Beneficial Use

Is it just that I've come to dislike my addiction to internet reading? Of the kind, I mean, that I keep at, despite myself? I really hate it: trolling the columns of comments (many too short!) page after page. Watching the race wars ignite and explode from afar: I like it.

I've got a problem.

Good internet reading is reading Les Misérables at work at every opportunity and reading it again when you're through. I know this. I strive to be better but I backslide into all the multi-vocal bilge collecting under news reports on Alvin Greene. Then I pull myself up by my bootstraps real hard and far enough to wonder: What happens to my feces?

Because I've started Book 2 of the fifth and final volume of Les Misérables at work and it's all about the Paris sewer system now. The characters are off stage and it's history, it's social criticism, it's visionary, it's an intermission: it's literary architecture now, of the awe-inspiring monumental type, and the highest of pleasures to read when I can find the time which I have not been finding lately (see above). So anyway, back to me over here, one night last week I came home, sat down at my trusty home computer, and spent a couple of very enlightening hours reading about biosolids. I have to say, as a New Yorker, knowing that about 50% of what I produce goes to a good cause is kind of a lift.