Hello World! (yes, we begin with the very basic "printf" of computer programming). We have this to report:

1. Roberto Balano is a friking genius, and one must (re-)learn how to write a novel from him

2. We are also feasting on lamb and wine (why does this choice of food sound so Hebraic?), and both complement Balano's "Savage Detectives" very well

3. This hotel room is being rocked by tourists descending upon this California wine valley

4. We are not tourists here but then maybe we are, metaphorically speaking, as we pass through others' lives, and let others pass through ours

5. Bach is making us feel very very religious but then today, in the interiors, nihilism seems to have a upper hand

6. Perhaps the latter feeling comes to fore if one reads Balano to wine and Bach,

7. which makes us want to give up these endless games we are playing (or perhaps more appropriately, "are learning to play"), and head out into...

8. oblivion, sunsets, red dust, rivers, green leaves in the rain, the dark space between a woman's breasts, the terrain of skin at one's wrists, stones, and chains of words

Segovia playing Bach's "Chaconne"; written apparently soon after Bach's wife died, this maze of repeating notes that ebb and flow is where the endlessly restless mind will rest today.

Between a day of work and a night which will be filled with work, I pass through the valley in which

the sun, aslant through the cypresses, is cooling its fingers in the river, and every hill has become more vivid in its own long shadows.

I take these minutes with their sudden arc of geese flying across the highway as a sacrament for the heart to be.