Regardless of Which Day it is...

Working the night shift messes up my sense of timing. I start on one day, finish on the next day, start again on that same day, then finish on the next. I can't keep track.

Regardless of which day it is, I finished reading Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang by Joyce Carol Oates. That was excellent. I don't see how she does it. Reading her stories and novels, the enormity of her talent, it makes me feel small.

I have to quote one part. I love it. It describes an inmate at Red Bank State Correctional Facility For Girls...

Dutchgirl, seventeen years old, scheduled for release on her eighteenth birthday in January 1955, was a favorite of the guards 'cause she'd cultivated the bullying-suspicious manner of the guards, a zest for trouble gleaming in her eyes so she could declare her authority, lay hands on weaker girls, challenge and connive with the stronger. She'd been at Red Bank for two years for having helped her twenty-nine-year-old boy friend rob a gas station and hiding his gun after he'd shot a man. Her face was brutal as a boot, dented, scabbed, scarred; her dark, heavy brows grew together over the bridge of her nose; her bite was sharp and horseshoe-shaped sinking with an angry hunger into, say, grilled cheese toast. Eating, Dutchgirl lowered her head toward her plate so her eyes were dreamy and milky as if with self-loving.