Happy Birthday, Thomas Pynchon!

I still have no clue if I ever got what Gravity's Rainbow is about, but I love it for its weirdness anyway...

It's been a while since I put up anything here, and there's a good reason for that: I'm inherently lazy. As a writer or writer-to-be, this could be seen as a non-desirable trait, but there it is; sometimes the muse is alive and well, other times it's buried in Cheetos dust and too many afternoons spent watching No Reservations marathons. I can't be "on" all the time, people.

I will say that, in the absence of having anything to say, I've done a lot of reading the past few months, or perhaps more accurately, buying books that I will either eventually get around to reading or actually managing to do so before now. Don't worry, financially-minded friends; most of the purchases have been at used-book stores, the opiate to bookish masses like myself who a.) like trying to find obscure books that might not be at the megachains or library and b.) are kinda cheap. Not in a bad way (I suppose I'd spend money on surgery, if it were totally necessary), but cheap nonetheless.

But I think it's time to scale back on such non-extravagent spending sprees. I've been lucky in that my tax return hasn't been wasted on rims for my car or a grill for my teeth (or is it grills for my car and rims for my teeth? My knowledge of culture doesn't really extend past 1997). But that luck could easily run out, especially considering my automotive woes in the past (blown tires, exploding engines, terrorists demanding that I drive them to the bank...oops, shouldn't have told about that one). So I have to be careful.

One of the things I've noticed is that, for all the books I have bought, very few have been read yet by me. It's a pattern that usually occurs when I get home and the "new book" smell (or "very old book smell") wears off and I put it aside for something more substantial, like the second volume of Edmund Morris' bio of Teddy Roosevelt, or another collection of Get Fuzzy comic strips. But I've read some good ones: Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien springs immediately to mind.

Anyway, that's it for now, folks; hopefully I can go back to New Orleans in June (if not, Myrtle Beach will have to do, but I'm taking a vacation this summer. An actual vacation, not a "sit on my ass at home" vacation). So there's an incentive to save money instead of spending it. Will I manage to do so? Only the fates know for sure.