Rudyard Kipling, Ayn Rand, and even Stephen Leacock.

What surprised me more was realizing how many books I originally thought I'd want to keep, but which I ultimately was kind of "meh" about. I really didn't want most of Jane Smiley's books, deciding that there are only three that I actually like enough to read again: A Thousand Acres, Horse Heaven, and The Age of Grief. I also turfed my modest collection of Joyce Carol Oates's novels. I like Oates, but I just feel so emotionally shredded by the time I finish one of her books (Them -- which I read, and loved, after reading Gwen's recommendation on her site -- and We Were the Mulvaneys, I'm looking at you) that I can't imagine ever being able to read it again.

I was disheartened to see how many of Patrick White's books I was getting rid of that I hadn't even read. When I was in university, I first read Voss (a fantastic book that nobody seems to have heard of, despite the fact that it helped White win a little trophy called the Nobel Prize back in 1973), and I loved it so much that it spurred me to pick up every White novel I found at yard sales and used-book stores... only to realize that Voss was probably his best novel. My enthusiasm waned quickly thereafter.

What's really great is that I now have a small stack of rediscovered unread books waiting for me, fabulous gems like Martin Amis's Einstein's Monsters, Ronald Wright's Time Among the Maya, Neil Postman's The Disappearance of Childhood, Michael Turner's Hard Core Logo, and The Second Sex (by Simone de Beauvoir, of course, who also happens to be winner of the Coolest Name Ever award).

What's really, really great, though, is that my book of Martha Stewart paper dolls finally resurfaced. Whee!

And what's really, really, REALLY great is that I feel wonderful. I feel like someone has carefully removed my soul, laundered it with environmentally friendly soap, hung it on the line to dry on a balmy June day, pressed it with just the lightest sprinkling of starch, and gently re-inserted it into my corporeal self.

I'm still considering ways and means of getting rid of all the books I'm done with (and thanks again to everyone who posted suggestions and moral support! As corny as this may sound, I honestly couldn't have done this without you and this site). But in the meantime, check out this pared-down bookcase action:

Do you see that? There are actually empty shelves in my bookcase, for the first time in... forever. And, of course, a cat has rushed in to shed hair on them.

Before I sign off -- and by "sign off" I mean "go stare rapturously at my shelves for the eleventeenth time today" -- I want to give a shout-out (do people still do this or are shout-outs totally yesterday.com?) to Kim for posting this excellent -- if enabling -- piece of found wisdom:

"The buying of more books than one can possibly read is the soul's way of aspiring towards infinity."

There. I knew it wasn't just because I'm a lazy slob.

BOOKS: The Unbookening

Here's the problem: I have too many books.

I never, ever, in a million trillion gazillion years thought I'd ever hear myself say that.

I have always loved books. I love the way they look. I love the way they feel. I love the way they smell. I love the heft of them. I love books with pictures as much as I love the look of plain unadorned fields of black type.

As a poor kid who eventually became a poor grown-up, I never felt poor because I was so rich in books. In fact, books have always been a kind of currency for me. So the idea of getting rid of my trove of books has me feeling distinctly Golem-y.

Here's the problem again, in pictures:

Books are threatening to take over our not-small house. They're double-stacked on the main wall of shelves in the kitchen. They're piled up against the walls of our bedroom. They're massing on the backs of the toilets in both bathrooms. A teetering tower has recently, and mysteriously, appeared on the ottoman next to the sofa. And these increasingly messy piles and stacks and rows are hard on books. My books are acquiring a distinctly chewed-upon look, as if they've turned cannibalistic and are trying to devour one another.

To be truthful, though, the "creepy hundred-year-old used-book store" look is a look I really dig, but it's not fair to impose it on Rusty Iron and young Master Sam. I need to make space for their books, which are not inconsiderable. And on a more mundane level, as soon as Sam starts crawling, which could literally start any second now, these tottering stacks of books are going to present a serious safety hazard.

Last spring, I did manage to get the shelves in the upstairs hallway in some semblance of order, but that was a job and a half because it required consolidating the books that were already there with all the books we evacuated from Sam's room (née our former office). I sold/gave away three big boxes of books then, and it almost KILLED me.

I reckon we've got somewhere in the neighbourhood of three thousand books throughout the house. My goal? To slice that number cleanly in half.

But how to do it? How do you unburden yourself of the bulk of a book collection that you've spent more than half your life amassing? I've been mentally struggling with this for months, and with the help of my unseemly addiction to home organization TV shows, I've realized that I'm not hung up on the books themselves, but on the books as ideas.

Back when I was in university, if I was down to my last ten bucks and had to choose between a trip to the used-book store or a trip to the grocery store, I'd choose the book store. These books represent missed meals and long walks instead of taking the bus.

