There's a lot of good advice for Obama here.

Meanwhile - and I think I've said this before - I've got to get out more. Or get more inspired. I dunno.

However, on the subject of being mostly indoors...I haven't been totally idle, so, allow me to recommend some books. It's a trilogy of grim. Julian Barnes's "Nothing to be Frightened Of", coupled with two Philip Roth novels - "The Dying Animal", and "Indignation".

Barnes's book is a combination autobiography/meditation on death. It gets a tad long here and there, but still, it's worth the read. He recounts his own fears of death, and the manner in which his parents, his brother (Jonathan Barnes - well-known authority on Aristotle (and if that isn't cruising perilously close to an oxymoron, I don't know what is)), other famous authors (if you read, Julian's famous too), and various other folks have approached their own deaths. Julian is not happy about the prospect. Of course, who is? Neither, however, is he accepting of it. Here, he and his brother part company. His brother shares Aristotle's outlook on it - once you're dead, you don't feel pain, fear, anticipation...anything. So, what's to be afraid of? Julian remains unconvinced.

Roth's novels are, to put it mildly (which is about the limit of my ability), brilliant. And I'm saying that even though I'm only about a quarter of the way through "Indignation", his latest novel. Roth is, to use a well-worn cliche, unflinching. He looks at decay and death, and reports what he sees. There is a scene in "The Dying Animal" in which David Kepesh, the narrator, realizes that his great love, the one he found far too late and failed to recognize as such, has crossed over into the land of the dead (despite the fact that she's alive, naked, in his arms). It brings the sort of feeling that someone recently dead, if they could somehow live on within that dead body, would experience as the nails were being driven into the lid of their coffin - there is nothing more.

Yes, it sounds grim. O.K., it is grim. But, it's brilliant. Like I said.