Fun fact: I’ve been taking 2400mg of ibuprofen a day since January for complications from my vasectomy. On Friday I was supposed to switch to a prescription NSAID, but my doctor forgot to call it in before she left town for the weekend, so I got to experience withdrawal. I don’t know if you’ve ever gone through withdrawal from prescription painkillers, but I have, and I can say that ibuprofen is worse. Hard to know for sure, though, because I also caught the flu. Or maybe it’s strep; I have a sharp pain in my throat that radiates into one ear, and I can’t really talk. My capacity to complain remains undimmed, however, thanks to this blog. Today, that is all it’s good for. We’ll be back tomorrow with something real. Or I will curse God and die. Fifty-fifty, is how it looks at this point.

John Krakauer’s Missoula has been out for almost ten days now, and damning reviews keep pouring in from people who haven’t read it. Defense attorney David Paoli’s guest editorial in the Missoulian, “Krakauer’s ‘Missoula’ misses the point,” ran the day before the book was released. Two days later, the same paper quoted a woman who flipped through Krakauer’s book at Hastings and found it “biased.” For a book that has received wall-to-wall coverage in the local press, remarkably few people seem to have actually read Missoula. Beware the truth on which everyone agrees but nobody knows firsthand. I read Missoula, and I found it remarkably even-handed, although it got distastefully zealous in its condemnation of Kirsten Pabst at the end. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent, wherein I gently remind the good people of western Montana to read a fucking book. Come for the literary smugness and stay for my review of Hop Along’s Painted Shut, which is delightful. The album, I mean, not the review. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.