Jungly hot night

Hard to sleep well when even the sheets feel too warm. The cat that usually snuggles with us could not bear to do so, and wandered around looking for a comfortable place to sprawl. Perhaps I should have followed him, because today I am exhausted, depressed and feelin' not groovy but grousy. My mother seems to be all right today, no sweaty outbreaks of dizziness, and has been commenting about the NYTBR's "Best American Literature of the Last 25 Years" piece. Says she hasn't read one of them. Looking at the list, I see Helprin's crapola A Winter's Tale, similarly shitty Underworld by Don Delillo, and a few others I read and loathed. Toni Morrison's Beloved which they picked as the best of them all was all right, but there are other writers I have appreciated far more. Oh, but they're not American. Not such a big surprise.
The day ended with a late dinner of crab cakes and salad.
Off to bed to venture a few more pages into the siege of Leningrad, via Vollmann's Europe Central. Reading about fascist Germany and the dictatorship of the Stalinist USSR, there seems to me to be littel funcitonal difference between the two regimes. Much as our country is sliding into some kind of fundie-swayed system, which will be embattled with other fundie-swayed systems in the Middle East. What's the difference, when the results are the same? The plunder of war, the death of innocents. At some point, it's hard to distinguish the players from one another.