When Rusty and I moved across the country in our mid-20s, we sold practically everything we owned, except our books, which we had shipped out as soon as we had an apartment and a huge set of shelves... which was, for a month or so, the only furniture we owned. (We slept on sleeping bags and Thermarests in the living room.) The day the books arrived -- all fifteen boxes of them -- I stayed up all night shelving and felt hugely content when it was done. These books represent security and home.

I have all sorts of mini-collections within my collection. The complete novels of Emile Zola and André Gide are from my "pretentious French philosopher/novelists" phase. All my novels by R.K. Narayan, Patrick White, and V.S. Naipaul are from my "earnest post-Colonial literature" phase. All the books by W.O. Mitchell, Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, Hugh Maclennan, and Timothy Findley are from my "obligatory boning-up-on-the-great-men-of-Canadian-letters" phase. Even my Ayn Rand, Jack Kerouac, and Viking Portable Beat Reader still sit on my shelves, reminding me that, like most people who love books, I went through an "annoying Ayn Rand, Jack Kerouac, and Beat writers" phase. These books represent, for lack of a better phrase, my literary zeitgeist for the past twenty-odd years.

I will probably never read any of these books again, but on my shelves they stand as a reminder of how my interests and worldview have changed over the years. Some of my past choices may embarrass me (Carlos Castenada and Judith Krantz, are your ears burning?), but regular doses of humility are the only things that make me tolerable to others, so I can live with that.

Deep down, I worry that, by getting rid of these books, I'll be forgetting something important about myself. I worry that my tabula will become too rasa. And so long as I'm baring my soul here, I'll also confess that I worry that people meeting me and seeing my house for the first time won't realize that I'm ever so smart. (I must be! Look at all those books! Right?)

So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go through my shelves ruthlessly. (I mean it. I will be utterly without ruth. Whatever ruth I normally entertain will be sent packing for the weekend.) And when I'm done, the only books that will remain will follow at least one of these criteria:

• They merit re-reading. (I'm a big-time re-reader. You could set your calendar by my revisits to Pride and Prejudice, Larry's Party, and Garden of Eden.)
• They have vast sentimental value. (I'm probably never going to read War and Peace again, but you can bloody well bet I'm going to keep my copy as a trophy.)
• They're part of a sub-collection that I don't want to dismantle. (Am I likely to re-read The Moon Is Down, The Long Valley, or The Wayward Bus? Not much. But I can't break up my nigh-complete set of Steinbeck's novels.)
• I'm planting them for Sam to stumble over on his own one day. (If your child is going to read Catcher in the Rye or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, better that they do it in the safety of home.)
  
• They please me aesthetically. (I have two copies of Animal Farm, for example. One is my crappy paperback version. It's for reading. The other is a hardcover special edition, with illustrations by Ralph Stedman, that Wing Chun and Glark gave me. It's for stroking.)

Then, before I do anything rash, I'm going to take all the unwanted books and store them in my basement for the winter to see if I miss any. And in the spring, I will... I will...

How the hell do you get rid of over a thousand books, anyway? Giant yard sale? Used bookseller? eBay? Craigslist? Help!

Anyway. When it's all over, my reward for myself and all the precioussss books that survived the Great Culling is going to -- someday -- be a single, well-organized wall of this shelving:

I have such a hard-on for these Atlas shelves that every time I see a picture of them I have to get up and go for a walk to cool off. Look at those yummy end brackets. I don't know if you can tell from this photo, but that's tongue-in-groove! Luscious. Seriously, if these shelves don't get you hot, you're not the person I thought you were.

The project starts now. Wish me luck. And if I'm not back in a couple of days, call 911. Tell them to look for my body under the stack of old Norton anthologies.

BOOKS: Watch Your Toes! Truman Capote Is Dropping Names!

If you've been playing along at home for a while now, you know that I love me some short stories. Well, my recent post about great novels and stories set in New Orleans reminded me that I had an as-yet-unread collection of Truman Capote stories buried somewhere in the many book middens in my house. Not only did I actually manage to find it, but right beneath it was an also-unread collection of short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Score!

Music for Chameleons by Truman Capote (#41)
It is a sad thing but a good thing that I didn't discover Truman Capote until I'd reached the ripe old age of 34. It's also a surprising thing, considering how many times I've watched Breakfast at Tiffany's. I'd mentally relegated Capote to a cadre of writers with whose names I am, of course, familiar but whom I never expect to read. (Hello, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and John Updike! Sorry. It's nothing personal.)

But then I finally got a copy of Breakfast at Tiffany's (which also contains some of Capote's other short stories, including "A Christmas Memory", which made me cry) and took it with me on a trip to Cuba. And oh my god, I loved it. I loved it so much that when I finished reading it, I immediately pressed it on Rusty Iron, and even he loved it (and you know how he is). And then, when he was done, I picked it up again and started reading my new-favourite bits. That's how amazingly awesome it was.

