Four days after taking the night off because I was 100 pages from the end of Book One, I’m taking the night off because I am 100 pages from the end of Book Two. I think I’m going to take a little break in between two and three, but not long, and if Jay Kristoff ends this one with the same level of cliffhanger that he did the second Nevernight book, I won’t have any choice in the matter. So we’ll see.

I have, like most of you, spent most of the day playing Schrödinger’s Senators, and finally found an upside to waking up at the ass-crack of dawn every day: several of my friends and family members woke up to a text from me reading “Good morning! Lindsey Graham is dead!”. As of this moment, Mitch McConnell’s office has released a statement that he is, in fact, alive, along with a still picture conspicuously featuring the sports section of a newspaper from today. I am unsatisfied; I’m willing to believe that he is alive (the notion that they literally had his corpse in a cold room waiting for, well, something never really sat well with me) but if I were a Kentuckian I would be raising pure bloody hell demanding 1) an explanation for why the fuck he’s been radio-silent for a month and 2) if not an actual press conference, at least a Zoom group interview or something. I’m not willing to go so far as to say the photo is faked, but a still photo of a (surprisingly healthy-looking) person and a written statement is not a proof of capability. I want to know if there’s still a person in there, damn it.