Bull as a Hilltop Billboard

• Today marks 30 full years at Hilltop University, half my life, successfully still nobody there (true, trust me, true, on purpose)
• If Earthgirl hadn't seen the help-wanted in the Washington Post classified and insisted once, insisted twice, insisted three times I call for an interview our timeline would be completely different, happy, hopefully, too, not an Enterprise C going back through the time rift to certain destruction by Romulans timeline, happy, hopefully, too, but Planet-less
• Reminds me of my second favorite Stanley Elkin paragraph, this from *The Franchiser*

Ben, everything there is is against your being here! Think of get-togethers, family stuff, golden anniversaries in rented halls, fire regulation celebrated more in the breach than the observance, the baked Alaska up in flames, everybody wiped out - all the cousins in from coasts, wiped out. Rare, yes - who says not - certainly rare, but it could happen, has happened. And once is enough if you've been invited. All the people picked off by plagues and folks eaten by earthquakes and drowned in the tidal waves, all the people already dead that you might have been or who might have begat the girl who married the guy who fathered the fellow who might have been your ancestor - all the showers of sperm that dried on his Kleenex or spilled on his sheets or fell on the ground or dirtied his hands when he jerked off or came in his p.j.'s or no, maybe he was actually screwing and the spermatozoon had your number written on it and it was lost at sea because that's what happens, you see - there's low motility and torn tails - that's what happens to all but a handful out of all the googols and gallons of come, more sperm finally than even the grains of sand I was talking about, more even than the degrees. Well - am I making the picture for you? Am I connecting the dots? Ben, Ben, Nick the Greek wouldn't lay a fart against a trillion bucks that you'd ever make it to this planet!

• Discovered yesterday there's a new The Necks album

• Abandoned nevernote for simplenote which I will love until I hate it
• The first copy/paste from simplenote to here succeeded, that's one more time than nevernote
• The press that cried wolf
• Democrats: Cringefest One
• Democrats: Cringefest Two
• Democrats: Cringefest Three
• Democrats: John Kasich, Cindy McCain, Colin Powell
• Democrats: suck
• Appropriate hate
• Avedon Carol's occasional links
• When I saw this story about a used bookstore owner stealing from little libraries I naturally thought of Alan S, the fuck who owns Second Story, I'll spare me typing me going down that rabbithole of my past before I met Earthgirl and got a job at Hilltop
• Andy Partridge interviewed on English Settlement

ABOUT MY DEATH

Jennifer Barber

I don’t want to see it coming

like late summer roses waiting to bloom

  

or a highway I remember in Spain,

a giant black cutout bull

  

as a hilltop billboard.

Instead let me be half asleep,

  

the Never and Forever twins,

one in a brown dress, one in blue,

  

steeped in the shadows of my room,

the air replacing my breath

  

with flow and husk, and then the sound.

Let me leave each twin a gift:

  

a milky quartz on the night table,

my worn gold wedding ring.