2011-07-05 - 11:11 a.m.
Yesterday, on Independence Day, many, many fat firecrackers were lit, and thrown, and they were loud. One of them was lit and thrown and made that loud noise very close to my right ear. Things on my left side sound crisp as ever. But the stuff on the right is fuzzy.
I did not get the university job, but that's OK. I'm a third through a final (I hope) revision. So far, I've cut it from 374 pages to about 318. This cutting feels good. It feels like losing weight, or trimming fingernails. I just hope it's good. If it's no good, or just only half-good, then all of this will feel like a long, long diversion.
I finished a decent-but-not-great memoir about kicking alcohol yesterday and decided to move on to a big gun, and so I picked up Lolita, which I must say I've never read. I read a few pages and I see how dense it is. It's like a pound cake. Or a sports-car engine. I wonder how many times he revised it. My guess is many times.
Summer now, which means tanned forearms, hot burns around the loop on my bike, late nights on the deck with cold beer, Scrabble until the dusk fails. Mondays through Fridays, there's this thing that happens, with sweat. My pickup's got vinyl seats, and though I roll the windows down, the air can't get into all the cracks. And so my back sweats. It's hot and wet back there on the drive, and then, the minute I get up out of the cab and go for the bike in the bed, the sweat turns from hot to cool. The air finally gets to it, and the sweat does what it's supposed to do.
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