The Double-Edged Sword Exists in a Round Ball

At this point I've watched, say, seventy-five percent of the World Cup. Which is awesome from a soccer perspective, clearly, and I've gotten to listen to a lot of Spanish commentary, which is far superior to their American counterparts. As for work, well...

I had a good schedule going in the mornings. That's when I wrote. Since the Cup, however, that time is given up to soccer. And while I have many hours to many days to write, what's the more surprising is the welling up of ideas. When things are going well you dredam of your characters, you think of your stories all the time. Lately I've been thinking about soccer and how I should be writing. This is not so good.

So. World Cup=good. What the World Cup does to you=not so good.

The Price of Books

I spent the better part of this morning and afternoon cleaning and clearing: selecting clothes to be sold to Buffalo Exchange; selecting clothes to be donated to Goodwill; selecting books that I no longer needed to live with.

This last job was relatively painless because I created a simple criteria--if I knew I would never read a book again, it was gone. This led to some darn good books leaving the fold (most notably Mailer's Executioner's Song), but it felt right, good.

I took the 15 or so books to Half-Price, having never sold there before so not knowing how much to expect. The sum total for Mailer, Rushdie, Eco, Mark Bowden, and others: Eight dollars.

Yaoza. Yaoza. How much had they cost me? How much could I get on eBay? Why don't I use libraries?

In the end I took their offer, and used it to buy Ben Marcus' Notable American Women and Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association Inc. Such is my cycle.