To the neon god they made.

Simon & Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"
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My closest friends know me to be a person who starts and stops a lot of things. My life is best characterized as a book of half-plots and partial resolutions. It's a serious personal flaw that, appropriately, I'll one day get around to correcting. But I am glad to report that I'm finally done with Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, which is a fantastic book. Yes, I'm well off the pace I set for myself back when I was incarcerated, but freedom does crazy things to your schedule, such as giving you more free time than you probably deserve. In reality, I was getting depressed that this book, through my indifference for many months, started to show serious signs of weathering. Creases were slowly turning into tears, and the book cover was beginning to fall apart.

I've got one more week of seeing the court-appointed drunk driving counselor. The latter half of my three month requirement has, admittedly, gone by very fast, but that was the case with jail time, too. So the lesson here is that through any externally-imposed commitment, it's the first part that sucks. And while my car is still in a vegetative state, at least I don't have to seriously worry about my mobility until my next calibration. In the meantime, I no longer take cabs, figuring that the e-bike/bus combo is easy and efficient enough, and the cost can't be beat, even by comparison to a working car. My new doublepane windows are getting installed on Thursday, one a picture window for the front, and one slider for the side. (This is the side window that's had a golf-ball-sized hole in it for about a year.) Also, since the loss of my Voom connection, TV is available, but no longer am I glued to it. This qualifies as a good thing.

This is my third draft, and here I've done you all a great editorial service by snipping out a rant. You don't believe me? Had I not parenthetically written this scar of a paragraph, you wouldn't have ever noticed the cut. To quote Denzel in Training Day, "I'm surgical with this bitch."

Having successfully digressed, I resume:

My life has got a lot of cleaning up to do, and while my mail-ins to my probation officer provide me with a serviceable unit of time, in between those montly reports, I need to make sure I finish a few more books, so to speak, while the covers are still in place.