01.07.04 - 5:46 p.m.

I can feel the days opening up, at the edges, like a fan or a fire that has found new fuel. There's a little more light at the edges of each day, morning and night, the borderlands, the only place you notice such things, betweentimes. I love betweentimes, and I love summer and I love spring, but I'm not sure I'm pleased with this (inevitable) development. I think I must be opposed to change, of both the human and cosmic varieties. I've just gotten used to the darkness. I'd rather keep it around a bit longer so I can somehow experience it more closely. That's all I'm asking. I don't think it's too much.

It's a lovely day. Really: a lovely, lovely tableau outside, the bright sun spilling - almost splayed - obscenely over the dry brown hills and the dry brown little city and the brown little streets faded and crusted from their first few coats of salt. Everything is washed out, even the winter sky, graced with a few threads of clouds on the western horizon.

I would like to learn to be gracious, to train myself to be gracious, at least in thought. Instead I am petty and contemptuous, though for the most part I manage to cloak those negative aspects of my personality in a fine veneer of shy smiles and absent-minded humor, unless you know me well, and then the humor becomes more acerbic, perhaps a bit ironic, but only in a broad sense. The nits I pick are not the ones that trouble you. I say nothing about SUVs.

Congo has a nuclear reactor, built by a Belgian priest who established the university in Kinshasa and who - incidentally - had nuclear physics as a hobby. Nuclear physics is quite a hobby, isn't it? Most people go for gardening, bridge, perhaps butterfly collecting, particularly in the tropics - there are many, many butterflies there.

Monsignor Luc Gillon: that's the gentleman who got hisself a 1 megawatt nuclear reactor in Kinshasa. Fascinating story, but I don't have time to tell it because hours later I'm struggling to finish something up so I can go home and ALSO in the meantime:

They accepted my offer. Heh. I have a freakin' house. I'm fucking insane. I don't even want to tell anyone b/c everyone will have something to tell me what to do. It feels huge, this huge fucking thing up there and out there, completely separate from the rest of these idiotic meanderings, no matter how much I mean them at the time. I think I should pinch myself, but I know I won't do it hard enough to matter, or even to notice.

Okay, work, faxes, LOAN APPLICATIONS, bye!