Holiday !

At left, my current mood. [ Dead Kennedy Album cover copyright was in doubt so instead, Pol Pot from the Romanian photo archives of communism].

I get like this once in a while.

I wrote a little about despots this morning early. I'm putting some things in place. I know the humor in the forbidden just like Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. You laugh nervously about the serious dark side of life.

You laugh though and cannot look away.

I have an article on my desk tonight from The Times of India from Saturday past. [ Read Widely. Start every single writing class you teach with that admonition. Writers are first broad readers ].

Thirty-Seven dead in Russian psychiatric hospital fire located in Luka 137 miles SE of St. Petersburg.

Wooden building. No sprinkler. Middle of the night fire. Hard to say what caused it though they did have a pyromaniac admitted this past summer. Sixty male patients were housed including fifteen who were bed-bound.

There's a story there, too.

Horrible topic, you say.

The Diary of Anne Frank ? How about something less horrendous: The Good Earth which won the Nobel prize for Pearl Buck. Only a little famine and infanticide there. I know. Slaughterhouse Five or maybe Catch-22 which certainly is a cleaned-up version of the human suffering of war.

Horrible topic present us with the mayhem and maelstrom that unhinge our characters and remove from them refuge. They struggle with the horrendous and through it free you to feel  - but feel less than if you too suffered.

Horrible still, you say?

Read - not watch - read Life of Pi and tell me about the horror and fear of tremendous fiction.

Do some harm people. I know you are writing.  Write something other than the martini being warm.