Blow Wind Blow, Saturday Continued

 I got back around 2 pm. Things went downhill from there.

While I was out, I went looking for CC. The latest Google search turned up an entry for her on LinkedIn. That showed her working at Vogue Cleaners. I made three calls last Monday, could not get through to two of the Vogue stores, and the third did not know her. That afternoon, I went to the one on the northwest side and found they did not know her, either. I had planned to eat at Yummy's, but I decided to get back and eat what I had in the room. This morning I went to the last Vogue store. She was not known there. So much for Google, so much for my detective skills.

Let me mention a different crowd seems to ride the Saturday buses. Or maybe it is the buses heading south towards the Open Door clinic. Or maybe it was all of the above plus the weather. Worn down faces, bodies carrying too much weight, clothes not quite clean enough, the representatives of the post-industrial Muncie.

From there I walked downtown to change the bus to Payless. I had my sister on the phone, then I had a call from DM. My sister said she was not going out thanks to the wind, I did not think it so bad to me, but DM could not hear me very well with the wind blowing.

I spent $30 at the grocery. I indulged a little to celebrate for getting "Passerby" published.

Back in the room, I ate my lunch and read a bit more. I decided to put off work on a story until tomorrow. Feeling tired, I laid down. It was supposed to be an hour only; it turned out to be two. I forgot to set the alarm for 4 pm. Duh. Such a dangerous criminal mastermind am I.

I knocked off another post this evening. I have Backwoods from WMBR playing right now. Still not feeling at all peppy. I meant to call E, maybe KH. Instead, I am going to work on my pretrial journal and check out submitting my stories, and probably not in that order.

I did manage to read Why Do Women Want?: Edith Wharton’s Present Tense and found it quite interesting, but then I think Edith Wharton an important writer.

It strikes me as odd that the opening of Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel, The Custom of the Country, rarely appears on those “best first lines in literature” lists that go around every so often. The sentence has everything that makes the novel, and Wharton’s work in general, so great: vigor, voice, irony, detail. Through it, Wharton sketches a tense and dissonant world in which the colloquial and the bejeweled come into uncomfortable relation with each other. Dramatic and dynamic, this world nevertheless feels intensely claustrophobic. From the first five words of the novel, the reader is tied to a repetitive present tense that feels inescapable—no future, no past, just a boxed-in present (“how can you?” rather than the usual “how could you?”).

I will be in for the night. The wind is still blowing. The temperature is 66 degrees. The following from Muddy Waters seems to fit the weather and the day's failed search:

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