When I got home, I spent the next few months scouring used book stores trying to find more of Capote's stuff, and by god, it was hard -- and by "hard" I mean "impossible" -- until I found Music for Chameleons... and promptly lost it in a stack of books, as already mentioned.

It was worth the wait. Now, I'm not saying it was the best book ever, but it was definitely inspiring. To give you a sense of what Capote was trying to do with this collection, which was published in 1980 when he was arguably at the top of his game, I'll excerpt from his Preface, in which he critiques his earlier style and sets forth his goals for his new approach to writing:

...how can a writer successfully combine within a single form -- say the short story -- all he knows about every other form of writing? For this was why my work was often insufficiently illuminated; the voltage was there, but by restricting myself to the techniques of whatever form I was working in, I was not using everything I knew about writing -- all I'd learned from film scripts, plays, reportage, poetry, the short story, novellas, the novella. A writer ought to have all his colors, all his abilities available on the same palette for mingling (and, in suitable instances, simultaneous application). But how?

...Now, however, I set myself center stage, and reconstructed, in a severe, minimal manner, commonplace conversations with everyday people: the superintendent of my building, a masseur at the gym, an old school friend, my dentist. After writing hundreds of pages of this simple-minded sort of thing, I eventually developed a style. I had found a framework into which I could assimilate everything I knew about writing.

What's so incredible about this collection of true-stories-that-read-as-fiction is that, in many other writers' hands, it could have come off as a series of gimmicky Creative Writing 101 exercises. But whether Capote is transcribing a conversation between himself and his housecleaner or himself and Marilyn Monroe, whether he's telling a story about a friend's "ruinous obsession" with a twelve-year-old girl he's never met or talking about his years-long coverage of a chillingly enigmatic series of murders in Texas, these stories are all pieces of art that make remind you that art and life, as corny as it may sound, are the same.

But oh my... dude loves to drop him some names. Baroness Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen). Colette. Diana Vreeland. E.M. Forster. Yukio Mishima. Capote travelled in glittering circles, and he does not let you forget it. But just when you're ready to write him off as a poseur, he disarms you by turning around and making a breathtakingly, dazzlingly simple, honest, no-BS observation. Sneaky sneaky.*

No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (#42)
If Capote's self-proclaimed goal in Music for Chameleons was to describe everything using the height and breadth of his powers, Marquez's gift is in describing much but leaving even more unsaid. These silences breed his own unique brand of melancholic wit and irony.

As disparate as Capote's collection is, Marquez's forms a more coherent tapestry, as he delicately cherry-picks stories and character studies from among the citizens of the sleepy, strangely empty, quietly pre-apocalyptic town of Macondo, culminating in the final story, "Big Mama's Funeral", which ends with a sort of verbal rapaciousness that reminds me of the ending of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

It's not a grand, sweeping epic in the tradition of One Hundred Years, but if you like Marquez, it definitely merits your time.


*Just wondering: has anyone read In Cold Blood? Was it any good? Any other Capote recommendations? I feel a book bender coming on. Speaking of which, check out this collection of Capote's reprinted New York Times articles (and try to ignore the fact that they were sponsored by Sony Pictures in a ploy to pimp their upcoming Capote biopic). Thanks to Rusty for the link!

ETC: Mea Culpa? YOU-a Culpa!

My apologies for the paucity of posts in the past couple of weeks. But are you at least impressed that I used "paucity" in a sentence? I may have mommy brain, but I can still Increase My Word Power.

I have a bunch of half-written book reviews, but between our ongoing real estate monkeyshines, young Master Sam's busy teething schedule, and other... er... stuff... actually finishing them has fallen by the wayside. But not for long.

That is all. Back to your regularly scheduled internet.

Your pal,
Doppelganger

P.S. And I'm very aware that my previous post was lame. My thanks to you all for not pointing it out. Your mamas raised you up good.

P.P.S. Oh crap. I just remembered that someone once told me that blogging is like hackysack: you're never supposed to apologize for sucking.

P.P.P.S. Double-crap. Now I'm talking about hackysack. Now you really know how lame I am.

P.P.P.P.S. Well, since you're already here and my lame-osity is now out on the table, I may as well show you some recent baby pictures. Ha! You did not see that coming. Too late. Feast your senses.

ETC: Why?

God spoke to Moses through a burning bush. Satan spoke to Eve through a serpent. Someone or something is trying to communicate with me, but he/she/it has chosen a different medium, as I discovered when I looked into the sink recently.

Good question.

ETC: Gone Fishin'

Is today already Wednesday? I guess it looks like I'm taking this week off from the site. (And no, it's not because of reader's block. The Kite Runner may be eluding me, but I've got three other books finished and two others pending.) But exciting real estate (mis)adventures are looming. More on that later.

In the meantime, a couple of wildly different blogs I've really been digging lately:

Baghdad Burning
Fagistan

See you on Monday Tuesday.