2011.05.14
I drove down to Gettysburg the weekend of the Fourth, the anniversary of the battle, along with my wife, who grew up on different books than I did and doesn't care two cents about the Civil War. She is crazy about fiction, especially Gabriel Garcia Marquez whose latest she happened to have in her bag, and after we walked around the battlefield monuments for a half-hour that Saturday afternoon and ate a hot dog and watched a Union battery demonstrate artillery firing, she found a place in the shade back behind the crowds near the Gettysburg Volunteer Fire Department's refrehment tent and sat and read.I've always found this description of distracted affection extremely attractive. (I'm not sure if that speaks well of me, but it is what it is.)
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Fifty yards away, under the trees where the Pennsylvania reserves must've sat on July 3 waiting Pickett's charge, my wife in white jumpsuit reclined on the grass, so absorbed in the passions of a man on the Colombian coast that she didnt answer when I came over and said hello to her. Eyes on the page, she just reached and took me by the ankle.
Why TV is bad for kids: depth of field fakery, lack of emotional back-and-forth, too much and rapid changing, and just a bad habit...
2007 idea for a fridge: have it spinning at a large percentage of the speed of light, so relativistic effects will keep your food fresh!
In going through my backlog I was surprised I never wrote about how in 2007 my friend Jacques D. described my central philosophy as "cruxian"; that I want to get to the crux of things, and I'm generally disdainful of nuance and a "gourmet" approach to life. Give me a novel, central core idea, and economize on all the trappings around that.