The law of wills and estates is fascinating and ridiculous and fascinating again:

(Deliberating on whether a signature on a separate piece of paper can be considered part of the will so as to render it legally valid.) If an unattached paper is to be admitted at all, there is much to be said in favour of an envelope, which may reasonably be held to have a far closer relationship to a document which it encloses than a second and wholly disconnected piece of paper. Envelopes are, by their nature, designed to have what may be described as a dependent and secondary existence, rather than an independent and primary life of their own.

Re Mann (England, 1942)

"Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition; they have only a communal existence; and not only does the meaning of each interpenetrate the other, but all in their aggregate take their purport from the setting in which they are used of which the relation between the speaker and the hearer is the most important part." Judge Learned Hand, NLRB v. Federbush Co., 121 F.2d 954, 957 (2d Cir. 1941).

accretion, n. Growth by organic enlargement; growing of separate things into one, the resulting whole;

crumble, v.i. To fall into small fragments or particles; disintegrate.

Back when this blog was an anonymous experiment in posting snippets of execrably bad automatic writing, I wrote these lines, which I've subsequently tried to fit into a couple of different manuscripts as a sort of free-floating quotation or footnote or something that's not quite up to a poem, but which don't seem to fit anywhere:

Climates facilitate ennui.

Here and here and herer.

Which is a shame, because I really like these lines. My writing is often referred to as Steinian, and that's not always true, but I think these lines are definitely Steinian. There's some fascinating grammatical thing going on, that I don't want to explicate because that would be a step down the sad road of being one's own literary critic, and that can't lead anywhere comforting. But I wanted to at least re-post them, if only to validate the time I've spent staring at something I wrote four years ago as somehow productive.

For one day the other day, it was warm enough to smell the ocean, and it was quite a shock; once you've lived near the ocean for a while you stop noticing the smell of it, so it was nice to be aware of it again. Now we're back to the weather I moved here to get a break from. This old guy on the bus today said it was the worst winter he's seen in 25 years, and the guy he was talking to said he'd been here 57 years and it was the worst he'd ever seen. Not that it's really cold, mind you, and not that as an emigrant from the prairies I can legitimately complain about the amount of snow, it's just that I miss the wet, gray saltiness of winter in Vancouver. Bright and freezing just doesn't fit here.

If you were cruising around one of the richest, quietest, closest-to-the-university suburbs in Vancouver looking to shred someone’s ignition without actually stealing their car, would you target the unimposing 15-year-old sedan with the 4-foot tall stuffed monkey in the back seat, which has held up incredibly well and never needed any major repair (the car, not the monkey, although the monkey has held up pretty well too, and it’s closer to 30 years old)?

Yeah, I guess you would. So would I, but it seems so unfair.

Looking at things objectively, do you think the owner of that car can afford to get it repaired? Do you think she has the mental fortitude, or even the wherewithal, to deal with police reports and insurance people and mechanics and tow truck drivers, during the first week of the final semester of a degree that clearly isn’t taking her life anywhere she thought it might even though she never thought about it very clearly and just kind of came here on a whim? Don’t the Alberta license plates indicate to you that the owner of that particular car is probably not entirely in compliance with the idiotic BC insurance and registration regime, and might prefer to pass her time in this province without drawing any attention to the existence of her car?

And lastly, isn’t it obvious that she hardly ever drives, except to go shopping or to the legal aid clinic where she volunteers to help people who have legal problems, which could very well include being charged with attempted theft of a vehicle, and that she was on her way to the clinic when she discovered the evidence of your incompetent hacking? Do you really want to be the author of that kind of irony?