that damn fan

I thought it was my ceiling fan at first. Something wasn’t turning smoothly. Making a clear whining sound. A sound that is not continuous but comes like the ticking of the clock. I could just shut off my fan, right?

Wrong.

I shut my fan off, but the whiny sound continued. I assumed the house isn’t haunted. It turns out that it is Pop’s fan. Don’t ask me how that can be! It is beyond my home improvement skills.

It was a terrible night. Not because of Ms. Walker. No, she and Pop are not going at it like teenage Olympians. It’s that damn fan. That whining.

I end up going to the big room, but I am too wound up to sleep. This could become a permanent problem and not just the annoyance of a single night. I read some Jim Thompson for about an hour and a half ("The Nothing Man"). That helped. I managed to get a few hours of sleep.

But is this going to be a problem every night?

1984 (2,9) Reading

We get to come up for air from Goldstein’s book for a brief spell, and Orwell shares with us a reflective note on reading and the books we tend to favor, pointing out that thinkers and readers tended to fall into an echo chamber long before the Internet, and it perhaps has always been so. Birds of a feather and all of that.

__ __ __

Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude and safety were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the window that played upon his cheek. The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

-- “1984” by George Orwell

Chores

I must have some spirit left in me.
It's about ten-thirty
and I am tackling my toilet.