A Non-Poetry Jury Duty (Sort of) Post

7:49 am. Well, I am off to jury duty at Kings County Civil Court. Instead of "live blogging," I'm just periodically recapping. I mean, what could be more exciting than jury duty, right? And Civil Court no less.

Aside from my BillyBlackBerry, I am armed with three (3) short stories I printed out from The New Yorker site (T.C. Boyle, Salman Rushdie, and Roddy Doyle) and a non-fiction piece by Nick Paumgarten about elevators.

Also, I have last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, with an unmolested crossword puzzle.

Plus, Kurt Vonnegut's first posthumous colection Armageddon in Retrospect, as well as a non-fiction tome, Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community, by Margo DeMello (Duke University Press).

Not to mention my journal. Even though I just did. With all this to do, I shouldn't be bored. But I will be.

10:17 a.m. Homeward bound. Plans to have the kids off and occupied tomorrow, and the fact that this is a week they are off from school, threw a wrench into the juryworks. I received a postponement. And I barely cracked the tattoo book. So much for an exciting post!

On the train home, read the aforementioned T.C. Boyle story, "The Lie". Vintage TCB: dark as always, with a seemingly good protagonist slipping on a moral slippery slope that transported him from benign to tragic. Read it here.