Reading: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel

Moving: walked two miles

Watching: "Illuminata"

12 March 2002: Books and sushi: my perfect evening

RDC and I took a walk in the park after work yesterday, after which I had this theory about weights. Instead we went for sushi and to the Tattered Cover.

The west side of the park is all torn up and length of pipe three feet or more in diameter await being laid. That reads a little off, doesn't it? The laughingstock of an MLK statue is gone, thank heavens; the new one should go up next month. In the new monument, he'll be farther off the ground, which is sad, and surrounded by Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, and Mahatma Gandhi. Last time he had a little boy who wore Huck Finn's hat. I would rather that he hang out with children, although I can understand why the Huck Finn hat might seem an insult. The child himself was supposed to be a boy murdered in Denver. Not that these four aren't exalted company for King, but I would like him nearer eye level and with a child again, to make him human and accessible. Oh well. At least this time he'll look like himself and not a lemur.

I brought Biographer's Tale with me to dinner. "Do you want a Westword?" I asked RDC as we passed the stand. "No, I've got my Palm." But instead he contented himself with talking to me every time I opened my book. It's no longer kicking my butt. When I started it the first time I thought it was going to be all academic and impossible but instead it's more academic and farcical. Speaking of which, at the Tattered Cover I bought Pale Fire, which RDC began to read; he laughed before the first page was out. See, Pale Fire intimidated me within five pages. He laughed within five paragraphs. We see now who's on Nabokov's intellectual plane. Also I reminded him why I'm finally reading the A.S. Byatt.

"Beth's forum," he said.

"No, that's Possession, which I barely need to reread. No, I have to read this, which I've had for almost two years, before I read the new Jean Auel, which comes out next month, and which I will buy in hardcover and read immediately and not take kindly to abuse about, until I'm done." (This is similar to the rule in my house by which you can rank on "ER" for 167 hours of the week, just not on Thursdays between 9 and 10 pm.)

At the TC, I bought some Richard Russo I've been wanting to own since I read him--Nobody's Fool and Straight Man. I didn't like the other as much and can't even remember if it was Risk Pool or Mohawk. It was Mohawk. And I still haven't read Empire Falls. Also Pale Fire and Moll Flanders. RDC asked if I would want it anytime soon--he ditched Big Rock Candy Mountain--and I said no, I still had Paradise Lost and Invisible Man to read and Don Quijote to reread. And Nobody's Fool to reread. It would amuse me to read all four (and Biographer's Tale; Guns, Germs, and Steel; and Suburban Nation) before he's done with Pale Fire. It won't happen.

We read in bed, with Blake whining because, we thought at first, of socks,but a minute later, when we actually listened to the whining instead of tuning it out, we realized he wasn't horny but hungry. Of course, because once again we left him locked in his cage with nothing to eat.* Because we're mean like that. When I got home from work, I fed him, but he didn't eat, because we left to go for a walk. We came back and he had a few bites, and then we left again, so he ignored his food. I know parrots are flock animals, but he's ridiculous. This is why we have the vet weigh him every day when we board him, and why we don't leave him overnight with just Haitch feeding him or SPM looking in.

*For the sarcasm-impaired, "nothing to eat" means pellets, seeds, greens, and buddy chow.

He wouldn't be so stupid if we didn't eat with him and reinforce the flockitude, but then he wouldn't be his charming loving self if we didn't do flock things either. After the walk, I called my mother while RDC shaved and showered. Blake was on the windowsill, where he loves to be, until he heard the electric shaver, whereupon he shrieked and fluttered bathroom-ward, demanding to be included. On the windowsill, he had been looking out, remarking at birds and cars and people walking their dogs and calling them all good boys buddy; once in the bathroom with the grooming parent, he commenced preening. Because that is as it should be.

On Sunday, snowshoeing, we met a golden retriever named Kaylie, a husky named (predictably) Dinali, and a lab named Otis. "Does he walk out on stage during Dead shows?" I asked, but his owner shook her head, now wanting this babbling person to be gone. "One of the Grateful Dead had a dog named Otis," RDC insufficiently explained my randomness. I continued, "And there's a live recording of a concert where all of a sudden the audience cheers and you don't know why until someone interrupts the song to say, 'That's Otis.'" Perhaps her dog repairs elevators. We shall never know.

Both malamutes and huskies are named Dinali. This makes sense to me only because I'm sure Alaskan malamutes and Siberian huskies are nearly the same dog anyway, and because my alma mater showed its considerable intellect by adopting the Siberian husky to represent a school whose abbreviation is commonly mistaken for a Canadian territory that borders Alaska. It would have been funnier if the Northwest Territories, not the Yukon, bordered Alaska, but no. None of the three has anything to do with UConn, of course.