Listening

I am listening to "Nowhere to Here". Probably the best Blue Rodeo album.

Still reading Aloft by Chang-Rae Lee. On page 359 he describes the night in October after a funeral in these terms:

"I began to feel as if I were lying in a box and naturally didn't want to continue on that line and so I stepped outside onto the patio in the cooling night air and sat slumped in a deck chair beneath the moonlight sky, the distant big-hearted-river sound of the Expressway filtering through the dry leaves of the trees."

Went to gym three times on Tuesday and Wednesday. Far too much. Made me faint and dizzy. Doesn't seem to speed the weight loss. 190 pounds. Still, takes some time, I suppose.

Sh let me see her on the web cam to show me the skirt and jacket she wore to a Sarah Hussain's dinner party. She even wore heels, or so she reported to me.

If this is your birthday

Yesterday was my birthday. The Globe & Mail newspaper provides a horoscope page (half page, really), which includes a "if it's your birthday" section. On my birthday this section advised, in somewhat alarming tones:

"There will be no easy victories this year but that's okay because you like to earn what you get. Anyone who thinks that, as a Cancerian, you can be intimidated by raw power obviously has not done their homework. There is a streak of stubborness in you a mile wide and it will serve you well over the coming 12 months. You never give up."

I purchased and had a little desk and swivel chair delivered to my third story (no elevator) apartment in the old Victorian house in which I live. The purpose of this was to be able to use the computer at home without the low-back-pain-producing straight-back dinner room chair that I had been using since mid May.

Had to help the delivery guy get the stuff (including a heavy bookcase) up the increasingly narrow stair-case. Thought it would have hurt my back, but, as it turned out, it might even have helped.

So, all of yesterday I spent putting all this stuff together in the sweaty and humid Ottawa summer-time.

Called Sh today. Nice chat. She fell down the staircase the other night because of, she says, being angry with me.

Might have to go to Toronto next week.

Went to the gym today for the first time in three weeks.

The Motor of All Narrative

London Review of Books (not as good as the NY Review of Books, but it is summer and standards have to be relaxed), June 22/2006 edition, page 9.

"The chief writer and executive producer on the new Doctor Who is Russel T. Davies, the Welsh writer previously known for Queer as Folk (1999), Channel 4's energetic, unusually active drama about young gay men in Manchester, and for the view, as expressed to a journalist, that the motor of all narrative is sex."