h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Spent the last two nights off from work.
Which is funny because Christmas week my assistant manager (the WR) scheduled me off (without asking me)for three days before working Christmas eve and Christmas day and then two days off after. They used up my unused sick days for the year in order to schedule my days off.

I think I got sick being off. Then I had to take off being sick, with no sick time left. Wow.

I did get to spend two evenings with Shnooks, eating pizza and being lazy and walking to the mall to the used video store and the bookstore.

My fill-in at the 7-11 was the WR. Nobody else had the time or was inclined. So she ended up working 16 hours yesterday. Poetic justice I think since I'd done the same for her and others so many times before.

So I woke up this morning and picked up some trash, as I have it everywhere, being the batchelor living slob that I am. Then I made some bad coffee and sat in the loo reading Vanity Fair (the magazine, I have no knowledge of the book). Then I got up and looked for my cellaphone and discovered I'd messed up and lost it. It was in the last place I looked, the bag of trash I'd collected. Boy, did I feel stupid.

So I was reading this excerpt in Vanity Fair from a book by Sally Bedell Smith about Jackie Kennedy.
Fascinating. She was twelve years younger than Jack, who remained unmarried until he was 36 and kept acting like he was unmarried in many ways until his death. She smoked filtered L and M cigarettes almost incessantly, even when she was pregnant. She held herself at 120 pounds when she wasn't gravid. She sought the counsel of a doctor in the fear that her lack of sexual experience was making Jack seek gratification elsewhere. According to the book, the fact that she was willing to bring the subject up at a private dinner one night brought her to a new level of respect in Jack's eyes. He continued to gather mistresses like ties, but he spent a little more time with his wife when he had the time. She on the other hand was intellectually unfaithful mainly because Jack was unsophisticated. Sounds like a royal couple to me.
They had the intelligence and sense to stay out of each other's way when it was necessary. She was horsey and he was boatey. She set up an in-house daycare and nursery school cooperative at the White House and redocorated the place with donations while he cavorted with men of influence and women of variable virtues.

I have days like that too. Almost every day as a matter of fact. I'm sorry that you're not feeling well and hope that you improve quickly. I'm having a little seasonal stuff too (affective depression, flareup of a paroditis that hasn't troubled me since my teenage years till now).

Most of my reading these days is 19th & early 20th century classics, "The Uncollected Storys of Arthur Conan Doyle", "Seven Gothic Tales" by Isak Dinesen. Neither was perhaps as polished a grammarian as Ernest Hemingway, but both had a ready intuitive grasp of the incongruity of observation and causality and a gift for lucid reconcilations of the the two standards. People often get confused, reporting the events in a sequence of events in the order in which they find them emotionally exciting rather than the order of observations or reports received or the actual causal order of events. Agatha Christie was very talented this way as well.

- Viewpoints! -

Other current and recent readings: Philip K. Dick, "The Man In The High Castle"; Zane Grey, "The Thundering Herd", "Cabin Gulch", "The Vanishing American".

Ernest who?

I can't read Dick because I read his biography and I saw the documentary on him that accompanied the DVD of "A scanner darkly".
He makes me sick, kinda like Sylvia Plath.

Hmm. I've never heard of the uncollected stories of Sir Doyle. What are they like. I don't think I've ever read anything by the author of "Out of Africa".

I read a lot of non-fiction (giggle) history and am still trying to get through the Compleat Works of Robert the Burns and Jimmy Joice's "Finnegans Wake", which often seem very similar in their communal illegibillity.

"The Man In The High Castle" predates Dick's ego death experience dramatized in Frank Zappa's "100 motels". Provides a glimpse of what he might have become except for his dissolution. Some of the most powerful characters I've ever seen in fiction. I won't spoil it for you.

On "The Uncollected Storys...", Not what you'd expect. The last relates to a political disaster that happened rather than in gangland ridden "roaring twenties" America as in Doyle's setting, instead pre-WW II Germany.

