Obituarium

• X. choked on a spicy tuna roll while listening to his blind date espouse her political views. He died as one of the restaurant's shokunin attempted to perform CPR.
• N. suffocated himself with a tyvek shipping envelope.
• Z., a suicide, is found by his brother, who rewrites the suicide note before calling the police

I collect these in my Moleskine and never do anything with them. They're inspired mainly by two things: The local news briefs I read in the Gainesville [Fla.] Sun while we were living down there and Chekhov's notebooks, which are coming back into print. You can also read the notebooks at Project Gutenberg. There is no better book ever -- or at least this week.