Cranky Large Medium reading, 1 June

Go away.

Why won't you leave? Do I need to say a magic word, or something? Pleeeeeeeeeze. Go. Away. And yet you are still here, magic word notwithstanding. Blast it all. What will it take for me to be shut of you? A reading? Can that be all? Wonderful! Here you are, then:

Goood gravy, but you're annoyingly chipper! A hundred grumps can't bring your spirits down. Maybe being kicked off the side of a mountain...? Well, when disappointment eventually comes to you, it comes bigtime, with tears and wailing and all the noise of a tot losing its mama. You can be pacified with music and pretty books. You love your home and would stay in it all day and night, if you could. The rest of the world probably wouldn't miss you, anyway.

Are you happy, now? Of course not. But you do have one thing you can be pleased about, and that is your life. You have it. That beats what these people have, as, on this date in history, they all knelt at the Big Gates: Marcus Severus Didius Julianus, Tokugawa Ieyasu, David Mitchell, James Buchanan, Pierre-Joseph Desault, Hans Berger, John Story, Mary Dyer, Samuel Werenfels, David Wilkie, Pope Gregory XVI, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, William Manchester, Hank Ketcham, Melchior Franck, David Ruffin, Leslie Howard, Darwin Joston, Mary Kornman, Frances Heflin, Lester Patrick, Earl "Curly" Lambeau, Rube Marquard, Edward Holyoke, James Gordon Bennett, Sr., Wilfrid B. Israel, Adolf Eichmann, Helen Keller, Arthur Nielsen, Yves Saint Laurent,

and John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson, I.

Not my funeral, no trial at all.
Happy birthday, anyway.