If She Knew the Prognosis She Would Begin to Feel Alone, Too

Been forty-eight fucking hours since my last fix of obamacrank and I'm really starting to feel sick man, I need me a fucking spectacle and I fucking need it now.

Don't tell me to take fucking methamilitantdysphoriadone.

*

• What it takes to win a Nobel Prize.
• Depraved, obscene absurdities.
• Our threatisest threat.
• Militant dysphoria, continued.
• Militant dysphoria, continued. 
• Militant dysphoria, continued.
• Militant dysphoria, continued.
• UPDATE! Synedoche.
• A question I asked a few weeks ago.
• On the second lives of wetfarts.
• Awesome wetfart.
• Friedman's wetfart, and a response.
• What's in the government's databases about you?
• TPM Headline: Melancon Endorse Anti-Rape Law, After Vitter Opposed It.

• Melakon?
• UPDATE! Elric goes to hockey night in Toronto, in post insults Baltimore AND Pittsburgh. (Elric should call his parents so they stop bugging me he doesn't call.)
• Well, while this is good, it renders Wednesday at RFK relatively meaningless to USMNT (I suppose you could make the argument that winning the hexagonal outright might mean a higher seed and better draw at WC10, like FIFA won't seed Mexico higher regardless).
• UPDATE! This could be the a fun week in DC.
• New translation of Tin Drum, which I've tried three times over the years, never making it past page 50.
• Greenblatt reviews Mantel's Wolf Hall (and meditates on what makes a historical novel): Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is a startling achievement, a brilliant historical novel focused on the rise to power of a figure exceedingly unlikely, on the face of things, to arouse any sympathy at all. To be sure, one could imagine worse: we are not being invited to enter the life of, say, Stalin's sinister henchman Lavrenti Beria. But Thomas Cromwell, the focus of Mantel's loving attention for almost six hundred pages, is not that distant from the bureaucratic architect of the Great Purge.
• UPDATE! Sharp short story.
• As a gimmick for their pledge drive, KEXP asked listeners to vote on different subjects - best song, best album, etc. Find the lists here, of which I'll only say this: all's fine, but if I hear Jeff Buckley's - or anyone's -version of "Hallelujah" one more fucking time, I'm fucking gonna scream. (Fucking Fleet Foxes too.)
• UPDATE! Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Eternal Memory.
• HEY! Feelies song!

*

THE DIAGNOSIS

James Tate

Lincoln was sixty years old when the doctor told him he only had forty more years to live. He didn't tell his wife, with whom he confided everything, or any of his friends, because this new revelation made him feel all alone in a way he had never experienced before. He and Rachel had been inseparable for as long as he could remember and he thought that if she knew the prognosis she would begin to feel alone, too. But Rachel could see the change in him and within a couple of days she figured out what it meant. "You're dying," she said, "aren't you?" "Yes, I'm dying," Lincoln said, "I only have forty years." "I feel you drifting away from me already," she said. "It's the drifting that kills you," Lincoln whispered.

*