1,000 Books

There are 50 posts filed in 1,000 Books (this is page 2 of 5).

I prefer cotton it’s more durable

The Old Boy informs me that I spend too much time talking about school, and that when I talk about school I sound like I’m complaining. “Nobody will read that because nobody wants to hear teachers whinge,” his notes said. “That’s the entire basis of America’s education system.”

I wish they’d never showed him how to send text messages, but he has a point. School is insidious; it seeps into too many aspects of my daily life and I shouldn’t let it.

Anywho. Let’s talk about the Silk Road.

Pictured above, the Silk Road is one of the most famous trade routes ever and has been utilized in one form or another for several centuries. Connecting Europe with the Middle East and Asia, you can tell by looking that the Silk Road goes through all sorts of fun places where you aren’t at all likely to get kidnapped or murdered. The Silk Road is also well known for passing through areas of tremendous political stability where there are hardly any wars at all and everyone gets along pretty well. It is such a chill part of the world that most travelers choose to go down the Silk Road on recumbent bikes, their only real complaint that they wished there were more lemonade stands along the way.

In all seriousness, before sea routes became more practical, the Silk Road was one of the only ways to spread wealth and culture between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It may not be safe, but it is an exciting road that connected a whole slew of ancient empires. If you were a trader or a merchant, this is where the action was.

In the year 1271, a guy named Marco Polo traveled down the Silk Road causing a ruckus and making all sorts of new pals, and news of his exploits were one of the things that sparked a tremendous European interest in the dealings of China.

If this sounds familiar, it should. We all studied it in 6th grade (but forgot most of it by 9th).

Anywho. In the 1980s, after a couple hundred years of the Silk Road being impassable due to wars and closed borders and stuff, a Scottish historian and traveler named William Dalrymple realized that, with the right visas and a little planning, it might be possible to travel the whole lengthy of the Silk Road again. He decided to give it a try, and this book is the result:

It’s pretty good so far. I do worry that it’s going to pan out to be something spiritual, that the author is going to somehow channel Marco Polo or something and experience a profound awakening by sleeping in the same ditch where Polo once relieved himself.

I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally spiritual about traveling, and it bugs me when travel writrts pretend there is. Can it be spiritual? Sure, but I tend to think of it on an (auto)mechanical level. You can think of yourself as a Datsun pick-up truck, and your spirit as, perhaps, a carburetor. If you travel around long enough, you’re eventually going to realize that your carburetor needs replacing. Same for the tires and the windshield wipers and the oil and eventually the whole transmission’ll needs work. It doesn’t matter where you are when it happens; all that you need in order to make these realizations is to keep moving.

Traveling changes you no matter where you go. You learn empathy, you learn patience, you learn humility. (All very, very spiritual.) But you could be driving across Alaska when you learn these things, or on a boat in Indonesia, or hanging out on a beach in Brazil.

My point is that following the path of Marco Polo might seem cool, but there’s nothing inherently better about it than any other road you may travel. The author certainly will garner no better understanding of the actual Marco Polo than he would if he were swimming through the canals of Venice playing a game of Marco Polo with the citizenry.

Still, it was probably a wild trip and I’m excited to hear about it.

Silly rabbit, lucky charms are for leprechauns

My high school had our Open House on Thursday. Having gone to a much smaller school than the one where I currently teach, the idea of an Open House seems unusual to me. Apparently students and parents around here get to choose which high school they want to go to? I’ve always been under the impression that, if you lived in a certain area, then you went to a certain school. That was why rich parents would move to a certain neighborhood “for the schools.”

Yesterday, though, I spent an evening explaining (or “upselling”) aspects of the English department to prospective parents and students. Mostly, I did this by giving everyone really hard grammar and punctuation questions and giving them mini Snickers if they got a question right. Good salesmanship is about having snacks. (Prove me wrong.)

I didn’t try very hard, though. English would not be a selling point for nearly any high school — every student has to take four years of English, no matter what, so there isn’t much “selling” to be done. I can understand some students wanting to go to a certain school for the football program, or because they have a good music director, or their theater department was big, but nobody picks their high school based on the English classes.

