raining, pouring, snoring (whaling)

It is late and it's raining and this photo is from several days ago, but I think that this is probably what it will look like tomorrow, so it's like a picture OF THE FUTURE from the past. Like that. (it is late! and it's raining!)

My schedule has gone petite bananas for the last few days (lots of spur of the moment "I can be there in an hour" sub jobs), so I haven't had time to post the things I wanted to post, but I did want to say that just yesterday I helped an Abe Lincoln Beard Victim who was only SEVENTEEN and wearing a plaid shirt. (clearly of the pioneer timber town throwback school of abe lincoln facial hair.) He was trying to do the right thing by paying off some fines, and I was trying to do the right thing by not asking inappropriate facial hair questions. We both were successful, and there was much rejoicing across the land.

In other news, I think I might have to make a reading schedule for myself, which feels weird and wrong, but it's the only way I'm going to ever get through Moby Dick (and other long books I wish to read), which is ridiculous because it is completely charming and soon to be completely bonkers once Ahab gets WHALE FEVER. (I suppose he already has the fever, it just is waiting to be reignited.) Whenever I read it I have heart-eyes for Melville, but somehow it is too easy to put it down and not pick it up again.

Anyway, here's a little bit that charmed me regarding my beloved butter and the propriety and pecking order of the cabin table. (Flask is low man on the cabin table totem pole.) "Least of all, did Flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners of the ship denied it to him on account of its clotting his clear, sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!"

A butterless man! such an evocative description.