Five synonyms for "good times"

Things, randomly:

• Blackout: Last week, inspired by the efforts of Austin Kleon, I did my first Newspaper Blackout Poem. This week, you can see it on the Internet! Oh, Internet! And seriously, it was fun to do, and I intend to keep doing them. Here's the current challenge.
  
  
• Thinking: Thanks, Imani! I'm quite flattered. (Especially what with being listed right under The Reading Experience which, were I to put together a list of five of my own, would most likely be included. I mean, damn, Dan Green smarts.)
  
  
• Ishiguro: The two comments added to my last post on Kazuo Ishiguro are very fine comments, and are worth going back to read, if you are digging the recent Ishiguro-ness of this blog. I swear I will respond in kind, and shall continue that post's topics, once I manage to land a full night's sleep right before a day in which I have some time to put some thoughts into not-so-crappy words.
  
  
• Contact: I've abandoned my gmail spam folder. It's closing in on a thousand messages. I'm unwilling to sort through that, and I'm also unwilling to check it on a regular basis. Life is too short. So if you send me e-mail and I do not reply within a week or so (I am so terrible at replying to e-mail) and a response was required or generally expected, feel free to nudge me. Maybe you got spam-foldered, or maybe I'm just being a huge e-mail flake. Likely the latter, of course.
  
  
• Reading: I'm about to start reading some Dickens. Why? Why, when I said I wanted to spend this year reading short books, would I start reading Dickens? It's because I'm in that super-fussy/ultra-futzy mood when nothing on my bookshelf is right and I just finished the book I was reading (The Diviners by Rick Moody which, jeez, that wasn't so bad, the way I think people wanted to make it out to be; it wasn't particularly great, either, I mean, I think I liked Purple America more, but it was still generally fun to read, until maybe the last chunk, when I sort of just wanted to move on) and now I don't know what to read next and and and and and my brain is a spaz. So I'm going to read some Dickens because if you're going to default, you can default to far worse authors than Dickens. (I mean, I almost decided to go with Delillo? Which would have just been a huge mental brainwreck. If you know what I mean, then oh boy, do you know what I mean. Maybe.)