Essentially, I was like a car salesman pointing out that the vehicle in question had four tires. “These babies sure do spin!” I said, aiming a kick at a tire, missing, and kicking the door frame instead, leaving a large dent.

So, it’s been a busy week. I have made some good progress with The Portable Dorothy Parker (I’m nearly finished), and am thinking about what I want to read next. I’d like to pick something fun, but I also want to keep working with the element of randomness. Maybe I’ll just pick a number and let the Gods of RNG hold my fate in their fat, fumbling fingers.

I mean, I can’t pick out the books that I know I’ll like first. If I do that, pretty soon the list will turn into one big chore. Like a bowl of Lucky Charms with all the marshmallows picked out; it’s milky disappointment. I feel like randomly picking is the only real way to go forward.

At the same time, who cares? This is my project and I can do it however the hell I want.

Maybe I could randomly select three books and choose the one that I like most? That’s an idea! It’s still random, but it’ll keep me from getting hit with The Bible when I don’t feel like reading something so ponderous.

Let’s try it!

Native Son by Richard Wright
In Xanadu by William Dalrymple
the lives and times of archy & mehitabel by Don Marquis

Oooooh what a range. I’ve heard of two of these, and I’m pretty sure I read Native Son in college. Still, if I’m picking between those three, then I suppose my next book is going to be In Xanadu by William Dalrymple, which I’m pretty sure is about a guy traveling down the Silk Road in the 1980s.

Let’s get ready for some lightly racist soul searching!

Buy me some peanuts

I’ve been trying to think of what, exactly, it is about Dorothy Parker’s writing that I like so much. I touched on it briefly yesterday when I wrote about a New Yorker style of writing, but I think there’s more to it. These things can often be indescribable, however, so you’ll have to take this with a grain of salt.

First of all, I think I read from the perspective of a writer. I’m not as interested in character and plot as I am in how the author presents those things. (This is largely why I never mind spoilers — knowing the end makes the journey more satisfying to me.)

One question I always ask myself when I’m reading is this: “If I were writing this same story, is this how I would approach it?” When the answer is “yes,” I feel a quirky sense of camaraderie with the author, as if we’re reaching across great gulfs of time and space to give each other a spectral high-five. “I see what you did there!” I say to them. “You and I are on the same wavelength!”

Dorothy Parker starts stories the way I start stories, she writes dialogue the way I try to, and all of her endings are satisfying. I feel like a baseball enthusiast watching a pitcher completing a perfect game. I know just enough to recognize how cool it is, even if I can’t accomplish the same feat myself.

While I appreciate authors whose sense of style jives with my own (like Parker, pictured above suddenly realizing the photographer was totally nude), it’s not that I can only enjoy authors who write the same way I write, or that I think those are the only good writers out there. Far from it.

To stick with the baseball metaphor, sometimes books can be more like, say, a hockey game. As a baseball enthusiast, I can appreciate the athleticism and the teamwork and the speed of a hockey match. I can even marvel at how violent everything is and how suddenly, as if by magic, teams seem to score. Hockey games can be wonderful to watch and I’m sure I’d have a great time if I went to more of them. But, no matter how good the game is, I’m still a baseball guy.

I enjoy reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, but I would never write the way he does. The same thing goes for Thomas Pynchon and Gene Wolfe — they are fantastic authors that I always return to, but they have vastly different sensibilities than I have.

Dorothy Parker just plays my sport, and she does it awfully well.

(In that same metaphor, reading Salman Rushdie feels like watching a variation of Polo that was only popular in a specific region of Kashmir during the early 1970s, and I’m stuck watching the match while sitting next to a guy intent on elbowing my ribs and explaining why the whole sport is actually about religion.)

