Charlie sent along this poem, along with the blog entry that details when he discovered it. I thought you should see it:

Japanese Restaurant

When you’re young you think loneliness
is just something that happens to you, say,
if you don’t get any letters for a while
or no-one asks you out. It isn’t;
it’s part of the basic design concept
of the human heart — like Tartini’s
Abandoned Dido. Me and the violin.
The girl at the next table wipes
her chopsticks and puts her hair up
with them. My teacher says I should brighten
the tone. “Don’t worry,” she says,
“the dark will still shine through.”

–Frederick Jones, from Congreve’s Balsamic Elixir

I’m listening to Soul Coughing’s “True Dreams of Wichita,” which is one of those eerie songs that has voices in the background. If you were to relax, you might allow them to just be part of the sonic landscape. But my ear keeps singling them out and trying to construct the meaning.

It’s really dangerous for the following conditions to be met:

• I am home alone– Ladybug is away on business.
• I have been surfing the Internet for over an hour and have been IMing with friends.
• I begin looking at Amazon
• I see that certain books I covet have come out
• My resistance to Amazon’s clever marketing has been lowered through any variety of factors