April Angst or

"April. Month of dust and lies. The long, high-ceilinged office a gloomy storeroom for cigarette smoke. On the shelves the files enjoy an easeful death. How diverting they must find the civil servant at work, carrying out, with utterly serious mien, utterly trivial tasks. Recording the arrival of registered post. Filing. Incoming mail. Outgoing mail. Ants, cockroaches, and spiders, and the smell of dust stealing in through the closed windows."

This from Naguib Mahfouz' Adrift on the Nile. The first of his books I read. It was this paragraph that made me love his work. Weird, wealthy, alienated but intelligent people--including a female journalist and would be playwright--hang out on a houseboat on the Nile owned by a perpetually stoned civil servant.

Oh how I envy the perpetually stoned civil servant and his house-boat parties!