Bestilled

I don't imagine that Luther's inkwell is in order, but I find myself out of sorts and I'd like to be prepared should Old Nick pay a visit. All jokes aside, The transition back to work has been elusive. It was quite nice to go home last night after a great workout and spend time with my wife, my reading involved another 80 pages of Poor People. Despite his flippant approach, I do admire Vollmann's reporting and his hastily fastened sociological musings. One can gather that Russians are superstitious per fate and tragedy, that they, like all of us, exaggerate their present station and the distance by which they fell. The Chinese, Vollmann asserts, have kept their focus throughout political tumult and that their geyser of fiscal success has created some odd couplings in the process, namely the need to expand traffic to bustling factory clusters has necessitated the bulldozing of countless private homes, despite the deeds of ownership - that capitalist gold standard by which we maintain a system of law.

Today has found me rereading sections of the Pope's Rhinoceros, both in effort to address the comments of my friends on samizdat, but also to configure squarely my mental cartography of the rival factions in the Eternal City.