July is The Jackal

Oh frabjous day when the next installment of a beloved story (The Book of Life, yes!!) shows up in plain cardboard just inside the front gate!

Oh beloved month of July, when hours and hours of each day are spent watching the Tour de France!

Dear people, here's your warning. For the next week or so, you might want to refrain from interrupting me, or you will hear me say these words:

Are you talking to me during The Jackal?

For those who don't get the reference, it's to a scene in the very first season of The West Wing, CJ Cregg late-night lip-synching a classic.

Sure, maybe it dates us (who cares), but Are you talking to me during The Jackal is part of our language now. It's what we say when someone breaks in on a moment of thrall, of deep reverence or flow, blundering in with their words and noise, unknowing. It calls for immediate cessation. When it's said to me, I instantly shut up, knowing my silence then is the only appropriate response, an expression of deep respect.

The unschooled, though, might not get the reference. They might keep talking, and then suffer the next slap:

Never talk to me during The Jackal.

Don't make me say it. Seriously, don't.

What's great is that world over, others are as sucked in as I am, either to The Book of Life or The Tour de France or, like me, both. I wonder what our population is in that little piece of the diagram where those circles overlap. I wonder how many others are swept into this same consumption, this desire to look away from all else and lock eyes only on this target: pages, kilometers, pageantry, heroism, battle, defeat, glory. But as much as I wonder, I won't Google it. Nope, no time for that, No spare attention. 

So just reminding the rest of you, not similarly enthralled. You may want to think twice before talking.

July is The Jackal.

And in case you missed it on one of the several other occasions on which I've posted it, here it is, again, still awesome, The Jackal.