#242

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that this is the two hundred and forty second post, post two four two. The fun in the math of this number is huge. But something about it, I dunno. To be honest, not one of my favorite numbers. It's maybe too perfect, too even, too balanced. I prefer 2424242. The same, but better. Better, too, than 24242424. 2424 is kinda funny.

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m,    ≥÷

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That was the cat. One of the cats, the older cat. The deaf one. Ezra got her for free almost four years ago from a family out in the sticks. The other one, blind, Ezra and I fetched together from the shelter the day after we met her there, once we were somewhat settled in the current apartment. 

Certainly this is not the first case of sharing what a cat did to something an artist was in the middle of working on, or beginning, but it is the first time an animal besides myself has entered anything into this blog's text field, and that seems momentous. Especially as Chubbs is something of an artist herself. Love the way she knocks stuff down and covers stuff up. A clear and unafraid talent, sometimes poignant.

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Finished Jayber Crow. Dang. I wasn't ready for some of that, how hard and beautiful it would be. Wonderful, gorgeous, hilarious, bitterly sad, profound as fuck. Gotta get my hands on this dude's poems. The book was every-page good.

Reading The Lowland now, by Jhumpa Lahiri. Just about halfway, page one hundred and sixty two. Amazing so far. Beautiful and sad, remote and intimate at the same time. It's that dealio wherein no quotation marks are used to delineate dialogue, which seems to lend books and stories that special distance from the reader and that particular insideness and way of being folded into their own reality to the characters--more intimate for them, further away from you. Less performance, more innerness. More like a dream, a dream in some ways more detailed and clear than waking life ever is.

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Completed The Lowland. Tremendous. Started The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne. I started this in high school because I loved the movie they pretended to make about it back in the day. Tristram Shandy: a Cock and Bull Story. I looked it up. Never did complete it, but I did buy a handsome green Everyman's Library copy. Now seems to be the time. 

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About halfway through that book, now. I'm gonna hit publish on this thing after I go ahead and acknowledge to you, dear, dear reader that yes: yes. Yes, I am grief-reading in a quiet frenzy. We all cope differently. 

Be good to your people and try to be your best for them and yourself, dear reader. It is a brief and precious time we have, to show that the sharing of it means a little something to us.

--JL