Pic: On a rough day, a patriotic doughnut and at least one shining sea.

And now I have the song stuck in my head, replacing most words with doughnut. Thoroughfare for doughnut beat across the doughnutness…

Eating lunch now, I'm celebrating America and doughnuts by reading the Homer Price doughnut story on Amazon. The best part? After the machine goes crazy, I'd forgotten how at last they sell the thousands of doughnuts and also lots of coffee and milk and soda — a contest.

That's how ElvisNews.com reports the Jackson death. Judging by the angle and the resulting reader comments, the Elvis community at large is no fan of the late King of Pop. Why? There are the Jackson abuse allegations, for sure, but with a massive dose of musical rivalry. If you want odder reactions to the death, Elvis fans are good place to start. (Sincerely, an Elvis fan but apparently not as big a one as I could be.)

I love the beach and distrust it. I call the trip the most relaxing week of my year each year, and that's true. But relaxation and satisfaction are two different things, and to a great extent each year, the week leaves me wanting. As much as I may escape here, as much as I may hate to go home at the end of the week, as often as I may threaten to leave whatever job for some seasonal island work, there are no answers to be found when there are no true responsibilities, there are no people, there are no choices. There's nothing, really, to be gained or lost.

So, important people in life, I've brought them here or I've kept them away. I've hidden the escape factor or laid it out there. No matter. The situations have ended up the same. Happiness at home or away turns out to have nothing to do with place and everything to do with people and choices. Even if choices are far off, there's a certain management that can be done to treat the possibilities fairly and openly. There's a responsibility in life to care before you ever get in the car or arrive at the big bridge and fruit stands. They're locations, and that's all.

I've put too much faith in those locations, I know. Whatever ways I can hope to come here and then run magic or fight fate, the beach freezes the skinny from the ocean and burns the pale off the sand.  There's so much beauty around, but participation, as wonderful as it may be for a time, isn't conversion. If you want someone else, want someone else. Underneath the pier, the best place to go, turn around and come back, the tide's doing the same, in another direction. Has to be more?

The card from one of last week's birthday highlights. Thanks so much to Stephanie, Katie and Laura for it. (And the meeting was productive.)

Was talking with someone today over whether you could be into Morse code and being a jerk at the same time. I say it's all done, played out.

Take the whining of Samuel Morse: "I have been so constantly under the necessity of watching the movements of the most unprincipled set of pirates I have ever known, that all my time has been occupied in defense, in putting evidence into something like legal shape that I am the inventor of the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph!! Would you have believed it ten years ago that a question could be raised on that subject?" Also, he hated Catholics and immigrants and loved slavery.

So there. After the man himself, no more room for Morse code jerks. I don't know the code, but clearly it should only be used for good stuff.

My guess? Vampire bats. My apartment building's guess? Some kind of weather phenomenon, like hail. But the building admits it's not totally sure on that one yet. So… vampire bats stay on the table.

Whatever ripped into my apartment and others chose the right time to hit: a summer Friday night. Like I learned a long time ago from either the Hardy Boys or a Choose Your Own Adventure book, if you used ice at night for a summer crime, the evidence was gone by morning. The culprit in The Case of Old Cooper's Studio was able to slash my screen, crack a window and do far more damage to neighbors. Glass covered our sidewalk and lot, and a team arrived to begin repairs. Damn bats.

Unless you're the one particular dude with a suburban Detroit improv joint who won. His essay got him $100k and, as mentioned in this blog previously, a role in introducing the new Edy's flavor, "Red, White & No More Blues." The flavor has strawberry and blueberry swirls mixed in vanilla ice cream, with a "Recovery never tasted so good" badge on it.

Slayer of all beasts, the Minotaur meets the new girl in her corner at the computer, apparently lost in distraction with the screen, and in the Labyrinth the fear is both mutual and hidden between a mix of old and new social excuses. Stephen O'Connor's fiction piece in this week's New Yorker builds simply, the incorporated telling of one myth fueling exposure of another, one obvious but important. In the middle:

The Minotaur was a novice of arc and swell and dip, a new-minted connoisseur of smooth and tender and sway. That little snippet of bird-peep that entered the new girl’s voice whenever she got excited, or when she thought something she had done was stupid—he wanted to put that in a box, tie it up with a leather thong, and keep it around his neck. That way she had of elbowing him in the ribs, rolling her eyes, slapping herself on the top of her head and saying, "Only joking!"—why did his cobblestone feet always do a shuffling dance when she did that? Why did his shoulders squinch together and his floppy lips twist up at the corners? To his embarrassment was added shame, and the Minotaur found that he could bear his message of ultimate truth only on the sly, when the new girl was asleep, or when she was looking the other way. He took to wearing a kerchief and giving his lips a hasty wipe after every meal. Then, one day, the new girl was gone, and the Minotaur worried that, in a moment of thoughtlessness, he had gobbled her up. When he didn’t see her for several weeks, he could think of no other explanation. A year passed, and then a century, and new-girllessness became a fact—as simple and discrete as other facts. In a way, life became easier for the Minotaur, as easy as it had been before the new girl’s arrival. But only in a way. In another way, the Minotaur began to wonder if he was getting too old for his job. His vocabulary increased. To "embarrassment" and "shame" he added "joyless." He added "regret." He added "lost."

In a different issue — my beach catch-up is well underway (halfway catch-up, at least, only feeling comfortable bringing so many issues) — there's Dean Young's poem "Delphiniums in a Window Box." Insta-sad opening line's internal rhyme, "Every sunrise, even strangers' eyes."

Casey writes a solid response to the Weingarten rant. In part:

A professional critic believes only he can listen to rock, electronica and hip-hop and have something interesting to say about all three. But you know who else can do that? Everyone on earth. Read your friends’ musical interests on Facebook or MySpace — half of them say they like 'everything.' I’ve yet to meet one of these straw men Weingarten describes, the ones that listen only to metal or hip hop or bands that play exclusively on a three-block stretch of Williamsburg. To be alive today is to sing Grizzly Bear in the shower, blast T-Pain on the ride to work, hum Coldplay in the grocery store, rock Jay Z at the gym, and have Jose Gonzalez sing you to sleep. And we do it all without Rolling Stone's help.