Riding home on the train today, trying to plow through the early pages of Faulkner's "Sound and the Fury" (don't know why I decided to re-read that), I noticed a lot of noise: chatty women sitting across from me, a conversation somewhere behind me, and a middle-aged moron a seat away from me plugged into his music headphones, singing along with his eyes closed -- even playing some air guitar.

Then his cellphone rang and I had to hear his conversation. It started like this:

"And why did you drink lakewater?"

Took the boys out back after we ate tonight. They packed plastic shovels and other toy-junk into their dump trucks and declared that they were going to Wyoming to dig for treasure. They rolled their trucks to the end of the driveway, unloaded them, and started scraping through the shallow dirt at the edges of the asphalt.