The best parts of Model Home, by Eric Puchner:

“They had lost this feeling, the way you might lose a favorite gift you were no longer attached to. It had not seemed an important loss at the time: Dustin was born, and if anything a deeper,more devout-seeming love took its place. Once, while they were bathing Dustin together in the sink of their apartment, washing his scabbed-up bellybutton and tiny, heartbreaking penis, Camille had turned to Warren with a look of such stunning affection that he had actually lost his breath. I will never be happier than I am now, Warren had thought. Seventeen years later, he realized how sadly prescient that was.”

“[The guy in the top hat] sprayed some PAM into a plastic bag and then stuffed it up to his face. He blinked his eyes wide when he was finished, like something hatching from an egg.”

“The place gave Lyle a sludgy, unreal feeling, as though she were watching soap operas on a beautiful day.”

“He looked like one of those football players whose popularity hinged on their willingness to eat strange things.”

“The fact that you could know someone almost intimately and then a year later not know him at all seemed to be at the heart of everything sad and fucked up in the world.”

This is the skull of a suspected vampire.

“At the time the woman died, many people believed that the plague was spread by ‘vampires’ which, rather than drinking people’s blood, spread disease by chewing on their shrouds after dying. Grave-diggers put bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires to stop them from doing this.”

Huh. I found her on Legacy Matters, a fascinating blog that’s mostly about death.

The link above is to the site’s “No Way to Go” section, which is worth a look, my friends. Here’s a Roald Dahlian photo of a priest who floated away with a bunch of helium balloons and was never found.

Given some of the more choice examples in the “No Way to Go” section, this one is looking like an unequivocally excellent way to go.

I prefer to think he just floated right on up, no waiting.

From a A Cup of Joe:

“I must learn to love the fool in me–the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my fool.” — Theodore I. Rubin, MD

“Attempts to flee from yourself are useless.” – Paul Auster

(via Sarah)

If you were next to me when I was reading this week’s The Week, these are the parts I would have read to you out loud:

-Car deaths rise 18 percent on election days in The States. So maybe mail-in ballots this year.

-Ottawa is looking to pass a law that would protect people who apologize from being sued. More apologies for everyone!

-Poland may become the first country to chemically castrate pedophiles.

-A Zimbabwean soccer team took a ritual-cleansing dip in a crocodile-infested river, and one of them didn’t come back out.

-Hooman Majd, who has often translated for Iranian President Mahmud Amadenijad, says Amadenijad never said there are no gay people in Iran. Instead, he said Iran has no openly gay culture.

-Doctors are trying to help Erik Ramsey speak again. Ramsey’s body is completely paralyzed, and doctors have implanted wires in his brain that can read brain signals, which computers can then translate into speech. Rad.