Steven Wright is coming to the auditorium that I work at (at the ticket office). He’s a comedian (had bit parts in many movies, like the pilot in So I Married and Ax Murderer and “couch guy” in Half Baked). We find out, that he has this clause in his contract, that says that all midgets have to be seated in the front row…no kidding. Of course, we are a theatre auditorium and sell most of our tickets pre show, over the phone…which makes one wonder how we are supposed to discover these midgets. I volunteered to ask every customer over the phone if they were a midget (“Mam, you sound kind of short…are you able to ride all the rides at Six Flags?”). My boss said that would not be necessary.

Election day has come and gone…and what is there to say? More than I have the energy for here…maybe a later post.

Today I bought a new, illustrated edition of some of Poe’s stories and poems with an introduction by Neil Gaiman (my favorite living author)…so impulse buy and bombs and credit cards away!

Looking through the pages, I got to thinking the dark tales Poe writes and the things I try and write and the “Whys?” and the “Isn’t that morbid?” and other questions besides. There are dark things that stalk Poe’s world. Ture. “There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the Bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust” (Poe, “Mask of the Red Death”). But that isn’t the ultimate point, the morbid and the grotesque, those are just some of the trappings but not the ultimate end. Poe, more than anything, wrote about beauty. In his easay about his writing style in “The Raven” he admitted that poetic beauty, not morbidity, was the reason he chose his subject matter for the poem – that, “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”).