Syllabus #254 - Overdue

 More than a day late, never a dollar short.  I didn't get around to my customary Sunday post this past weekend because we spent the better part of Sunday running for our lives.  

That's a gross exaggeration, but we did experience a tornado warning, a power outage, an inability to obtain breakfast, and a harrowing hour and 45 minute drive through torrential rain and hail.  Before that, though, we had a great little Memorial Day Weekend getaway up to the Land Between the Lakes in Kentucky to celebrate our anniversary and the end of the school year.  I almost don't even want to name the place we stayed, because it was such a gem and I don't want the secret to get out and have it be overrun with the molted husks of a trillion Nashville-based tourists descending on it like screeching cicadas, BUT since my dedicated reading audience numbers in the low 1-figure ballpark (hi, Mom!) I guess I'll just say it:

We stayed at the Barkley Lodge at Lake Barkley State Resort Park.  It was great!  10/10 recommend.

It was great, but it wasn't luxurious.  When I say it was a little janky, I say that with all the love in my heart.  It was like stepping into a time machine, or flying through a rip in time like in The Langoliers.  The lodge itself smelled exactly like Grandmom's house.  If you would have kidnapped me, blindfolded me, drugged me so I slept through the journey, driven me there, carried me bound-and-gagged from the trunk of your car into this lodge, and then slapped me awake (while still blindfolded), I definitely would have sworn I was in the pool room at home.  That would be a pretty elaborate ruse, but it would have worked, is what I'm saying.

On Saturday, we lucked into unexpectedly beautiful weather.  We hiked!  We played pickleball!  We swam!  We consumed all manner of stimulating beverages that would make a Mormon blush, and read books on our porch.  We were supposed to stay until Monday, but come Sunday, we had to GTFO or starve because there was no power anywhere, for a good 30 minutes in any direction.  Overall, a solid weekend.

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I didn't have any time to dick around on the internet last week.  No links!  

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Analog Reading:

So I finished Percival Everett's Erasure last Sunday.  I think I already mentioned that, but I'm too lazy to cross-check last week's post.  I need to read more of his work.  He's certainly a genius, and I feel slightly smarter just from the exposure.

Since then, I've been reading the stories in the Stephen King collection, Four Past Midnight.  Again, where does he get off calling this a story collection?  These aren't even novellas, they are what any normal person would consider to be a whole-ass book, and I am counting them as such on my reading spreadsheet.  The first story was The Langoliers, which I finished at the lake.  I kept questioning whether, I, too, had time-traveled to arrive at my accommodations.  

The second story, Secret Window, Secret Garden, is another variation of one of Steve's favorite themes, a writer driven to madness by some internal impulse related to his creative process.  I think King himself must really love and appreciate his wife, because whenever he writes about a writer gone mad, they are always alone in some way.  In this story, the writer is recently divorced and living alone, in The Shining he's unable to connect with his wife because of his debilitating alcoholism, in Rat he's isolated in a remote cabin cut off from society by a massive storm, and in Misery (which I haven't yet read) I understand the writer is a bachelor or divorcee who has gone a little off the rails leading up to the car crash that sets things in motion.

And now, I'm reading The Library Policeman, which is creepy but also, for me, extra hilarious given the library and librarian stereotypes that form the basis for the sinister elements.