the pit and the pendejo

"...as someone once counted, there are 784 questions asked in the Investigations. Of those only 110 are answered."

Watching people drive explains to me why they vote the way they do.

On being an ally.

Customer had me looking for Children of Men & (The Road? Station Eleven?)--seems she was doing Apocalypses, & did i know any good ones? I said this was rather a played-out genre (though they are writing more now than ever), but i could recommend a few. First, J G Ballard destroyed the world four times over, once for each of the four elements; i think The Crystal World is his best one, with The Drowned World a close second (i've reread each of these three or four times). Then, for a full-dress Armageddon, it's hard to top James Blish's Black Easter. M P Shiel: The Purple Cloud is classic loonyness. Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (damn, i need to reread that) comes close--for a rational human being. The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber is the widescreen baroque one i enjoyed most (cast of thousands! yellow & purple rogue planets!). R A Lafferty does a dozen, each more absurd than the other, who can pick a favorite?--oh hell: Fourth Mansions. One of Doris Lessing's scifi series--i hate to admit i forget the title right now--conjures real sadness in its depiction of a whole world just freezing to death. But the deepest-sounding one of all is the poem "Night" by Lord Byron.