Buddy system

The person I've climbed with longest, a good friend, finally pried me out of the house and off for a session at the climbing gym. It was good to see her again, and have a good strenuous couple of hours of getting up routes, even if we had to do it inside.
Still plugging away at Europe Central, but its nightmarish qualities keep me from immersing myslef in it for very long. I've started the collected short stories of Katehrine Mansfield, a writer originally from New Zealand who died of TB pretty young, at 34, between the World Wars. There are 88 completed stories, ranging from 1908 to the early '20's. The more intimate quality of her settings gives me relief from reading about the unconscionable horrors of WWII. Don't know if it's my current state of mind, or some innate part of my make up that gives me the horrors while reading the Vollmann opus. Probably a bit of both; I've never appreciated Hollywood catsup splatters, even though it's fake. And although Europe Central is fiction, it's firmly set in concentration camps and battle fronts. Maybe one's imagination runs away with the possibility that we might suffer similarly, oh, say, like they do in Iraq these days...