I haven't had an interesting thought in my head for two days. I'm filled with thoughts, of course, as I am, for better or worse, a consciousness that cannot be turned off, but they are all stupid. It's icy in the driveway. Don't hit it to her forehand. There's nothing good on television. I wish my head cold would go away. Our kitchen is nice. I like sugar.

I can go on, if you'd like. No, really I can.

For relief from myself I picked up Quentin Bell's biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf. He wrote, about a Woolf forebear:

He was known as the greatest liar in India; he drank himself to death; he was packed off home in a cask of spirits, which cask, exploding, ejected his unbottled corpse before his widow’s eyes, drove her out of her wits, set the ship on fire and left it stranded [darlings, wait for it] in the Hooghly.

About another relative:

He was, I believe, the author of One More Passionate Kiss; this embrace was reserved, however, not for his beautiful wife but for the second footman.

However real life may seem, says Bell, it is a story, and not only a story, but a joke.