You have to write if you want to be read

And other lessons from viewing my blog stats. Gee, I don't put anything up for a week and my traffic drops! Combine extreme busyness with a mess of issues over at my other addiction, Fotolog, and a general lack of free time to think, and my choice is to put up something not-witty or put up nothing at all. Voting for the latter, and I think you'll thank me.

I have been pulling out of the doom/dread cycle that had started a few weeks back and intensified as I contemplated the extremely temporary nature of absolutely everything, as outlined in Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything," but I was kinda pulling out of that and am generally feeling less panic-stricken about the general prospect of mortality. But it's not just a book that puts me in these frames of mind, and the set of circumstances hasn't really changed. In a very short time a number of people I know were afflicted with cancer. Two are, I have to believe, going to be just fine. Another will be memorialized tomorrow, after a very brief and devastating illness. This was someone from work, and the mood there today was just dreadful quiet.

To try to make up for that, I'm reading a somewhat more gleeful recounting of life and death in the seamy underbelly of old New York, a book by Luc Sante called "Low Life." Very entertaining, but really hard to imagine how unspeakably awful the city was in the days of horses, epidemics, and trash piled up on the streets. A fun little wallow.

Movie of the week? Well, we didn't quite finish it (out of sheer exhaustion), but "M. Hulot's Holiday," a Jacques Tati film (he who inspired what I can only imagine is the unbelievable "Triplets of Belleville," which I haven't gotten to see yet) was a gentle, sweet, very funny little comedy. Virtually no dialogue, just pantomime and slapstick. Big brownie points to the public library for having it!