quote of the day

... this is probably the closest I will ever come to being able to describe the sense I get from observing people in Ottawa... Courtesy of Russell Banks, from "Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story" in Success Stories.

The bar, a cocktail lounge at street level, with a restaurant upstairs, is decorated with hanging plants and unfinished wood paneling, butcher block tables and captain's chairs, with a half-dozen darkened, thickly upholstered booths along one wall. Three or four men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five are drinking at the bar and, like the man who has just entered, wear three-piece suits and loosened neckties. They are probably lawyers, young, unmarried lawyers gossiping with their brethren over martinis so as to postpone arriving home alone at their white-washed townhouse apartments, where they will fix their evening meals in radar ranges and afterwards, while their TVs chuckle quietly in front of them, si ton their couches and do a little extra work for tomorrow. They are, for the most part, honorable, educated, hard-working, shallow and moderately unhappy young men.

Apologies in advance for the bruised egos.