134th day sober. I stayed up reading last night. First "Zoo Story" which I ultimately found too boring. Maybe if I wanted to work in a zoo, I'd be fascinated. Then "Parable Of The Sower" by Octavia Butler. That's a pretty good book, even if parts of it are unrealistic (come on, the protagonist just happens to pair up with a guy who turns out to be a doctor with 200 acres of land in an ideal, out-of-the-way place?) I think parts of it are more realistic than a lot of novelists want to touch on - like dogs becoming wild animals again that prey on humans. There's a reason in Biblical times in the Middle-East, dogs were cursed and "unclean", in a land where no one had spare food to feed dogs, and they were scavengers, cleaning up offal and garbage and ridding one of unwanted small children the way swimming pools are used for "oopsie" child disposal now.
(I can speak with some authority on this last point, because everyone who had a swimming pool when I was growing up either had a story of a child drowning or one or more near-drowning. And I was almost "disposed" of this way myself. The very first place we lived in Hawaii had a swimming pool and I was left out there to hopefully doze off in the hot sun and drown. Leave a kid out there with a shitty flotation ring that will always have a leak, let them doze off, and they will like as not slip off into the water without much of a struggle at all. Instead, the flotation ring I had just happened to be this official Mickey Mouse one and very well made. I was fished out after some time with a great deal of - feigned or not I'll never know - concern.)
After reading I slept until about 4 in the afternoon, and did not feel better enough to think about going out busking. In fact, the headache had largely gone away last night, then came back to some extent. So busking is out.
No comments:
Post a Comment