Breaking the signal so it's totally unreadable

I spent most of today with someone very dear to me whom I had not seen in almost seven months. This is a fairly ridiculous lapse of time; and I will see him on Rosh Hashanah, but I'm not sure friendships should be scheduled around the ritual calendar.*

I am now the proud possessor of a slender, only slightly scribbled-in paperback of Anthony Burgess' Oedipus Rex. I discovered it this afternoon in The Book Rack. Just its existence brightened my day.

It is not useful to mention Eraserhead to me in a discussion of David Lynch's films, because all that happens is "Too Drunk to Fuck" gets stuck in my head for hours.

*Actually, that's not any weirder than friends whom one only sees at cons. But I'm not sure it's the designated point of the High Holidays.

It was herself she placed between us and the powers of darkness

This summer. Has many redeeming qualities, but the continuing obituaries are not among them. All the people I read young.

Meg muttered, "It'd have been a lot easier if I could have gone on hating him."

Now it was Proginoskes's voice in her mind's ear, not Calvin's. "What would be easier?"

"Naming him."

"Would it? Don't you know more about him now?"

"Second-hand. I've never known him to do anything else nice."

"How do you suppose he feels about you?"

"He's never seen me except when I'm snarly," she admitted. She found herself almost laughing as she remembered Mr. Jenkins saying, 'Margaret, you are the most contumacious child it has ever been my misfortune to have in this office,' and she had had to go home and look up 'contumacious.'

—Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door (1973)