it's not morse code, it's just obnoxious

So...

Our new upstairs neighbor seems to think the putting together of the World Machine should begin around 10 p.m. every evening. Unfortunately, this is just about the time that I think everything should shut the fuck up and be quiet. Else there will be trouble. He has a day, based on the fact that his moving help may be of the vampiric persuasion, and after that, well, complaining, complaining, complaining until that's the most obnoxious thing going on in the building.

Did I mention that they seem to be listening to Sheryl Crow? I'm not going to throw any stones -- people listen to different music when involved in heavy lifting. During the fixing up of the apartment next door, there was a heavy handman preference for '80s rock. It happens. But puleeze, you can't soak up the sun during the midnight hour, so knock the shit off or wear headphones.

I want neighbors who have no friends. Really, that's the ideal. We are lonely people who may or may not cross the line from checking out too many library books and having too many plants to killing. Serial killers. The guy next door who you never have to complain about.

I kid, I kid.

Anyway:

Below I liked as much as everyone said I would and not a bit more. To me, the scary and atmospheric parts were not accomplished inside the submarine at all. To me, the scary part of the boat is the ocean. The fact that you're deep and the waves, and world, nobody understands can come crashing in on you whenever it wants is terrifying and what more do you need? The ocean is terrifying. Ask people who know a lot about it. What they say will scare you even more.

Shiver.

A much, much better than average ghost story.

And, lastly, the following from the papers today:

In the current issue of Book magazine, apparently Stephen King has some fun with "literary" writing.

So sayeth the, um, article about (the) king: It begins with an attack on Jonathan Franzen's much-praised literary novel, "The Corrections," as "patronizing and self-indulgent" -- a very good way to begin an essay, in my opinion.
King is ticked off at Franzen's condescending scorn for popular novelists, and he has responded with a wild fantasy based on the delightfully absurd premise that high-tone literary novelists like Franzen, Annie Proulx and Margaret Drabble sell millions of books while pop novelists like himself are barely scraping by. This explains those trailer photos, which are part of the elaborate joke.
"I, like virtually every other popular novelist in America, live mostly on a subsidy check of just over twelve thousand dollars a month," King writes. "The check comes from Literature 'R' Us, a company incorporated in the Bahamas."

I'm not sure who this benefits, if anybody, but I'm sure looking forward to buying a magazine I hardly every buy. So, kudos to them.

And there was something else, but I'm too tired. G'night.