Colds. Definitely a part of the human condition.

Still battling a cold. You know what that's like. You're not really sick. You'd probably go in to work and endure. But when you're off work for the summer (ahhh the teaching life) the thing somehow takes a hold of you and slows everything right down. You stay in bed too long. You get up and pity yourself. You wear the easiest, crappiest clothes you've got. You don't do anything that you know will make you feel better, because you don't have the energy. These are the dumb things you tell yourself. This is the human condition. Like water ... what's easiest ... blah blah blah. It took me three hours to make coffee, try to figure out whether I'm flying to Ontario with my dad for my Uncle Pete's funeral (see yesterday's post), and then settle down to write.

AAAAANNywaaaAAys. I did get some writing done (not this writing, but some other writing) and, you know, "got somewhere" on a story. Is it also the human condition that, given license, we'll take it? Just asking. I gave myself some license. The story needed to move. Suddenly it's moving, buuuuut it's going to make some readers uncomfortable. I guess that's really okay. That's really the way it is. That's really a question I needn't ask. I know. Every time I ask it the answers seem so obvious - both the good ones and the wrong ones. Then I regret asking. So this time the asking is rhetorical. The human condition. Who needs it.

I'm reading a different New Yorker piece of fiction everyday - they're great. (A big thanks to Lois for supplying me with the issues she's finished reading - she's the one with the subscription). You can just trust that the editors have had the best to choose from (actually they only publish work they've solicited), so it's rare that it's a dud. Pretty much every time I get this great sense of serendipity - like the story is exactly the story I should be reading at exactly this time (usually I begin while sitting in my outhouse for the morning necessaries). Today's story was from the Jan 18, 2010 issue: "A Death in Kitchawank" by T. Coraghessan Boyle. It included a canoe. And a violent, accident death that did not involve the canoe. Although, given the title, when they built the canoe, and then the kids playing around in it, and later the main character, Marsha, getting stranded in the middle of the lake in it, you're just always thinking that that's how it's going to go.

I love non-foreshadowing. Anti-foreshadowing. Death should come by the bootstraps. You should have to reach down and work for it. I think that's how Uncle Pete would have felt. It must have been awful for him though. Dying of a bowel infection at the age of 84. Is it ever elegant? Thank God for morphine. Thank God for death too.

Rode the Letellier loop: 52 ks Wind N 30 ks Avg 30.63 kph.