Employment!

After a year out of work, I have accepted a position at a local nonprofit company.

Yay!

So as not to jinx anything (not that I’m particularly superstitious, but …) I’m clamming up about this for now. At least until I get the first paycheck. So, more details to follow, next month.

Currently I’m stashed away in a nondescript motel off an unremarkable highway in an unassuming cookie-cutter town somewhere along the Jersey shore. Yesterday I spent my annual day at the beach with the family. Truth be told, the water was frigid, the wind was gale force, and the entire experience was somewhat unpleasant. I did read sixty pages of my current paperback (see below). I also bonded with Patch, walking up and down the surf searching for cool looking rocks and shells. Today I’m holing up behind closed curtains, to read, write, and study.

Halfway done with the Great White Whale novel. I’m much more learned than I was when I first surfed through it, nearly twenty years ago. I pick up on the literary and classical references that swam away from me on that maiden voyage. Plus I pleasantly perceive how perfectly alliterative Melville the mythic proto-modern American whaling wordsmith was. Like I like to be, to lesser or larger levels.

Been going through a UFO fringe-y thing of late. Every couple of years it happens; now’s the time this time. Read Curtis Peebles’s excellent slightly skeptical history of the phenomenon last week (review to follow) and now almost finished with Dr. Hynek’s The UFO Experience, of which Spielberg’s Close Encounters was heavily influenced. I am of two mind regarding UFOs. As a student of physics (albeit highly lapsed), I disbelieve the extra-terrestrial intelligence hypothesis fervently. Yet … something’s there. Which leads to me weirder explanations, perhaps the subject of a future post. Irrespective of the ultimate origin of the UFO phenomenon, there’s a campy creepiness I absolutely love about reading first-person accounts of sauceric encounters, hearkening wistfully back to the dangerous days of my youth. I eat it up.

Anyway, that’s the quick update. I’d like to do two more blog entries before the end of the month, so check back, okay?

In the meantime, why not read about my Close Encounter of the First Kind?