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Have survived. Have learned valuable lessons about abusing ones own body with fatigue, alcohol and stress. Considering killing all people in the world. Relented in order to watch Jays games. Will allow the Jays players and management, plus the announcement teams of both RSN and TSN to live. Maybe the batboys. And that whole group of the White Sox, to give us someone to play. And my bartender, and anyone involved in the making and delivering of Moosehead and Guinness. And Scarlett Johansson, but only if she proves to be a significantly attentive baseball fan who thinks my knowledge of baseball, books, and lame video games is hot.
That's it. The rest of you are going away.
In lighter news, Alexander Solzhenitsyn died. I say lighter because the man died forty years later than he should in a life much kinder than at his darkest, he could have ever hoped to find. The Gulag Archipelago was one of those books that first really rocked the smug safe existence that most of us have between eleven and twelve, especially if we've already assumed we've got it all figured out. It would be another four readings and five years before most of what Solzhenitsyn was writing about finally gelled in proper historical and political context in my mind, but even the first reading jolted me into a very new and slightly uncomfortable realization that the horrible things you see on the news happening to and ordered by other people actually are happening to 'people'. Not just images or characters in an obviously fake movie, but actual people who were not much different than those who composed your everyday 'real' life.
There's a quote from the first book, I think, and I've endlessly used the idea in my writing:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
That's it. The rest of you are going away.
In lighter news, Alexander Solzhenitsyn died. I say lighter because the man died forty years later than he should in a life much kinder than at his darkest, he could have ever hoped to find. The Gulag Archipelago was one of those books that first really rocked the smug safe existence that most of us have between eleven and twelve, especially if we've already assumed we've got it all figured out. It would be another four readings and five years before most of what Solzhenitsyn was writing about finally gelled in proper historical and political context in my mind, but even the first reading jolted me into a very new and slightly uncomfortable realization that the horrible things you see on the news happening to and ordered by other people actually are happening to 'people'. Not just images or characters in an obviously fake movie, but actual people who were not much different than those who composed your everyday 'real' life.
There's a quote from the first book, I think, and I've endlessly used the idea in my writing:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
