I am halfway through Pastoralia by George Saunders and it is everything I expected. My big venture outside netted Pastoralia, Z Channel, and some soup makings.

Walking out of the cold into the library felt so good. I returned my embarrasingly overdue copy of Stiff and my million-times renewed copy of OPRH and perused the sale rack. Nothing.

Right after the steps up to the first floor of my branch is a cricle of four upolstered chairs. If you wallk in around 2:30 or so, the chairs will be filled with four to six teens, being kinda loud and talking about dumb stuff. Sometimes they have books and occasionally a silence descends on the group if one of the alpha-females decides she really wants to get her homework done. Around this time, the computers are filled with kids too. I always spy on what they are doing and it is usually email or some kind of complicated networking site hoo-ha. It reminds me a little of being a kid and hanging out in the downtown Borders by the zines, waiting for that Xeroxed message meant just for me, but messing around and causing some trouble in the meanwhile. I am glad to see those kids in the library, but I wonder how much they are actually getting out of meeting there. What this neighborhood needs is a good coffeeshops so the nerd-type teens can get all caffinated and shoot horomones at each other somewhere where silence isn't so encouraged.

I am thinking about how to best approach writing about Half Life. The book really rocked me while I was reading it...