This is a page from a book probably written in the 15th century, showing some astrological information centered on the sun (on *a* sun). What's cool and weird is that no modern astronomer can identify the constellations depicted, and no modern linguists or code-breakers can decipher the text.

If I were dying and had a week remaining, I wouldn't show up for work anymore. I wouldn't contact my co-workers or employers, I'd stop returning their calls and emails, and rid them all from my life. Funny how one of the most important things--a job, a career, professional experience, a means to money and money itself--is the first to lose its value when the future disappears.

I would speak to my family and my closest friends, each one to one, and tell them the things I haven't and should have, and tell them all goodbye.

About 5 requests for somebody named Janese nude (presumably *not* Joe Blackface's wife in my Other Country novel):

There were many requests for nude egyptian and palestinian girls. I guess some people consider this really really wrong, or else perhaps the news has made them desireable somehow. I wonder if Islamic girls are the least photographed nude of all races?

Lots of other "+nude" requests for--bizarrely--Sonic the Hedgehog, large sewer pipes (whatever that means), and the HBO series OZ. Again, I do not have any of these images. Really!

Um, yeah:

And then there's the really twisted stuff:

Of course not everybody on the internet is a freak (how refreshing to find such diamonds in this pool of slime):

And then there's the kind content I actually *do* have around here:

This was the day, Oct. 8, in 1871, when a friggin cow burned down Chicago. Four square miles of fire, leveling nearly the entire city, killing over 300 people, and destroying the original Emancipation Proclamation before it was done.

Meanwhile, on the same day in 1871, another fire burned just to the north in Wisconsin--the dairy state--this one the size of six rural counties, killing over 1100 people finally.

Sometimes, usually in the morning, bleary eyed, in love with a pillow, at war with a clock radio I've had since the early eighties, just sometimes it occurs to me that some people do not have to sit at a desk in order to earn a living. There are those who travel around in the open air, riding horses or something, chopping down trees, examining mineral deposits from veins in huge mountains. And I realize that the difference between them and me, essentially, is this: those people are cold.

But here it is late in October already, my favorite of all the months, a month for sitting outside on the porch in the evening with a cup of coffee and a pack of gaggers reading fantasy novels. Or Poe or Hawthorne or something else New Englandish. I read Washington Irving's book of stories that way; how sentimental I feel towards them now! Rip Van Winkle, Sleepy Hollow, or that one where the dead knight comes back to life to torment his bride with his undying love. Ah! I was full of the season back then, full of the autumn, the crisp air blanketing the night, the rustling leaves outgrowing their branches, my future nothing but the next line on the page and the next page in the book.

Last year in Autumn, I traveled to Italy, where kids roam the medieval streets they grew up on, and old bells sound through the night from foggy clock-towers, their lights the light of eons, their apices the highest points of secular ambition for miles, and topped only by the looming cathedrals in checkerboards of black and white granite like prison uniforms for inmates sentenced to millennia of consecutive terms. We drank wine on a penthouse balcony and watched Florence settle into dusk around its quiet river; we sailed through choppy channels from Lido and watched as the palaces sank slowly into their deeps; we wound uneven corners in Venice, from moment to moment dark to light and quiet to noisy and warm to cool, all always in the night in my memories, all always autumn and livid.

This year I've spent my time staring at pixels and listening to abrasive orders and worrying over broken virtual things.

He had never felt such a need before, an aching knowledge of loss and waste, and a fear that his life was fading, just as quickly and as surely as the city had, until--in a single moment--it disappeared forever, off into the harsh vast sea. The images had sent him here, the scent of her wet hair, the sound of her voice singing into the deep roiling night.