I had another observation at school today, which basically means I had an administrator sit in on my class with the sole purpose of giving me an assessment. (Huzzah!) That makes a total of … five times this year that I’ve had some sort of observation. It is unusual to have that many, and I’m not a huge fan, especially considering one of those observations was done by our district superintendent, but it’s not as if there’s a lot that I can do about it.

Some teachers point out that professional development meetings and classroom observations are the means by which administrators justify their jobs. Even though, quite frankly, I don’t know who is arguing that we should have fewer administrators. Schools need more people in nearly every position — you could double the number of admins and it wouldn’t hurt at all, as long as they were doing useful work.

More to the point of today’s evaluation: I don’t like how administrators evaluate teachers like college professors who say, “It’s impossible to get a 100% in this class.” It’s a stupid philosophy that is only ever brought up by people who are experts in their field, but not experts at teaching. (Hear that? It’s the sound of hundreds of engineering department heads mouthing, “Who, me?”)

We’re evaluated in a number of areas on a scale that goes from “Poor” to “Exemplary,” and from my understanding, nobody every gets an “exemplary” on any part of it. What I’ve been told is that “the wording of ‘exemplary’ on the rubric makes it nearly impossible to attain.”

Am I exemplary? I doubt it. But I am “proficient” enough to recognize that you shouldn’t build a rubric with unattainable levels of scoring. Because what is the point of that? It’s like not handing out a gold medal for the long jump because nobody at the Olympics can jump 50 meters.

Is it supposed to make me feel like I have room to improve? I always feel that way. Most teachers do; we don’t need a reminder. We constantly evaluate and improve our plans and strategies. That’s baked in.

Am I supposed to think that administrators are evaluating us based on faulty perceptions of what “good teaching” is because nincompoops at the department of education are forcing them to? Because that is what’s happening, and that doesn’t make anyone look good.

Anywho. I’ll probably have one more observation this year, and I’ve decided that it’s not worth worrying about. (I’ll still worry about it, of course, but I’ll feel silly for doing so. (Put something to that effect on my tombstone.))

Seems like a good spot

The temperatures have gotten so low (around -12º F) that they’ve cancelled in-person school today. It feels like a bit of a … wimpy decision. Where I grew up, they would never cancel school for cold temperatures. Snow? Sure; cancel away! But, as far as my tiny alma mater was concerned, freezing to death in sub-zero temperatures was just fine. Some people would even say it was a right of passage.

Snow days are a thing of the past, though, even in “big city” districts like mine. These days we’ve got to create asynchronous lessons that students can do from home and then have virtual professional development meetings.

So, my students are watching a video about Arthur Miller while I’m having Teams calls about S.M.A.R.T. goals.

(There’s an unspoken understanding that we have so many virtual meetings because teachers in my district got a raise recently. and any time teachers get a raise the “I WIsh I GoT sUmMErs OfF!” crowd demands that some free time be taken away. It’s stupid, but this is Nebraska, and the true litmus test of a piece of Nebraska legislation is “How much can it hurt public employees, minorities, and/or homeless people?”)

The meetings will only take up the morning, however, so I’m not too bent out of shape. It’s not like it hurts anything to set goals for the upcoming months.

I adore Dorothy Parker. I’m working through The Portable Dorothy Parker (it’s technically Penguin’s Dorothy Parker Collected Stories) and just enjoying the hell out of it.

Parker, who was instrumental in the growth of The New Yorker magazine in the 1920s, has become somewhat emblematic of a New Yorker style that I don’t know the actual name of but exists in my mind as its own category. Parker is in there, along with J.D. Salinger, John Updike, and David Sedaris. The relationship between those people may seem tenuous, but I would categorize their prose as tight-knit. An entire story or essay might hang on a single word or phrase, and it follows that every word and phrase needs to be elegant. In the end, what you get is a meticulously crafted insight into some subtle aspect of the human character.

On a sentence-by-sentence basis, their writing is an absolute treat. (As opposed to my recent foray into Salman Rushdie, whose sentences are bloated for the sake of bloating.) They approach their writing with thrift and a great concern for how things sound.

