Nothin doin

I'm getting over-zealous with my overly ambitious and ever-growing reading list (now with 50 titles of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry collections). I finished 2 (Flow, Everything is Illuminated), gave up on one (As I Lay Dying), and I'm presently reading another 2 (A Clockwork Orange, American Fascists). At one point I was trying to read 3 at once. Need to reel it in a bit.

I haven't written anything new lately. Just some ideas about war and plagues. RS and AF told me to read The Mask of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe. Something about people sweating blood. RS suggested using 'miasma' in a poem because it's a nice word. I used to have the collected works of Poe, but loaned it to someone (brand new) in high school for a project; instead of returning it he loaned it to someone else who proceeded to lose it. Never replaced it. I'm still sore about it. I've loaned out 3 books that have never been returned--one of which is one of my all time favorites. As an English major and writer, this is akin to loaning out my own children. I now put everyone through rigorous screening before I loan them a book. It's a cross between the Ivy League application process and marine boot camp.

A septic pipe cracked or burst at work, causing shit and fetid water to seep up through the floor drains in the bathrooms. By the end of the night, all the water in the building was coming out of the faucets brown. Probably not profitable to close. Oh, the horrors of corporate retail:

mi·as·ma

1.

noxious exhalations from putrescent organic matter; poisonous effluvia or germs polluting the atmosphere.

2.

a dangerous, foreboding, or deathlike influence or atmosphere.

Grandpa met grandma in Philadelphia when he was 14 and she was 12, and he thought to himself, 'boy, that's a pretty girl.'

2 years later they started going together.

5 years later: "She broke my heart...but then she put it back together again."

I said I liked his stories because we're the same, though I'm probably more like her. He said people don't change, and he meant it in the best possible way.

Just to be safe, we separated into a thousand pieces and never called home.