It could be the virus or the infection or the antibiotics but this has been a very long week. As I've told a few people, it feels like I've had a pound of glue in my head. Still, I did manage to see my niece in Montreal for Easter, and we did have a nice time until the chocolate high scrambled any remaining thought. Plus a cop hiding under a bridge came out to give me a speeding ticket (first one ever), I did something crunchy to my spine, and this nuclear spring continued to blow its little shredded-paper storms back and forth. Today it's raining.
Got an anti-treat in the mail yesterday, this rejection slip from Grain ...
I have quite a collection of these, just from the same magazine (my entire collection of rejection letters could paper a good-sized bedroom), going back six or seven years at least. Honestly, I don't know what these guys want. And while it's always galling to send away something worked on and worried over and get back nothing but a passing slap (I mean really: their comment here is about as generic and useless as they come, and then they can't even be bothered to sign a name to it? because what, a circle was more professional?), what really jams in the guts is that this is from the province I grew up in, that these are people I should have some affinity with. Maybe we just have different ideas on how to spell "sorry".
Kurt Vonnegut has died. The old fart was a bit of a nut. His most famous book, Slaughterhouse-Five (or The Children's Crusade, A Duty-Dance with Death) is the melding of a children's book with a loopy science-fiction novel and a sad personal story about World War Two. It is strange and mutable and hands-open honest. The main character in Slaughterhouse-Five is named Billy Pilgrim. When he becomes unstuck in time, passing through the full arc of life, he sees violet light. Like all those people in Dresden.
A suicide bomber blew himself up in the Iraqi parliament yesterday. Condoleezza Rice said that the American commanders were just starting to bring security to the Iraqi people. She said there would be "bad days and good days". Neil MacDonald, the reporter covering the story for CBC, said that most Iraqis think more in terms of "bad days and worse days". And so it goes.
One good thing this week? The start of the NHL playoffs. One better thing this week? No Toronto Maple Leafs. No Leaf Nation, no sudden appearance of Leaf flags everywhere, no Go Leafs Go, no swarms of fan-tourists, no big crash of the party going nowhere, nothing for the fans of "Canada's Hockey Team" to cheer about at all. Period. And a franchise with a license to print money still can't put a winning team on the ice. Hopefully it never will.
