I'm back, y'all

I am here again, and I greet you loyal few who will read these words. My life has been a bit of a melee of late, but I'm resolved to carry on with my writing again after too long a hiatus.

Sad news and glad news - we've lost some good friends to California, which is good for them (family and a better job) and we are happy for them, but it leaves us substantially more alone up here. At the same time, we might be gaining the company of an old and wonderful friend from Austin who's considering graduate school at the UW.

I also injured myself, resulting in chest pain, shooting pains down my left arm, and stabbing abdominal pain. More on that later.

To come in this space: a review of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, one of the most poetic, complex, and fearsomely violent volumes I've ever perused. And peruse it I did - while I took it in on audiobook, working as I do on my feet with my ears free to absorb, there were a number of segments I was obliged to play two, three, sometimes even four times just to be certain I had extracted the full meaning. Even after such a thorough read, I'm sure I'll try it again soon. Blood Meridian has been passingly praised as one of the greatest works of 20th-century American literature - to say nothing of its being hailed as the paramount masterpiece of enigmatic and brilliant McCarthy - and I'm struggling to feel up to the task of analyzing it.