Let-downs
It's a holiday weekend, isn't it? I'd almost completely forgotten, I was so wrapped up in everything else.

Not that Labor Day's an especially big holiday for me. Kurt, I know, has a big family gathering every year, but I never had enough of a family for one of those to achieve critical mass - Mom and Dad were only children, like me, and they'd had me relatively late in life. Now, Dad's gone and Mom's retired to Florida. And it's not like there's a big Labor Day tradition of any kind, like fireworks on the Fourth of July or anything like that.

Kurt didn't invite "Michelle" to the big family shindig, but I guess that makes sense, since it's only been a month - not quite "meet the parents" time. Not that I'm sure I'd want to go, anyway, after the other night. Besides, I've seen what happens to pretty girlfriends when Kurt and his brothers get together, and I don't particularly feel like being "appreciated", like I/Michelle was some wild animal he'd captured.

Just feeling kind of down. The baseball game was brutal to watch; seeing Pedro Martinez pitch every fifth day is one of the great perks of being a Red Sox fan, and it's no fun to see him vinced and vulnered, so to speak. Especially when Grady Gump just seemed to be switching pitchers for the sake of switching pitchers after he came out, like he was trying to find the one having a bad day.

Then, after that, I finished "The Teeth Of The Tiger", and that's really a bummer, since it makes two below-par books in a row for Clancy. I mean, this thing didn't even have an ending, the "the ends justify the means" vibe it gives off is scary, it's got no really good villain, and there's only two really exciting sequences. The worst part, though, is that TC spends a lot of time having characters talk about how cool Jack Ryan and John Clark are, and they're not even in the book. Instead, we get Jack Ryan Jr. and two of his cousins, who we really don't have much personal investment in and, unlike Ryan's debut in "The Hunt For Red October", aren't part of a really compelling story.

Ah, well. Tomorrow I'll get back to Brin's "Kiln People", which I'd put down to read "Teeth". Hopefully that'll be an improvement.

-Martin
- posted 10:46 PM - - (archive use only)