Thunderstorm races by last night in the four o’clock hour. Takes maybe twenty minutes to come and go. At a certain point the batteries of horrific thunderclaps start making the building’s walls tremble like struck drums. Light fixtures and picture frames rattle. I crawl out of bed to the computer to save an open file and then shut the machine down before the lightning has a shot at barbecuing our transformers. Laura attaches herself to a window to monitor the rain, which is hitting the panes at firehose pressure. Acting as counterpoints to the thunder are: 1) the pounding in my skull that announces its presence once I’m on my feet, the rough draft of an approaching hangover; and 2) our upstairs neighbor (“The Mad Crumpler” — I’ll explain later) rising from his slab and launching into his usual brontosaurian stomping act. He walks and walks across his hardwood floors and our ceiling joins in with the shuddering walls; the fixtures and frames jitterbug their hearts out. Everything soon shuts up and we go back to sleep. Now it’s daytime and that hangover is final copy.

Old Fort Niagara, NY, August 2005. Photo by Laura!

Odysseus erotically builds a boat in Robert Fagles’s translation of the Odyssey:

Working away at speed
he put up half-decks pinned to close-set ribs
and a sweep of gunwales rounded off the sides.
He fashioned the mast next and sank its yard in deep
and added a steering-oar to hold her right on course,
then he fenced her stem to stern with twigs and wicker,
bulwark against the sea-surge, floored with heaps of brush.
And lustrous Calypso came again, now with bolts of cloth
to make the sail, and he finished that off too, expertly.
Braces, sheets and brails — he rigged all fast on board,
then eased her down with levers into the sunlit sea.

Whew! Sing, O Muse, of cold showers…

Slate’s Michael Agger, from “Lazy Bastards: How we read online”:

We’ll do more and more reading on screens, but they won’t replace paper — never mind what your friend with a Kindle tells you. Rather, paper seems to be the new Prozac. A balm for the distracted mind.

Early evening just after a rain = best time for BIG FREAK BUBBLES.

My old Sony MDR-V700 DJ headphones, when plugged into my outboard computer speakers, somehow pick up transmissions between ambulance drivers and dispatch. Often very faint — upping the speaker volume has no amplifying effect — and the signal comes and goes, the voices and their radios’ glitchy cracklings drifting in and out of whatever quiet spooky music I’ve got the phones on for. (Or maybe between tracks if the desk soundtrack skews more toward the unquiet and unspooky.) This afternoon I hear dispatch sending out a vehicle for some poor citizen who is acting emotionally disturbed (no specifics given), and, shortly thereafter, for a fifteen-year-old girl who has spilled a pot of boiling water on her thigh. Thousands of mp3s on my hard drive, stacks of CDs reaching for the ceiling, untold petabytes of streaming music available on the net, and here I am eavesdropping on live local pain and suffering via an accidental antenna. This cannot be healthy…

(Semi-related detail: As I’ve mentioned before, we live across the street from a hospital. The giant ER sign that greets me every day as I walk out the front door is in both English and French and reads, in an assonant and vaguely Ned-Flanders-esque phrase that would make a fine indie-rock album title, EMERGENCY URGENCE.)

Last week we go to see the Canadian romantic comedy winningly entitled Young People Fucking. Two things impress me about this movie, besides the fact that it’s fucking hilarious: 1) that it’s playing at local multiplexes (almost unheard of for a Canadian indie film, at least outside of Toronto, or so I’m told), and 2) that one of the main characters mentions that he’s thirty-one. You mean thirty-one-year-olds still count as Young People? Bullshit! Get the fuck out of here! And thank you!

Jerry Seinfeld:

My all-time favorite form of motion is the car. I’m one of those people. I love cars. It’s the greatest physical object I’ve ever seen. I don’t know why, really. My only theory is, when you’re driving, you’re outside and inside, moving and completely still, all at the same time. I think that’s something.

Douglas Coupland, “In the Desert”, from Life After God:

But I guess the nice thing about driving a car is that the physical act of driving itself occupies a good chunk of brain cells that otherwise would be giving you trouble overloading your thinking. New scenery continually erases what came before; memory is lost, shuffled, relabeled and forgotten. Gum is chewed; buttons are pushed; windows are lowered and opened. A fast moving car is the only place where you’re legally allowed to not deal with your problems. It’s enforced meditation and this is good.

New sofa is delivered today. Lord have mercy: it is a white sofa — brilliantly, blindingly, terrifyingly Arctic bone china white, Paradisically pure white, the white of virgin snow, of supernova nuclei. It sits in the apartment like a great ocean liner, spotless and ghostly, a blank page, a wide whitened smile. Its eco-cotton upholstery drum-tight with expectancy, awaiting that first smudge, be it inky fingerprint or red wine Armageddon. The slightest opportunity to be smirched, stained, discolored, defiled: dust, perspiration, dead skin, harsh language. The furniture showroom salesweasels, drawing up the paperwork, look at us like we’re joking. The furniture delivery goons, unwrapping the plastic, look at us like we’re insane. Perhaps we are insane. Friends, family, strangers on the street — no one can believe our folly. You bought a white sofa? What’s wrong with you, they scream. Don’t you ever want to have KIDS?!?! The white sofa: home décor hallmark of evolutionary dead ends.

Happy Bloomsday! Leopold who?

Been running this blog for two years now. An internet eternity! I must be in it for the long haul. Since that inaugural 15 June 2006 post I have not had any other run-ins with strangers who’ve suggested I may be dead. The closest I’ve gotten was this one time last July when I’m told that I “don’t look a day over twenty-two” by a local Abebooks bookseller guy with the last name of Coffin. Scary! Though perhaps this may not quite qualify as an omen of mortality. (Although: One of the books I’m picking up from him is Daniel Pinkwater’s The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death.)

Yesterday I learn that next year’s forthcoming post-Leopard version of OS X is being code-named Snow Leopard. Yesterday we also see Kung Fu Panda, in which the villain, one Tai Lung — voiced with ravenous Swearegenian panache by the mellifluously menacing Ian McShane — is an evil snow leopard. Nice! (The movie’s a blast. McShane certainly makes a better evil snow leopard than an evil polar bear.)

Taking up long-term residence on our coffeetable is a paperback of Shakespeare’s narrative poems that I have been failing to get through. The readerly engines are hung up somewhere in the thick of Venus and Adonis. I find I keep accidentally opening to the page in Lucrece with the line: Thou ceaseless lackey to eternity.

Sebald, Austerlitz:

… both desolate and weirdly contented I wandered, all through that winter, up and down the long corridors, staring out for hours through one of the dirty windows at the cemetery below, where we are standing now, feeling nothing inside my head but the four burnt-out walls of my brain.