Today

Excruciating boredom, laziness, and self-pity. Fear of total obscurity.

This woman cooks!

Her name is Barbara Stephens, and she rocked my little world this very evening with her song "Wait a Minute," which you can find on the first disc of the nine-disc set The Complete Stax/Volt Singles: 1959-1968, which costs a fortune. I checked it out of the library a few years ago and downloaded it -- and a lot of other soul-oriented sets -- over several weeks: 670 numbers, a total day's worth of music, if iTunes is to be believed, and I have yet to hear it all. This was one I missed somehow. In the tradition of those great soul classics it has a thick supple backbeat, boogie-woogie piano, a sizzling, sexually demanding vocalist at the center, and over the course of 2:25 it works itself up into a fine funky froth. Put this knockout on while you're puttering around the house and see how long you can keep vacuuming.

Why do you define yourself among the worst?

Because you always give in to the worst. You lack discipline, completely. Live like someone who doesn't live like you live and see what happens

How much, he wondered

could he get away with? What could he create in his spare (huge, bloated, obscenely spare) time? The thought has often occured to him but he thought it was somehow wrong or unethical or whatever. It no longer does.

His brain is turning to mush

a little more everyday. Each minute of every working day he stares into a computer screen and hits a refresh button repeatedly. He doesn't like thinking how much of life has been devoted to just this activity. Too fucking much. He feels useless. He is useless. He's like his own old dog, steeped in senile demetia, walking around in circles for hours on end, feeling stupid, feeling wasted, telling himself there must somehow be a way out of it all without creating too much disaster. It's no way to live.

Henry is Tormented

by the story of James Atlas, a writer he does regard all that highly but who strikes him nonetheless as a brilliant and talented individual who fails nobly in ways Henry does not, and never has. Henry has never maxed out on ambition, never gone for big game, never fought for real stakes, and stories of people who do trouble his sense of cramped, stupid middle-class comfort, and make him thinking of doing something perfectly insane, perfectly uncomfortable.

The time had come...

for him to embrace boredom and claustrophobia on a more serious level than ever before.

A Pair of Brown Eyes

In his haste, Henry forgot to say the name of the song.

Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed

The above line comes from Henry's latest favorite tune, which he has duly added to the soundtrack of his forthcoming film about a biologist seaching for trilobites in Scotland. He has no idea where it will be used, but clearly the tune is portent with rich romantic imagery.

It has, also, had the curious effect on poor besotted Henry of making him think he has squandered a good bit of his life on not having actually really sat down and listened to a Pogues song before. He knows as you do that the lead singer is Shane MacGowan, known to one and all for his gappy choppers, or as one reporter colorfully called them, the "the black holes in MacGowan's mouth filled only by piteous dental stumps." (Inspiring at least one funny song, "Shane's Dentist," by Mojo Nixon.)

What he didn't know -- and what didn't surprise him -- is that Shane is a serious rock and roll dipso, which has threatened serious harm to his love life. Read more here in this old but amusing time-waster.