The Fat Man Today

When my grandmother was born, at least according to her, she could hear the bells ringing over at the local church. The exact moment she passed away was at around six in the morning, wherein the local bells were also ringing, waking the people up for the early morning Angelus. It's six in the morning as I type this entry. Whenever I'm fully functional and awake at this time of the day, I can't help but remember my grandmother, and the dreams I had of her months, then weeks before, and the days after she died. I miss her candidness sometimes, her laid-back attitude and ready, winsome smile that everybody loved. But most of all, what I do miss is her piano playing - not that I'd want to hear her playing now , because that'd be freaky as hell, but she once told me that it used to be part of her morning exercise, to stretch out on the piano and noodle a bit with the keys. She was inseparable from the piano. It was her opinion that she didn't need a house; all she

Salman Rushdie's probably in his declining years, as evidenced by his performance with one of his newest books entitled "Shalimar The Clown." Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Rusdhie's work - although I've never read "Midnight's Children," his ouvre, due to the sheer length of the book, I've read and enjoyed most of his other works, most notable of which would be his short story collection "East, West" and one of the newer novels, "Fury."

STARE INTO THE MIND of a genius, and you will end up extremely bored. Okay, some folks might crook their eyes at this, and bring up examples like Einstein or Mozart. Well let me tell you, those guys weren't just geniuses, they were enlightened souls. When I talk of genius, I mean people who just happen to be smarter than your average above average person (smarter than me, say). I mean, I realize that there's a wealth of knowledge that's ripe for the picking for everybody, and I also know of the orgasmic feel that comes with learning something knew or ground-breaking, so I'm not putting these intelligent folks down, because they're important too. What I'm saying is that sometimes, you just can't help but think that mebbe these folks focus too much on knowledge. What brought this about? I was reading the blog of a friend I recently met, and I realized that all of her entries were strikingly long, and strikingly honest - and abominously boring. Don't get

I LOVE WALKING . When you've got a lot of weighty things that require some thinking, a good, long walk's probably the perfect thing to clear away the cobwebs in your head. Matter of fact, I love walking so much that I've taken to walking the twenty minutes from my house to the stop where I take the bus that shuttles me to work every morning. Conversely, when I take the bus (or the occasional jeep) back home, I walk the twenty minutes from the bus stop to my house. This way, I make sure to take the requisite 4000 steps / day cardiovascular requirement of the average human body (not that my body's average in any way). I also get enough alone time to think. This evening, I got to thinking about titles. Back in Journ 101, Ian Esguerra helped us establish that the lead paragraph of a news article was what drew your readers, so an effective lead was your bait, so to speak. When it comes to fiction (or, according to one of my dearest friends, blog posts) titles hardly seem to