Today, as my ex-husband left the house to go to my ex-in-laws, I took advantage of the situation to launch a bomb. I told him that in all the years we’d been together, I’d always secretly hated Michel Sardou. He responded by bursting into tears and begging me to come back, that now that we’d been honest, Sardou would be put away forever.

Ha!

No, the real story was that I saw him leave, after he gave me a chaste peck on the cheek and a pain au chocolat, and as his fingers pulled the keychain off the hook, I noticed the extra set of keys. My mind, already racing, knew whose keys they were, what address to go to, and where to find a bottle of kerosene. Not that I’m angry really… it just seems appropriate to have violent fantasies at moments like these. Fantasies I will indulge in, for the moment, because it seems like the best thing to do.

Other best things to do are taking hot showers, naps, reading great books, seeing friends, drinking, dancing and having a marvelous time. All of these are in short order.

If I feel that I am suffering, perhaps it is appropriate. Perhaps one should go through a mourning period, to properly rid oneself of past emotions, past pain and past love, before moving forwards. There is a whole ton of me that giggles with delight at the outline of chimneys against a setting sun, or the fabulously structured castles of Bach in the air, or the charm in laughing out loud to yacht rock. These are my pleasures, no one elses. I just hope I don’t end up dating Hollywood Steve in pure desperation!

My dear Rhino has decided that I should revive this here blog with a literary meme. So, after a long break chilling out on a digital beach with a double whiskey sour and a little Ozzy Lust(h) on the brain, here’s the deal: pg. 123, write down sentences 6-8. So, in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, Sebald’s tendency towards run-on sentences, and the large font and spacing, throws a wrench in the mechanics. My sentence six starts on the bottom of p.123 and runs on to p.124.

Then, through the grille of a ventilation shaft that linked his bedchamber to one of the ground-floor living rooms and inadvertently functioned as a kind of communication channel, he could be heard calling on numerous different saints for hours on end, in particular, if I remember correctly, Saints Catherine and Elizabeth, who suffered the most cruel of martyrdoms, begging them to intercede for him in the contingency, as he put it, of his imminent appearance before the judgment seat of his Heavenly Lord. Unlike Uncle Evelyn, said Austerlitz after a while, taking from his jacket pocket a kind of folder containing several postcard-sized photographs, Great-Uncle Alphonso, who was about ten years older and continued the line of the naturalist Fitzpatricks, looked positively youthful. Always even-tempered, he spent most of his time out of doors, going on long expeditions even in the worst of weather, or when it was fine sitting on a camp stool somewhere near the house in his white smock, a straw hat on his head, painting watercolours.

Rather intriguing in a melancholy and curmudgeonly fashion, I feel this entry is slightly beyond the limits of the criteria (and hopelessly useless to comment on). So, I’m taking a page out of Rhino’s Petit Anglais, hoping that in this chapter he makes it to the toilet before wetting his spanking new peg-legged Acne jeans, and have resorted to cheating. In my second book, Josh Wolk’s Cabin Pressure, these are the three sentences in question:

“Big day at fishing this afternoon, when Rob Stilson caught a three-pound bass!” Yay for humans! Boo for fish!

This should further enrage my recent militant vegan lurkers into a soy-powered frenzy, disproving the oft-held opinion that vegetarianism is linked to pacifism and good body odour. Don’t know who else to pass this to since it’s been a long time since I visited Blogtown. Kevin, my sister, and my cousin… will you please stand up!