06.17.04 - 4:44 p.m.

Holy moly batman, diaryland ate my last post. I'm disappointed, because the pair of electricians who took a break in the middle of their big fight in the parking lot of the railroad hopper car plant is my favorite story ever.

There is no better story in the world.

Mmmph. Alright: there are many better stories, I know that because I've been reading an awful lot lately, and I always read good books. If nothing else, I have good taste, and not good taste in a "I have such good taste," snoot! way, but more in whatever way I have. Hey - and not just good taste, but broad taste. Tosca and The King and I and Mean Girls. Puccini and Faur� and the Shins and Loretta Lynn. W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas and Lucille Clifton and Richard Russo and China Mi�ville and Phillip Roth and (yeah!) Robertson Davies.

Robertson is my new favorite name, and sometime this year I have to reread The Rebel Angels as thinking adult, rather than the pre-adult I was when I first read it. I'm also going to tackle Ulysses, I think, for the post-post late modern romanticism of it, the tackling of Joyce 100 years after Bloomsday, but not until I've moved into my house, not until I've told Pam to get out of my house. Because it is now my house, my house, even if she's still living there.

I hate the thought of moving, uprooting, the labor of it, packing and unpacking and sorting-through-things. I'll throw away more stuffed animals - it happens every time, I am both less and more sentimental, but I am the only person in the whole wide world who knows how deeply I dreamed life into lambie's little blue glass/plastic eyes, and I am the only person in the whole wide world who remembers how I hopped down the stairs on Saturday mornings, sharp at 8 a.m., my hands wrapped around big doggie's patchwork ears, eager for Saturday morning cartoons.

My mom tells me that - as a very young child, before we moved - I would get up very early on Saturdays for cartoons, and I was so eager to watch TV that I would watch everything, whatever was on, including Treetops, which may have been a production of the University of Georgia's forestry department.

I don't remember that. I remember after, I remember living in the house here, being confined to my room until 8 a.m., reading my book of Greek myths and my child's encyclopedias or - later - my Cobblestone magazines until I was allowed to be up and about. My favorite myths: Athena, Artemis, women with swords, women with arrows and armor. My favorite encyclopedia entries: disasters. Volcanos. Tornados. Hurricanes. Destruction.

My favorite Saturday morning cartoons? That's harder. Dungeons and Dragons. Mmmph. Something else, maybe. I wasn't allowed to watch weekday cartoons at home, but those are the ones I remember liking best, whenever I saw them at a friend's house. He-Man and She-Ra and Jem! is truly outrageous, G.I. Joe - the woman with the dark hair and the guns? - but I can't like GI Joe anymore, with its laughable enemy COBRA, those crazy terrorists, because now our crazy terrorists are real, and half of them are in the white house.

That was a cheap shot.

I'm no one. I can take cheap shots.

I had some very important things to say about 1. WV politics; and 2. modernism and James Joyce, but I have managed to run out of time. So, I'll have to swallow them away, like so many things.