rainy Friday

First: a little more salt is in order. I eat enough salt to spike the blood pressure of half a dozen normal Americans, but mostly it just keeps me off the floor. Anyway, it’s a waste of semolina to eat pasta without at least a smidge of butter and salt.

Alright. Salt in place, one feels better.

It’s raining, and all the cats and dogs are inside. Abersnacki is cowering under M’s desk, while the rain drops patter down. One might say: Most Pathetic Guard Dog Ever. But, of course, one doesn’t.

I slept until 9 o’clock this morning, laziness I excuse by saying it’s rainy and dusky outside and I have no clock in my room (I threw out my clock during my insomnia weeks last autumn. Bad enough to not sleep, but absolutely suicidal to have to watch your next day’s sanity slip away one minute at a time. No. I threw out my clock and got a bunch of entertaining books and just read all night. Yeah, it still sucked).

In terms of life busyness, quickly: I turned down the full-time job, I accepted a 24 hr a week job of evening shift (still PR), Blue Cross Blue Shield has good major medical insurance for twenty-somethings, I started jogging again and am curing my writerly unbelieving blues with the happy hormones that come from exercise (as good Queen Vic says, “WE are not INTERESTED in the possibility of defeat.”).

I finished reading The Golden Notebook, a hefty tome that managed to snag itself a Nobel Prize in the early sixties… or seventies… or something. Highly interesting for its insider’s look at Being A Communist during the war and in the 50s. Highly political. It’s also supposed to have all these important things to say about being female and gender and what not, but after the main character’s twenty-eighth affair I kind of got over the illusion that she was clear-sighted. I mean, I’m sure she could write a razor book on The Kind Of Man Who Has Serial Affairs And Hates His Wife And Is Completely, Clinically Insane. By all means. But, one supposes that that is not exactly mainstream masculinity.

It does read a bit like a recipe for the Nobel Prize.

Take war and rinse under cold water; set aside

Mix:

1 can feminism

1 can communism

1 can racism

1 can worms

Toss together. Add war, and garnish with perseverations on art

Voilá. One cold worm salad coming up.

No, truly it is an interesting book. Very well-written.

I think shall read something very dense next, though. Like Trollope. I only have one book left, and I really feel that I deserve some candy now.

Dogs. I don’t have a bedroom clock, but I do have a computer clock. Must get back to work. The book is, oddly enough, coming along well these last two days. May the trend long continue.