Isak Dinesen's "Seven Gothic Tales" have so far (I'm still reading), 19th century Baltic settings.

With Robert Burns, it was traditional Scottish dialect as spoken in the back-country of his formative years. With James Joyce, a maladaptive response to chaos manifested in incomprehensibility, the consequence of action like that of Alfred Bester's "The Demolished Man".

Hemingway: the "lost generation" journalist and novelist who wrote "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". (He called the film version: 'The Snows of Daryl F. Zanuck'. Didn't like it, didn't think justice had been done to his novel.) Contemporary of Pablo Picasso and Salvadore Dali. The premier grammarian of 20th century English language literature.

I've never heard of Sylvia Plath.

"Used hard and put away wet."

Old horse grooming phrase.

On one of my seasonal part-time jobs, they often put me to minding the store on the two or three days before Xmas since the volume of trade drops off to almost nothing, little to do except take care of a few late layaway pickups. This gives people who've killing themselves with overwork during the rush a chance to to start recovering a little early.

I know what its like though, you're raring to go, called up short, it works on your self esteem, passing depression follows.

Then the off time, however well intentioned, its kind of like explosive decompression (air emergency in outer space). The hell of it is that the rush is over and the high level of activity conditioning this is no longer sustainable

AND WORST OF ALL, YOU REALLY ARE SO EXHAUSTED THAT THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND WON'T LET YOU PURSUE A REASONABLE COOL DOWN REGIMEN GIVEN THIS CHANCE TO INDULGE ITSELF IN ITS NATURALLY SLOTHFUL AND SELF INDULGENT HABIT.

[You have to coddle it. There is no other possible option.]

Zen Buddhist exercise for getting in touch with the unconscious mind:
tie a length of thread around the wrist and wear it till it falls away.
In this exercise the unconscious mind reveals itself to be shockingly incisive.

[incisive as a monkey bite]



Prescription: prophylactic chicken soup (frequently) and a sweet desert just before bed (at least a candy bar, preferably with a cup of milk) to ward off hypothermia. (The unconscious mind is always a sucker for self indulgence and can't resist being coddled.) A dinner steak for breakfast the first day of the off time helps. Especially if you had
one for supper the night before (perhaps rather groggily at a coffee shop or modest family restaurant right after work.)[Repair factors](Don't forget the candy (or reasonable facsimile) just before bed.

The seasonal three day layoff is an annual tradition one has to plan for.

More

Fatigue fighters for the rush: Yogurt and sour green olives (or for that matter sour mediterranean style purple olives). [Repair factors] (Lengthy explanation withheld for the moment. Trust me, it helps.)

Sylvia plath once wrote a book called "The Bell Jar".
It made her instantly famous amongst girls who dreamed of being interrupted.
Later she attempted to commit suicide and accidently succeeded.
Her husband later wrote "The Iron Giant".

At that, she does kind of remind me of Philip K. Dick's character Juliana from "The Man In The High Castle". Still reading my way through Isak Dinesen's "Seven Gothic Tales". Gets more bizarre page by page. Not for the faint of heart. How have things been going? Good to hear from you again!

Try Ambrose Bierce.

I've been coping with a computer problem and so am a little late getting back to you. Its been a while since I read any Ambrose Bierce. I recall that he disappeared while working as a war correspondant covering one of the Mexican revolutions. Perhaps fell in with "revolucionistas" who didn't appreciate the value of having a foreign war correspondant on their side.

Which of Bierce's storys do you like the best?

The "incident at Owl Creek Bridge" is the most famous. I can't remember the names of any of the other titles. It's been almost twenty years since I read his and clark ashton smiths and H. P. Lovecraft's stuff.

Most of what I've seen of his stuff was material related to the California gold rush I was reading when I was living in Carson City, Nevada back in the '60s. To be sure that's Sam Clemens country too. I can't remember any titles at the moment.