Speaking of ends-of-the-Earth: As I type this (lunchtime Thursday, Eastern time), Laura has recently flown over the Arctic. She is on a nonstop business trip to Singapore for her job, and her flight path (as I learn to my surprise last evening while tracking her flight online) gets to Singapore by traveling north. Not east over the Atlantic, as I’d assumed. It departs from Newark, NJ, flies up over Canada and the Arctic and the top of the Earth, and then, once the plane’s direction magically flips over to south, travels back down over Russia and China and Mongolia to Singapore. (Of course “up”, “top”, and “down” are meaningless figurative terms here.)

I also learn that her flight, Singapore Airlines Flight 21, has the distinction of being the longest nonstop flight in the world. Eighteen and a half hours. Though since Singapore’s time zone is twelve hours ahead of Eastern time (conveniently, she won’t have to change her watch when she arrives), according to the clocks she’ll have been hibernating in her space-age Business Class seat-bed-pod for more than thirty hours. At no point on Thursday, 29 April 2010 will she have set foot on the ground. Lucky!

Above: Not scenes from a Scandinavian art film.

We spend today driving west across the open lands of rural southern Ontario, attempting to fill our lungs with country air and our eyes with country sun. (We also hit some antique stores en route, to fill our lungs with dust and cat hair and varnish fumes and our eyes with allergic tears and ghoulish basement-bulb light.)

Our destination is somewhere, anywhere, on Lake Huron. We just want to lay eyes on it. In the afternoon we stop in the lakefront town of Grand Bend. The beach district there is still in its off season until May, so the shops are closed and the area is deserted except for a handful of beach-walkers. The beach is quiet and peaceful and a little bit surreal and ends-of-the-Earth. The sky has turned overcast but the weather is still warm. A soft lake breeze comes up from time to time. The lake water is green-grey and waveless. There are no bugs. The dunes are under construction.

Alec Wilkinson, “New York Underground”, the Believer, February 2006:

The deepest subterranean chamber in midtown Manhattan is the size of a small cathedral and lies beneath Central Park. An elevator leads to it. The chamber is made from concrete and has a high, vaulted ceiling. It is mostly empty — pipes in a pit at one end convey water through the city. At intervals in the walls are vertical seams through which water seeps and sometimes flows, as if a faucet somewhere had been left open. Central Park is laced with underground streams, and the seams prevent water outside the walls from building up to a pressure sufficient to damage them. The light in the chamber has a metallic tint; it comes from sodium vapor lamps which are never extinguished. A person might stand in the Park on a certain piece of grass and reflect that many floors below his shoes is a room with the lights on.

Naeem Murr, “My Poet”, Poetry, July/August 2007:

Anyway, he tells me he finds it profoundly reassuring that while we ordinary mortals are asleep, there exist lit rooms containing anxious, vigilant souls. A terrible responsibility, he says, devolves upon the poet, that requires her never to be fully awake or asleep: at night, wakeful poets buoy humanity to the surface, to consciousness, preventing our slumbering bulk from sinking too far; during the day, these same poets anchor the madding masses to the depths. The world will end, he once told me, when the final poet awake closes her eyes.

Trying to get out from underneath a lot of heavy furniture.

I can’t believe David Fincher is making a movie about Facebook. It’s done, wrapped, currently in post-production, coming out in October. Entitled The Social Network, a title more boring than dirt, it is based on the book about Facebook’s founders and the very exciting story of how they got rich. This may be the movie that exterminates my Fincher fanboyism once and for all. (Benjamin Button only maimed it.)

The only way a Fincher movie about Facebook could work is if it was based on this Fireland tweet: Is it possible to unfriend somebody to death?

“But what’s so wrong with hating the internet? I hate the internet too. I may even hate it more than you do, or perhaps I’ve just hated it for longer than you have. And yet, in a sense, I am the internet.”

A few weeks ago I injure my right foot, and then injure it further by not properly treating it. Several days ago I break a crystal wine glass and spill red wine all over myself and the kitchen floor. This weekend, in tribute to both mishaps: Drinking wine from a wine tumbler with a concrete footprint. (Will probably drop it on my toe.)