There’s also an element of psychology to their writing that I’ve always enjoyed. The way a character speaks is a little glimpse into what’s going on inside them, what’s “wrong” with them, how they are damaged. There’s a belief in this New Yorker style that we are all a damned mess and only vaguely pretending to be well adjusted for the sake of appearances. Our voices, however, give us away.

It’s all great fun, and it’s honestly hard to believe that some of Dorothy Parker’s stories are 100 years old.

The sun is as high as its going to get, I’m afraid, and it is a balmy 8º F.

Once upon a time, there was a guy in a covered wagon rolling across the great plains with his family, an ox, and a big bag of corn. He stopped (here! of all places), looked around, and thought, “This’ll do.”

It boggles my mind.

Reading the right Dorothy

The Asiago & Spinach Stuffed Chicken turned out great yesterday — it was easily one of the best meals I’ve cooked this year. The hardest part was actually assembling the chicken breasts, which need to be cut into (forgive the terminology) meat pockets so you can stuff in the spinach and sun-dried tomatoes and cheese. Once put together, I seared the chicken breasts in a cast iron skillet and put them in the oven to cook all the way through.

After buying sun-dried tomatoes, though, I started thinking, “I bet I could make those myself,” and, sure enough, it isn’t difficult to do:

It seems like a fun project … if it weren’t the dead of winter. If I try to leave a bunch of tomatoes outside now, they’re just going to freeze and/or get stolen by the gangs of obese city squirrels that roam my neighborhood.

It looks like you can dehydrate them in the oven, but that wouldn’t be “sun-dried,” would it? “Oven-dried tomatoes“ doesn’t have the same flair. Although who wants to wait six months until you can actually try this? Maybe I’ll give the oven-dried ones a shot, then in the warmer months I can … *checks notes* leave fruit unattended outside all day.

Wait, that can’t be right.

Ha — I bought the $0.99 “The Portable Dorothy Parker” off the Kindle store, only to discover that Amazon is selling a mistitled version of a collection of Dorothy L. Sayers’ works. I honestly read a whole chapter thinking, “I didn’t know Parker wrote mysteries. Fun!” before doing a little digging to get to the bottom of things. It looks like Amazon really put the wrong cover on a book and is selling it.

Bearing that in mind … it seems as if I can’t find a digital copy of The Portable Dorothy Parker. I guess there’s not a lot of demand for that one.

A little bit of research tells me that books in The Portable … series were first published by Viking Press in 1944 and were meant to be pocket-sized editions of “selected works” from various authors. (I believe I have The Portable Emerson floating around downstairs somewhere.) So, in keeping with the spirit of this endeavor, I’m just going to read a whole bunch of Dorothy Parker and call it good.

I was able to find a digital version of her Complete Stories, so I’ll check that one out. How different can it possibly be?

She’s a great writer with an interesting history, so I’m sure I can’t go wrong. Assuming I’m reading the right Dorothy this time.

Is goat cheese pretentious

Sarah got me a cookbook for Christmas. Taste of Home: Cooking for Two: 317 Quick & Easy Recipes Perfect for Small Households. I have been trying to branch out into cooking more advanced dishes over the last few years, but my culinary zeal is somewhat tempered by being horribly exhausted all the time. I very rarely want to cook a whole-ass meal when I get home, and when I do cook, I usually make so much that we have leftovers for about two days. Which gets old.

This book, though, has some good options that aren’t time consuming, don’t require a bunch of ingredients, and won’t have us eating chicken curry three days in a row.

This week, I’m going to try the Goat Cheese & Spinach Stuffed Chicken. Except I’m not going to use goat cheese, because WTF. Who uses goat cheese?

“I’m just going to get some … artisanal asiago,” I told Sarah. We were in the cheese section of our local Baker’s, which has a surprisingly large selection, and I picked up a small bag of grated cheese that seemed as if it belonged in Italy. “You don’t think that it will mess with the … integrity of the dish, do you? Not using goat cheese?”

“It’ll be fine,” Sarah said. “I don’t even like goat cheese.”

