Central Texas has been under an Excessive Heat Warning for what feels like months now, and I can’t remember a time in my 42 years when I’ve seen a more pointless advisory from the National Weather Service. What exactly are you expecting us to do, NWS? Get under our desks? Put wet paper bags over our heads? We know it’s hot; we’ve been outside, trying to live our lives. Oh no but it’s like, really hot. No doy. That’s why we’re dropping our kid off at school at 5:30 a.m. even though they don’t open ’til 8. Gotta be smarter than the climate change, as my dad would always say.

The Adventures of Floop and his trusty sidekick Agent Speckle continued tonight, though not without constant interruption from Matador. Oh, it can’t be that bad, Daniel, you say, as if you were somehow watching us through a camera hidden in the air conditioning vent, but it was. Here’s a little example of how the interruptions went, and I swear on the unparalleled beauty of Natalie Portman that this is as close to verbatim as humanly possible

I wrote a poem in my closet this morning. Thinking of entering it in a few festivals, maybe Cannes, I don’t know. I’m not really ready for all that fame and success. In the meantime… life goes on.

“Charlotte went up to a little table of imitation mahogany with a drawer. She put her hand upon it. The little table was ugly, no doubt, but it had done nothing to her.” – Lolita, Chapter 21

It’s too hot to be outside for any reason.

It will be years yet before El Matador experiences the horror of The Last of Us and the utterly soul-crushing death march of its sequel, and I can’t help but envy that kind of ignorance. For him, the world is still a wonderful, friendly, and inviting place.

No part of saying “this is how much I’ll spend on books each month” makes any sense to me. You don’t budget; you just buy. The more books the better! Fill up every bookshelf in the house and when you’re done, buy another bookshelf.

There’s not much you can say about Everything, Everywhere, All at Once without spoiling the movie, so I’ll leave you with this: the hype leading up to the theatrical and home release was huge, my expectations were huge, and from the moment the movie began to the last second some forty-two hours later, it delivered.

Presently, the lady herself–sandals, maroon slacks, yellow silk blouse, squarish face, in that order–came down the steps, her index finger still tapping upon her cigarette. Lolita, Chapter 10, Vladimir Nabokov There are plenty of books that might convince you of your mediocrity as a writer, but none so much as Lolita. Reading it is like […]

I am not a fan of first person POV in the best of times, and the way Weir uses it is super choppy. I did this. I did that. Something happened. The closer I got to the end, the more I found myself skipping lines at a time. That said… great book. Great premise along […]