Words are inadequate

1) Timing. An audio drama of Sandman, narrated by Neil, with a fantastic cast list, including Paterson "Marquis de Carabas" Joseph as the demon who steals Dream's helm. Potentially interested despite my difficulties in audio processing.

2) My bathroom fan streamed water (not really "gushing," but far more than "drizzling") for awhile last night, which was exciting. The maintenance guy came out pretty quickly, at least. Turns out it was a problem with the tub drain upstairs. With any luck it's been fixed today.

At least this one was a lot less hassle than the last plumbing problem I dealt with.

3) One of the bloggers at Lawyers, Guns & Money is the lead singer in a band, The Paranoid Style. Their latest album (A Goddamn Impossible Way Of Life) kept getting rave reviews. So a couple months ago I figured "what the hey" and picked it up.

The album's great, by which of course I mean it's exactly the sort of thing I like. Uptempo, fun guitar work, and lyrically dense. I enjoyed the first two tracks, with lines like "Better living through chemistry but I haven't got the grades / Better living through consumerism but I just need to get paid" alright. Then about halfway through the third track, "A Marked Man On A Marked Occasion," I realised she was singing about the Easter Rising, and had to go back and listen to it twice more right then.

I put it on once or twice a month, which is an awful lot for me. It's taken me five or six spins before I realised that "The Peculiar Case of the Human Song Generator" is not just referencing They Might Be Giants but is actually /about/ the band. And the last track, "Building Up and Tearing England Down," is a cover of an old Irish song about Irish construction workers in England. Good times all around.

4) Last week a friend asked "How are you all holding up these days?" to which I responded My decades of practice at pretending Everything Is Fine while my mental faculties crumble are paying off at last. Seriously though. I'm not doing /well/ but I think I'm doing alright, just in constant need of a Break. ... I'm functional, but not terribly resilient.

I think I'm in about the mental state I was in during, say, 2013-2014, with a touch more self-awareness. I'm not in bad shape as such but I feel fragile. I seem to need more time and space to return to basic functionality.

5) I finished Season of Mists and am having trouble writing up quick impressions of it. Will try again tomorrow. tl;dr: I still like it.

On the one hand, "social distancing" / "self-quarantine" isn't that much different from how I live my life three weeks out of four. Erin and I are functionally quarantining as a unit despite maintaining separate households, but apart from that my encounters with human beings closer than three feet are limited to the grocery store anyhow. Yoga's out for the foreseeable; that makes me sad, but I can exerbike and watch Kipo and the Wonderbeasts, or whatever once I run out of Kipo (got lots of good suggestions both here and on the Book of Face). I have a sufficiency of stuff to cook, and stuff to bake. I sometimes talk to people online.

On the other hand... that one week out of four was pretty important to my mental health and well-being, turns out, as were the semiregular semiannual distant-sweetheart visits.

Bah. Gonna be a rough spring all around.

What are you reading now?

Rereading Ha'penny by Jo Walton, because I decided that what I needed to distract me was a trip through an alt-history midcentury fascist England. I may yet regret this by the end of the book. I'm enjoying it thus far, though, and I have basically no memory of the ending (except for Viola's fate) so it's functionally a first read. As I recall I got irritated with the third book for its deus-ex-machina in the form of the Royals; will see if that holds up, I guess.

What did you just finish reading?

First reread of The Sorcerer's House by Gene Wolfe. What an odd book. It's nominally set present-day (well, 2010) but apart from a few references to email and cell phones it would feel more at home in, say, the late seventies. It's an enjoyable puzzle-box, and I'm sure there's more to it than I think, despite my feeling of smugness at having picked up on one of the key mysteries (the author of the last letter).

What do you think you'll read next?

Jeez, I don't know. Maybe Half A Crown, maybe A Mist Of Grit And Splinters, maybe something completely different. I seem to have spent last week binging on ebook sales so it's not like I'm starved for choice.