Right? I don’t think anybody in the world prefers goat cheese, and if they do, they’re probably the sort of people that use a wine decanter because “it needs to breathe.” No it doesn’t. You’re just trying to justify the $300 decanter you bought at Marks & Spencer.

Anywho. The dish is basically a chicken breast stuffed with spinach, sun-dried tomatoes, and cheese. You can’t go wrong no matter what kind of cheese you pick, and I think a nice asiago will do just fine.

I’ll serve it with baked asparagus. (Did someone say bacon-wrapped?)

I didn’t read much Dorothy Parker yesterday. After school, I came right home and did my first week’s homework for this semester’s online class, which is called, “Self-Care for Educators.” A whole class dedicated to tips for fighting burnout! I can dig it.

It’s exciting because I guarantee, at some point this semester, I will be stressed out about an assignment for a class that’s literally teaching me how to be less stressed out.

It’s kind of like having a class called, “How to Get More Sleep” and scheduling it for 5:00 AM.

I’ll be jumping into Dorothy Parker with both feet this morning. This afternoon, too, after I do a bit of cleaning up in our dining room. (It’s been all cluttered since Christmas.)

At midnight with a whimper

In late 2003, I went to see the Deftones play at the Pershing Center in Lincoln, NE. I was just a wee little English major with a penchant for getting kicked in the head in mosh pits then, and the Deftones closed out their show by playing a face-melting rendition of their song “Bloody Cape,” which has one of the best outros of any song I’ve ever heard:

It’s a jaunty, nautical tune about a pair of young lovers who sail off the edge of the Earth, the climax of which finds the singer shouting, “God help me!” over and over as, presumably, their boat tumbles into the void.

It’s just so violent and bouncy and fun that hearing it live immediately made it one of my favorite Deftones songs. You could probably attribute at least 30% of my tinnitus to blaring “Bloody Cape” when I was out driving around. It’s meant to be played as loud as you can possibly play it — it practically begs for it — and you’d have to be a corpse not to head bang just a little at the end there.

Even if you hate metal, you can probably see why that song gets the blood pumping.

The reason I bring any of this up is because, for the last two weeks, I’ve been slowly and painstakingly tortured by my high school’s bell music. I don’t know who picks it or why, but, during passing period, when students are walking from class to class, they play a lyric-free version of one famous song or another over the school speakers, and this month they’re playing “Hotel California” by The Eagles.

I. Hate. Hotel. California. I’ve always hated it. It’s the audio equivalent of a reverse enema. Don Henley is an awful person for writing it, and if I could magically erase all eagles from existence, I would do it just to wipe that song from popular memory.

So, I’m making a list of other songs, good songs, to combat it. If I have to listen to “Hotel California” every day, then it’s only good karma to put better songs out there into the ether. “Bloody Cape” is the first, but there are many, many more.

I’ve finished up Midnight’s Children — finally — and am content to let it fade away without much fanfare. I simply did not enjoy that read. I tried to find parts of it that were good and focus on them, and the best I can come up with is that I have a better understanding of the events following India’s Independence. But the plot, the characters, the magical realism … none of it resonated.

I think it’s the prose that got me, if I’m being honest. On a sentence-by-sentence basis, Midnight’s Children falls as flat as a tumbled-down house of cards. It’s pretty writing, I’ll grant you, but being pretty will only get you so far in life. To stick with the card metaphor, the most beautiful two and seven is still a two and a seven. Fold that shit.

My next read is going to be The Portable Dorothy Parker, and I am excited for this one. I’ve enjoyed the little bit of Dorothy Parker that I’ve read in the past, and I’ll be glad to read some more.

I went to Dairy Queen and ordered a Robert Frosty

I got up early this morning to do my meditation and coffee routine, which is, essentially, just me using Headspace while I wait for coffee to finish brewing. One part of dealing with depression and anxiety is becoming aware that building habits is one of the best ways to combat that kind of illness. You’ve got to take regular, positive steps, and it’s good to get those habits to a point where, like brushing your teeth, they become something that you just do every day without thinking about it. It’s the thinking that gets you — think too much and you’ll think yourself into not doing.

