Head Rattle

I.
Dallas is back on TV, with new episodes. A pristine rear-engine VW passed me on the street today, and the new Cadillacs are sporting fins again. The Beach Boys, including Brian Wilson, are not only back together but on tour. Nostalgia? Retro chic? Time warp?

II.
The temperature ascends to the high 90s (Fahrenheit), and everybody at work dresses like they're going to a barbecue -- though the place is actually a bit over-air-conditioned. Dotcom culture....

III.
Holy crap without the holy: I like living in the city, except when certain precincts occasionally smell like garbage, as they tend to do during heat waves. What's cooking? I don't want to know.

IV.
Our new AC system is installed and working admirably during this hellish heat. But I still need to get my ducts blown out. Why does that sentence sound lascivious?

V.
I'm reading the late David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, a collection of essays. Quite amusing, and he has an agreeable prose style, but I can't help looking for a suicide note between the lines. His essay on why he finds Franz Kafka funny ("Laughing with Kafka") is telling, I think. "It's not that students don't 'get' Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle."