No time for idle chatter today,  so here's a link that's to the point. The incomparable Sean Lock:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMCxT79Brb4

Hap

Hello Gentle Reader.

It has been too long a time since last I tried to reach you through the vacuum.  Here I sit, criss-cross-apple-sauce upon the tired and scuffed hard-wood boards of the fox-hole bachelor apartment I've called home for the better part of three years now.  Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds -- or Lucy (the feline) for short -- lies simultaneously stretched and curled, true to her cat-nature, on the Swedish couch behind me.  She caught another mouse two or three days ago.  She does not bring them as gifts to leave on my pillow or at the doorway that leads to the Outside.  Once she has had her fun, she lets sleeping mice lie, permanently.  She can so easily move on.  And to what?  Where are we going?  When are we going?  How can we get going again?  She was raised with a puppy.

Living feels so much like watching days glide past on a conveyor belt, occasionally placing a sticker on one of them, marking it QC-PT-SPG1979.  There's more to life than this, surely?  But without a stronger mind, a fiery soul only gets one so far.  A lot of energy can be burned up in self-restraint.  Fiery souls require tending, and sometimes quenching when they show signs that they might be making for certain of the cabinets.

There was the glint of a chance for employment recently.  The requisite testing complete, no call-back for an interview was forthcoming.  Another flicker of afternoon sun reflecting from a bit of quartz in a granite stone.  I had thought, "now that's a job for me: it's what I'm interested in, and what I'm good at".  Well, not good enough.  At least, not on that day, not when considered against the other candidates.  So, life goes on.  More work at the sticker factory tomorrow, then, until the next glimmer?  May that glimmer always be in your eye, the wee folk might say.  Is it not for them we do all this?  And, you see, you cannot properly answer such a question with "yes" or "no".  A question posed in the negative desires explication.  What is this, sophistry?  Rhetoric? What?

If you can't even be good for nothing, you may as well be good for something.

My invisible friend, my thanks, and my hope.  Slàinte.  Rest well.

The reasoning

Too small avail
The furrowed brow
Where fence is lacked
To turn the sow

That hungry lust
So warm, so pale
May tramp and root
Where crop will fail

A thorny hedge
To pen her in
And out, entrust
The reasoning.

Hope Floats, a review.

A root-beer float; a float in a parade; afloat in the atmosphere; a floating brain; a drift of snow; catch my drift.  Adrift in a tangle of seaweed, flotsam on an alien shore, sure enough: sure-footed Cher on a naval vessel bearing her naval, vitamin C in an old tin cup. A-cups, B-cups, the salty cusp of arrival. Bare with me.  An infinite number of stars. Margaret moves to Mars, episode one.