So far, I’ve been pretty successful at meditating each morning at 5:00 am., which is not a thing I ever thought I’d be able to say.

People in my family have always settled into being obscenely early risers as they’ve aged. When I was young, I didn’t understand this phenomenon. At all. I watched my mother wake up every morning at 4:00 and thought, “Why on Earth would anyone choose to wake up at that time?” Especially in winter, when your bed is like a fortress set against the freezing darkness of a February morning, who is chomping at the bit to get up and leave the house? I thought people were nuts for making themselves get out of bed any earlier than they absolutely had to.

The mistake in my reasoning was thinking that my mother had a choice in the matter. I’m beginning to think that she, like me and my brothers, was driven by anxiety. I absolutely can’t lie in bed in the morning thinking about the upcoming day anymore — it drives me batty. I have to get up and do things because, well, the alternative is stewing in anxious juices waiting for my alarm to go off, all the while wondering, Why do I feel so bad? Why do I feel so bad? Why do I feel so bad?

I remember once in high school asking a good friend of mine, “How do some people wake up every morning full of energy and excited to tackle their day?” I’d seen it happen in movies and on TV, so I thought it must have been possible.

My friend, who was smarter than I, said, “I don’t think those people are real.”

My new Kindle Scribe arrived over the weekend. I’ve had a few days to play with it and, I’ve got to say, it is the best e-reader I’ve ever used. While I’m not a fan of Amazon as a company, I’m fairly invested in that ecosystem (I have quite a few Kindle and Audible books), and the Scribe was just about half the price of the other e-reader I was considering: the Remarkable.

The thing that I like about it — the reason that I upgraded from my Kindle Paperwhite — is the size of the screen. Most e-readers are just too small for my taste, but the Scribe has a 10.2 inch screen, which is about the size of a page in a hardcover book. A lot of people might not think it’s too important, and that’s fine, but I like to get an idea of paragraph size as I’m reading, and that’s hard to do if the screen isn’t big enough to hold several paragraphs.

I can see, for example, when I’m about to encounter one of Salman Rushdie’s convoluted wall-o-texts about the war in Kashmir before it happens. I can steel myself; I can be mentally prepared to misunderstand whole swaths of text.

I’ve made some leaping strides into Midnight’s Children since I got the new Kindle, and matters are not improving. I think I’m getting too caught up in the character-driven nature of this book. The whole thing just seems … aimless.

There’s this whole ham-handed metaphor in which the narrator’s congested nose somehow represents the struggle for communication between the different aspects of India after they gained independence. I don’t know if I’m supposed to find it funny or sad or what. Mostly, I’m just confused. There are so many characters that I don’t see the point of, too many events that don’t matter at all.

And the plot is so tied up in India’s history that you never get a sense of trajectory. Where is all this going? Does it so closely mirror India’s history that it is untraceable? Is Rushdie trying to make a point here, or is he doing a Robert Frosty have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too sort of thing?

I don’t know, but I am very much looking forward to being done with this book.

The syrup grand prix has no winners

Since the election, I have tried to remove myself from any sort of social media, online news, or generally any platform that features political discourse. (The exception being BlueSky, where I only follow people who write poetry, fiction, or make art.) There was a certain amount of anger surrounding the decision (if the lunatics take over the asylum, leave the asylum), but, a few months into it, I’ve started thinking of it as a hard reset for the way I consume information.

Everyone needs a reset now and again. Getting off of social media for a while can’t possibly hurt, and I believe there are substantial benefits to your state of mind. Not the least of which is I have more time to read.

Of the few “news” sources I still look at, Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic is easily my favorite. Cory Doctorow is (more than) a science fiction writer and, frankly, much better blogger than I am. He manages to put together a daily post that is informative, clever, and pertinent, all while churning out novels at a dazzling pace. I don’t know how he does it. All I have to do for this blog is read and I think it’s tough.

