Head Rattle

I.
Good night, Irene.... This hurricane was not quite the cataclysm predicted. A good thing, so why am I slightly disappointed? Maybe because I spent some time preparing for the worst, with flashlights and batteries and candles and bottled water, bringing in all movable objects from the yard, etc. Now I feel like a fool. It's not nice to fool Mother Nature, but clearly the opposite is just fine with her. So the hurricane was kind of lame. So was the earthquake a few days ago, though you wouldn't know it from the media hysteria. What is this longing for an apocalypse in the air? Well, there's always 2012 to look forward to.

II.
Finished The Pale King, the posthumous "unfinished novel" by David Foster Wallace, which I thought was more like a collection of short stories that shared some of the same characters, setting, and theme. Nothing wrong with that, and many of them were brilliantly written, especially considering the difficulty of the subject matter ("life" in the IRS). Still, I hesitate to call it a novel, even an unfinished one. It might be a new type of literary genre, one that has yet to be named. A "concatenation"?