the deep moans round with many voices

Three unconnected thoughts:

1. Today at work, around 5:30pm after BW had left for the day and I was alone in the store, I went out to the back room for some reason or other and happened to glance at the windows.

Which were crawling with black flies. Literally. 40 or 50 of them.

I managed to kill at least 80% of them over the next few hours (whenever I had no customers in the store and stole a couple minutes to go back and smash things with a flyswatter and a handful of paper towel, rinse fly corpses off the flyswatter in the bathroom sink, and go back to kill more) but several were marginally brighter than the others and zoomed away into other areas, including the front of the store.

I mentioned the infestation to a customer while I was swatting a persistent little fly that had been circling my cash register, and she said something similar had happened to her once -- dozens of flies in her basement in the middle of winter. Apparently an animal had died in the walls of her house, a fly had laid maggots, and they had all finished their metamorphosis around the same time.

I left a note for PM and JM in case more flies appear tomorrow.

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2. I have tried, off and on for several years now, to read the DCU fanfiction of thete1, and I have failed every time. In theory, I should like her work -- she writes about characters I like, she has AU ideas I find fascinating, and she writes long stories, long enough to drown in. The trouble is that, without fail (so far as I can tell), her stories use those ideas as window dressing for sex scenes that bore me to tears and/or would squick me if I had the slightest emotional investment in the reality of the characters as she portrays them, and for relentlessly sex-centric character interpretations that refuse to map intelligibly onto my reading of canon and my gut-level understanding of human nature and society.

Yet her stories obviously work like gangbusters for a lot of people.

I wish I could find a headspace that would let me get through thete1's work. Alternatively, I wish someone would take her basic ideas and rewrite them as gen epics with no sex whatsoever -- because I get the feeling she links absolutely all human connections and obsessions to sex (unless a character is damaged and/or socipathic, and even then the damage will often be addressed via a sexual lens), and god damn it, sex (kinky or vanilla or what-the-fuck-ever) is not the be-all and end-all of human relationships!

This rant brought on by yet another attempt to read one of her stories which I saw recced by a person whose opinion I trust -- said attempt failed miserably something like 10,000 words in, which figures. *sigh* I really should know better by now.

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3. I went back to the library and found a different general history of India -- not the impossible French one, which made me want to ask the author if he would, around chapter 3, start proclaiming the pyramids were really built by aliens. Anyway, this one is proving much more readable. So far I have reached the 500-year confused era between the Maurya empire and the Gupta dynasty. Since the time period I am using for "Debts" is right around the rise of the Guptas, this is very relevant background information. :-)