Doctorow has a new book coming out in February that he’s currently posting a bit of, and I can’t recommend it highly enough:

I will probably take a bit of time off from THE LIST to read it, as I have for every book he’s published in the last few years.

I’ve come to accept that I’m going to have a … contentious relationship with Midnight’s Children. It has become apparent that Rushdie is purposefully delaying the introduction of the main character. Well, that’s not entirely true. The main character is the narrator and he’s telling his life’s story, but the first 25% of that story is about things that happened before he was born. The book starts with the introduction of how his grandfather and grandmother met.

That’s fine if you’re Charles Dickens, but by the time the main character makes his appearance in Midnight you realize that Rushdie is doing this on purpose. He’s purposefully dragging his damned feet. The whole first quarter is supposed to be slow. You’re supposed to get frustrated with it and wonder when things will actually get moving.

And I’m not a fan. It’s similar to when Chuck Palahniuk wrote Pygmy entirely in broken English. It’s a fun idea, but in the end you’re just annoying your readers.

That’s how I feel with Midnight’s Children. Annoyed. I don’t need some self-aware narrator discussing the virtues of appropriate novel pacing in the midst of a novel that’s purposefully slower than a syrup grand prix.

I’m going to stick with it (ha.) and try to see this thing through to the end. There are some people who think Rushdie is fantastic, and hopefully I’ll see what they see.

The ritual is complete

“Hail Satan,” I muttered, cutting open the box to our new Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner. I’m not a religious person by nature — certainly no devil worshipper — but our carpets were in dire need of a cleaning and I was willing to take help wherever I could find it.

There’s a thing that happens, and every time it does I feel somewhat cheated (or perhaps let down) by life in a way that is both profound and nihilistic — a cardboard paper cut. Such a thing should not be possible, but it is. A thick sheet of cardboard from the vacuum box sliced against my pinky, drawing a small amount of blood, some of which dribbled onto the Dirt Devil.

WHOOSH!

In a puff of smoke and super-heated glitter, The Devil appeared.

“THE RITUAL IS COMPLETE. BY THE LAWS OF THE SEVEN CIRCLES … “

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “Hold on there. I wasn’t summoning you. It was just an accident.”

” … I HAVE ARRIVED IN TERRIBLE SPLENDOR TO PURGE … “

“No purging. No purging!” I hastily wiped specks of blood off the handle of the vacuum, which was still wrapped in plastic. “See? Just a cardboard paper cut.“

“A WHAT.”

“A cardboard paper cut. It’s a thing that happens, and every time it does I feel … you know what, don’t worry about it. I didn’t summon you. I said ‘Hail Satan’ as a joke and then cut myself. Total accident.”

He was already red, but The Devil’s harrowing visage seemed to turn a darker shade. “AN ACCIDENT?”

“Yep. You can, er, go now.”

Petulance crept into his rumbling voice as The Devil crossed his arms. “FINE. I GUESS YOU DON’T WANT ANY HELP VACUUMING.”

Anywho. A relaxing Sunday. Sarah and I got a new vacuum because our old one sucked (or, rather, didn’t) and I cut my pinky opening it. After that, I did a deep clean of our living room. I found so many solitary socks tucked between the cushions, wedged into crevasses, and nestled under the coffee table that you might think my wife and I were a pair of squirrels tucking them away for winter.

I spent a bunch of time in the evening reading Midnight’s Children, which isn’t anywhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be based on my initial impressions. The prose is elevated and flies in the face of everything I’ve come to believe as a writer. (The elegance of prose comes from thrift, and you should avoid using two words when one will suffice. It’s like that scene in A River Runs Through It when Tom Skerritt teaches his son writing by constantly editing out most of his essays and saying, “Again, half as long.”)

I’m over 20% into it and the main character has yet to be born.

It’s a dark morning and my neighbors have rituals of their own — going out to start their big, dumb trucks to let them “warm up.” Sounds like a neighborhood full of angry tractors grumbling in the dark.