Jimmy Gabacho

After I uploaded the Chris Owens post, I high-tailed it out of the country as fast as I could. I wasn’t waiting around for any midnight knock at the door. I packed the usual: shorts, t-shirts, sandals, and plenty to read. It never seems to fail: I’ll be reading a book every night for a week and right before I travel I will be close to the end, but not close enough to finish. So, invariably I end up finishing the book on plane and having to lug the book around with me for the duration of my trip. This time it happened with Ru Freeman’s novel, entitled, A Disobedient Girl, which by the way is a great read. The story takes place in Sri Lanka and revolves around the lives and loves of Latha, a strikingly beautiful servant girl, and Thara, the pampered daughter of the upper-class/caste family. Because the two girls are so close in age, at times their relationship becomes one of sisters, confidants, and dangerous liaisons, but when boys (and later men) appear on the scene, they become competition for each other. Despite their close relationship, the class/caste difference is forever an impassable obstacle.

Amorphous Funk

As if the news were just breaking that psychiatrists are no longer a source of therapy but more like expensive Jersey toll booths on the pharmaceutical highway, the NYT has run this piece about the struggles of Dr. Levin, disillusioned psychiatrist, and his wife, therapist turned high-volume office manager, who both just had to give up on quality patient care to attain the lifestyle to which they had aspired. The market made them do it.  And if you have a problem with that, don’t go crying to them about it.

John Hicks

I meant to include a promise in my last post that this, my next one, would mark a return to my earlier, funnier efforts (cf. Allen v. Fan From Hell 1980).

At least, I hope some of them were funny. I once told a fellow contributor that my only real goal here was to write three decent laugh lines per post. (Jokes, if you will. If you won’t, go spoon a goose. I have no idea what “go spoon a goose” means, and neither does Google. But it sounds transgressive enough.)

B2L2