Confessional

The odor of incense was overwhelming and I felt close to passing out. I wanted just to leave the church and go out to play with my heathen friends, but Sister St. William had always stressed the fundamental importance of making a good confession, and at the age of twelve, I lived in fear and fright of offending any of the good nuns who taught us at St John's.
I felt some trepidation also toward the parish priests, but because they were men and seemed to have a bit more freedom in their daily activities, I thought perhaps they could be more understanding of my small wayward proclivities. After all, hadn't Father Beaumont smoked a cigarette while giving us religious instructions? And each of the priests drove his own car, though none were as nice as Monsignor Seles' Cadillac.
In my lightheadedness, I had not noticed anyone leaving the confessional closest to me, but the door was now open and I thought, at last, I could fulfill my duty and be done with it, though truly, the hardest part would be surviving the fast before communion the next morning.
I walked over and slipped quietly into the confessional. The cool darkness was soothing and as I knelt, waiting for Father Glory to slide the little panel back I tried to remember all my current sins.
I had had impure thoughts about Cindy Ingdall, the lay teacher who assisted Sister St. William, but I didn't have to tell Father Glory who the impure thoughts were actually about. While playing stick-ball during the week, I had struck out, as usual, and I had sworn like some of the truck drivers who ate at Rosie Musto's store. Wednesday night, before going to sleep, I had played with myself...
...and then the odor assaulted my nostrils. It was not the incense. The previous confessor must have passed gas just before leaving the confessional box. It was such an unexpected thing to me, I hadn't realized it when I first knelt on the prie-dieu.

The little panel was sliding back.

Two Weeks in a Tiny Room

Alec, approaching thirty, overweight and out of shape, decides to make himself over, but becomes obsessive about it. He lost his job, his wife, his friends.
You cannot gain happiness unless the makeover is complete, and when you reach that stage, it starts to reverse itself.
Changing a picture frame can reduce the value. The picture is the same, but in this case the frame was everything.

The Road Not Taken [by Robert Frost]

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Fuzzy Logic

She was innocent and naive appearing before they were married and during their first year, but after a baby boy was born, she seemed more calculating. As he had only enough love to give one person, his love went more in the boy's direction. Still, another child, a girl, was born. Now, the little girl was her focus. The children, spoiled, grew up to respect neither parent. The daughter produced a legitimate child, the son produced a bastard, and the cycle began again.

It was like God speaking, and you had to hear the beginning and the end, or you couldn't understand the middle.
Fuzzy logic can be useful.

Alphabet Story

A, B, C, D, E, F & G are parts of a group.
A & B are lovers, but B has turned his attention to C.
B comes on to C, but C spurns him.
B has himself "killed".
D is killed.
An investigation is set up by A.
C acts suspiciously, but can't be proved guilty because she knows nothing.
E is killed.
F & G begin to strongly suspect C, but can't prove her guilty.
A confronts C, but C admits she is now afraid they will all be killed.
B confronts C and admits how he faked his death to be able to have a "new life" with C, if she'll have him, but says he can't do anything now out of fear because he did not kill D or E and doesn't want to be blamed for it.
For the reader, at this point, the two suspects are F and G.
G learns B is alive and threatens to go to the police and have D & E's murders pinned on him.
In a final appeal to B to give himself up, while B and G are together, A is killed.
B now suspects F, while G suspects both C and F.
C is now scared of all three B, F & G and decides to come forward with what happened between her and B, but F confronts her and says he can't let her do that because he wants all the murders pinned on B. F tries to kill C, but B arrives in time to save her.
G arrives to see B saving C's life and together they get F arrested.
What was F's motive?

Song After Song

They were played in no particular order and with no particular significance, but they did remind him of moments when he had heard each of them before. In a coffee shop, on the way to work or in the elevator, or at the dentist's. They were those kinds of songs, adaptable and hummable.
It made him pause to reflect if any of the songs were very recent. Those were the ones he had not thought ready for this group yet, but then Bobby Darin would come on singing, Somewhere, beyond the sea...
And then he was somewhere, beyond the sea, maybe Ipanema, or maybe just somewhere in his own past when Astrud Gilberto told him of a boy who walked on that beach.
Strange, how all these songs evoked wistful memories with nary a happy moment among them. Happy times were always somewhere else, and not just around the corner, but perhaps as far away as beyond the sea.
He thought of one night in particular, when, as a preteenager, he had been left alone and he had frightened himself with his imagination. He pulled out a notebook that night and tried to exorcise his fear by writing about it in a fictional framework. He wrote his first story then, though it was not the first one published. In fact, it was never published, but he always kept that notebook somewhere within reach. It contained a few short works, a quick reading of which would easily humble him whenever he lost his grounding. He felt the notebook expressed some of his sense of futility.

Wonder What Will Happen?

Goodbye to All That

Love, etc. by Julian Barnes

Love, etc is a novel by Julian Barnes published in 2000, although it is also the title of a French film based on his earlier novel Talking it Over.

Love, etc - The Complete Review

My Favorite Corner

Bastille Day Event

July 14 - 16: Later referred to as the Bastille Day event, a powerful solar flare leads to a geomagnetic storm on Earth:

Updated Wikipedia Citation

405

Premonition

Millennial Changes

March 10: Indicating the beginning of the end of the dot-com boom, the NASDAQ Composite stock market index peaks at 5131.52.

March 12: For all the wrongdoings by members of the Roman Catholic Church throughout the ages, Pope John Paul II issues an apology.

March 17: For the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, the 800-plus deaths of the Ugandan cult movement members is regarded to be a mass murder and suicide organised by cult leaders.

Goodbye, Charlie Brown

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Charles Monroe "Sparky" Schulz was an American cartoonist and the creator of the comic strip Peanuts, featuring his two best-known characters, Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Wikipedia
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Born: November 26, 1922, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.
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Died: February 12, 2000, Santa Rosa, California, U.S.