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I really wanted to go on my walk today. I am ready to start that novel, “The Man Who Loved Dogs”, about the Trotsky assassination. It isn’t raining, but that 30% chance is looking a lot stronger now. The air is misty and the ground is wetted, and the cats are outside. I don’t feel like chancing it.
Feb. 17th, 2014
Wall Street
Feb. 17th, 2014 08:12 amMatt Taibbi gives us another muckraking of the rich and powerful, of our high financiers and legislators. In this excerpt, he writes about a loophole, which is a clause that gives banks the right to own other businesses. So, instead of being chastened and better hemmed in after the big financial meltdown of 2008, they are only getting bigger and more powerful than ever, and only more corrupt if you can imagine. It can seem like it is only a matter of time before the whole economy explodes and civilization comes raining down around our feet.
( Read more... )
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Sweet Breakfast
Feb. 17th, 2014 08:15 amAnother sweet breakfast. Oatmeal Creme Pies and coke. This is another of the downsides of not going out on my walk. I’m tired of cereal, though. And the thought of frozen pancakes kind of makes me feel sick. I feel even more ashamed of my sweet breakfast after reading a PolitiCartoons post on veganism, with all that talk of healthy food and eating. Lifelong habits tend to be just that with me, lifelong. It is a fucked up life. I'm just trying to make the most of it.
I lost a good part of my morning just tumbling, or at least doing more tumbling than reading. I was hungry for lollipop suckers, but they seem to be doing a better job at keeping that stuff out. I found other sweet things, and I already have my Saturday Night post ready, and it’s only Monday.
How Fiction Works
Feb. 17th, 2014 12:05 pm“Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.”
-- George Eliot
James Wood comments, “The great Victorian realist is being precise here: art is not life itself, art is always an artifice, is always mimesis - but art is the nearest thing to life.” For some of us, it is as close as we ever get to life.
[Source: James Wood, “How Fiction Works”]
-- George Eliot
James Wood comments, “The great Victorian realist is being precise here: art is not life itself, art is always an artifice, is always mimesis - but art is the nearest thing to life.” For some of us, it is as close as we ever get to life.
[Source: James Wood, “How Fiction Works”]
Another bum disk. These so-called cum crimes aren’t all that criminal. I’m only one for three disks, and that one disk is just barely passable. Only one more disk is left. I am hoping that there is at least one movie on it that is a big winner. Otherwise, I am really feeling bad about that fifty dollars. It’s good to settle my curiosity about an old movie, but if this is all I am getting, I’d rather keep the money.
Coco is inside with me now, and we’re roughhousing a bit. When I roll her over onto her back, there is such a lovely shock of white. For a calico, she does not have a lot of white to see when she is standing, as almost all of her white fur is on her lower chest and stomach, but when you see it, it really charms you.
Social Life
Feb. 17th, 2014 05:54 pmSunni comes ringing the doorbell. Pop is lying down in his room talking on the phone with Kay and doesn’t notice. I have sometimes expressed a jealousy over Pop’s social life, and how my life is more like that of an old man while he is busy running around. Though, I now wonder whether I would like to be this bothered. Even when things were going well between Gabe and me, I sometimes felt pressed hungering for more time with my books. In my ideal schedule, in a better world with a better life, I would be free during these hours in the afternoon, and I would meet up with some friends, including a girlfriend, for dinner and maybe a movie, or to chill at someone’s house listening to music and conversing. Maybe we would arrange to spend more time together on the occasional weekend.
Kitchen Time
Feb. 17th, 2014 06:59 pmI start dinner earlier, at six, feeling a little hungry, and I also want to do something a little more elaborate, heat up a can of beans to go with my hamburger sandwiches. Surprise, surprise, Pop comes in wanting to start his dinner. When it comes to cooking and kitchen time, I try to work around him, but he always seems to like the times I use to cook, and it feels like I am trying to outrun my shadow.
New Sweatpants
Feb. 17th, 2014 09:00 pmI had to make a decision about how much to have cut from the legs of the new sweatpants. Little things like that stress me, even though I enjoy a greater margin of error here, since we aren’t talking about dress pants. It’s alright if they run a little high on my leg. So, I was busy and flustered breaking out rulers and paper clips to hold up the folded part of the legs, second and third guessing myself. I’m going with five inches. That makes me nervous. It’s a lot. But I do have mini-legs. And I don’t want to measure anymore.
I’m listening to Sugar on a podcast. She’s being interviewed on a radio show. She’s doing it over the phone. She gave a heads up on her Twitter.
As with the other few times I have heard her speaking, I still find myself trying to put together my picture of her in my head. Since I have seen a lot of pictures of her, it should be easy. The problem is trying to match the personality with the person. I still tend to think of her as a little girlish thing who may be a bit hyper, but she has a voice that matches the high idea she has of herself. She makes me think that ‘upper-middle class’ really does mean a different order of living, a higher order of social status, a higher order of being. Or maybe it just confirms my serfdom, my marginal being, my “I’m not worthy” servility.
I kind of wish I dropped her from my mental life the day she dropped me, or at least within a couple of years. It feels a little mentally ill to still be thinking of her like this, almost ten years after she pronounced me dead.
[Source]
As with the other few times I have heard her speaking, I still find myself trying to put together my picture of her in my head. Since I have seen a lot of pictures of her, it should be easy. The problem is trying to match the personality with the person. I still tend to think of her as a little girlish thing who may be a bit hyper, but she has a voice that matches the high idea she has of herself. She makes me think that ‘upper-middle class’ really does mean a different order of living, a higher order of social status, a higher order of being. Or maybe it just confirms my serfdom, my marginal being, my “I’m not worthy” servility.
I kind of wish I dropped her from my mental life the day she dropped me, or at least within a couple of years. It feels a little mentally ill to still be thinking of her like this, almost ten years after she pronounced me dead.
[Source]
Taking out the trash, I am a little stunned when I see a weed that is so lushly green and a good two-feet in height. I suppose we can take this as the opening of spring. It is, after all, the second half of February. Although we are still likely to catch another good blast of winter, the change of seasons is upon us.
I still need to prune the tall, fat mound of dead grass from around the elephant ears. It’s worse than last year, and I have not pulled one blade of grass yet. The grass is so tall and dense, aside from the work, I am a little worried about waking up a snake with a bad temper. Maybe I should do some push-ups and sit-ups to toughen up.
I still need to prune the tall, fat mound of dead grass from around the elephant ears. It’s worse than last year, and I have not pulled one blade of grass yet. The grass is so tall and dense, aside from the work, I am a little worried about waking up a snake with a bad temper. Maybe I should do some push-ups and sit-ups to toughen up.