Rick came over again today. He was kind of rude with me. I thought he enjoyed helping me out, but he kept muttering something about cramping his style and then, before he left, he told me that I needed to change my style a little more. I asked him what he meant and he pointed out that my sweater was all I ever wore. I was going to show him my closet where I keep all my sweaters, but he didn't seem too interested. I admit that my sweaters do seem to look a little similar, but I like them and they keep me warm. This is Seattle you know. It's not as if we live in a tropical climate.

I was a little upset after Rick left today so I went to the bookstore down the street from my new house. I always get a new book whenever I am feeling down. It cheers me up. When I say 'new' I mean new to me. My favorite books are the ones that were written two or three hundred years ago in Europe. Chaucer, Bacon, Shakespeare, Moliere, Hugo, Cervantes, Voltaire, DeMaupassin, Dumas... I could go on and on. Those old books are hard to find so I spend a lot of time in the bookstores looking for them. Rick went with me once to see how I could find so much excitement in a bookstore. He left after about two minutes. He complained that there weren't any magazines. Philistine!

At the bookstore, some girl named Raine was signing her latest effort. They also have these greeting cards by "Lucy." Where do they get this stuff? How can these halls, hallowed by Hemmingway, Poe, Dickens, Pope, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Steinbeck, among others, be contaminated by these unclassical, radical charlatans who pose as writers?

I mean, I confess that I don't know much about that Raine girl, but just look at her! Raine! What kind of name is that? She's got that "I can put anything on a web-page look." I hate that! Modern technology is the bane of literature. Now-a-days any dolt with a keyboard can publish whatever garbage spills out of the sewer of his filthy mind. Literature has been forever tainted by electronic typewriters and computers. All the effort, all the thought, all the proofreading, all the anything that made good literature great has been erased by computer-aided ease of publication.

I guess that Raine won't go away and if she did, she'd come back another day, but if today's would-be writers would pick up a plume, the manliest of writing impliments, and dip it into an incessantly dripping ink well, then we would have some good writing. You see. Those plumes are so clumsy, cumbersome and messy that the only way to write is to carefully think out each line before you physically sit down to write it. These odious, perfidious modern writers sit down to a computer screen or fancy electronic typewriter and try to make their thoughts keep up with their hands. They call themselves writers and go to book-signings, but they are mere magicians, wizards of infinitely bad writing who are able to fool simplistic minded people who like to take up my browsing space in bookstores by waiting in line to have their new books scribbled in. It is like unto a garbage man going to the dump and delivering the goods therein to all the homes in the neighborhood where the trash cans are already full!

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Nap 5	English Muse	Raine	Rick 4	Lucy