She had never paid much attention to the Middle Eastern situation, per se, and now she knew why. It was an overload of craziness. It was a seventy-piece orchestra rehearsing a funeral dirge and a wedding march simultaneously in a broom closet. It was a firebug convention in a straw hotel.

Tom Robbins is up there with James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison for me. That means he writes so well that I stop writing.

I hope I'm never so old that I stop counting down to my birthdays. Only three weeks till my birthday!