And have you heard about Port Royale?

Finally, the desultory drizzle of most of this afternoon turned into a window-rattling thunderstorm. Took it long enough.

This is my ideal life: somewhere with books, cats, and the sea within reach; there is music and good company, and people who do not mind if I need to disappear. Between the past two weekends, in New York and in Providence, I think I've checked off every box on that list. Even a movie, this time: the second draft of the Lovecraft documentary for which Caitlín was interviewed last year, which made me feel more kindly toward H.P. than I had ever expected (never mind that my desire for gills and retractile claws would probably have horrified him), and for a while Labyrinth played as background music. Later we drove down to the Enchanted Forest, a small amusement park Spooky discovered online that had been derelict for about three years; the actual forest (or at least the underbrush) was reclaiming the bumper cars and the pirate ship, with picturesque ferns everywhere. I don't know what most of the toy houses had been, other than apparently built out of plywood and sheetrock, but in one of them a grapevine had twined in through the window, coiling up into the corner of the ceiling, and among all the plaster dust and pulverized glitters of glass, an office chair was sitting in the single room, with a black stapler on the seat. I have no idea. Spooky took pictures. I still can't believe I forgot my camera.

I wanted even more to take pictures of Beavertail Point, which reminded me strongly of Two Lights and Kettle Cove in Maine—there was even nineteenth-century graffiti pecked out on a flattened phyllite slab—and therefore of my platonic ideal of coastline, great shelves and spars of weathered stone, flung up and broken and tilted, ledges and crevasses for the tide to slam into, so closely scaled with barnacles and mussels, periwinkle-browsed, anchored with bladderwrack and sea lettuce anywhere the water washes up, whale-backed boulders where the earth turns into sea. Fortunately Caitlín has posted some stunning photographs, most of which were taken by her and Spooky. There were tiny crabs of several colors. There was a dripping tail of kelp still latched to its split plaque of rock. There were noisy kids who kept heaving chunks of rock into the tidepools, but eventually they went away before we had to sacrifice them. The tide was coming in. It was the right kind of afternoon.

And I came home after dinner on the next-to-last train and did not waste several hours listening to the Changelings' Amphibian (1998), which I got from Caitlín and most of whose lyrics I need to transcribe, and then to Paulo Szot, who just won a Tony for his portrayal of Emile de Becque in the recent revival of South Pacific—a real voice, an operatic bass, like Ezio Pinza before him. (Not like I can afford a Broadway show right now, but can't I dream? Fools give you reasons, wise men never try . . .) I heard about George Carlin's death from spectre_general's journal. Beyond Cardinal Glick in Dogma (1999), he was almost wholly unfamiliar to me. He replaced Ringo Starr as Mr. Conductor in the second season of Shining Time Station and I bore him a grudge for not being Ringo Starr. (This is me at age ten or eleven, discovering the Beatles: "Hey! Cool! Ringo Starr has a band!") I know people who can quote him like Monty Python. I never saw any of his standup routines. But if my friendlist is at all representative, he seems to be receiving all the seven-worded tributes he deserved, and I'm glad of that.

fleurdelis28, when are we going to the Cape?