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Saturday, November 16, 2002

A few random things:

--Re: comments on last entry -- my friends are the coolest. Thanks, ladies, and if some night twenty years from now a bedraggled old crone shows up on your doorstep, clutching a manuscript, a bottle, and a pack of cigs, just remember you invited me.

--Last night I dreamed that I was watching a TV movie--I can't remember any details of it, except that it was a well-written taut quiet drama of familial unhappiness, with two central characters: a no-longer-young black-sheep scapegrace son, played in my dream by Callum Keith Rennie, and his bleak and unforgiving father, played by Lance Henriksen. I remember I was literally bouncing up and down on my sofa with delight at such an inspired bit of casting, and that I woke up happy. The only downside now is that I really want to see this movie, dammit. I mean, wouldn't those two be great together? When I win the lottery, I'm going to start an independent film studio, hire all my buddies to write screenplays, and lure my favorite actors with princely sums.

--I remain perpetually amazed by people who can write with music playing. This afternoon, I was trying to work on the story, but my upstairs neighbor had something on the stereo, and even the faint background sound of the bass line was enough to destroy my ability put sentences together. Writing for me is really all about rhythm, and with any competing interference I can't hear sentence-rhythms at all.

--This is the damndest thing I've seen in some time. Just . . . golly. (Warning: .swf link, may not work well for those with slow connections.)

--I need to figure out how to make bullet points here. The usual html for it seems to get garbled by Greymatter. Hmm.

Posted @ 04:55 PM CST [Link]5 comments

Thursday, November 14, 2002

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it, since I cued up the band for another round of the Hairball Sessions. Lay down a nice bass line, Jack, and let's go . . .

--Several friends' birthdays have come and gone without me even bestirring myself to send them a few nice words, thereby giving further proof that I am an inconsiderate lout.

--All those vitamins I bought a while back, in some alarm at the realization that my diet lately consists of starchy bulk filler devoid of nutritive value, still sit on the counter, because I keep forgetting to take them, clearly evincing that I am dangerously low on brain cells and probably harboring a death wish.

--Speaking of which, we won't even get into the cigarettes, except to note that I am spending more each month to give myself cancer than I paid out for rent on my first apartment back in 1974.

--My entire six-foot expanse of dining-room-pass-through countertop, except for the part occupied by the untouched vitamins, is covered with a great swathe of financial papers, gathering dust and getting splattered with kitchen grease. Somewhere in there are a couple of checks that I haven't bestirred myself to dig out, endorse, and put in the bank, so that I may squander the proceeds on giving myself cancer.

--The seasons have come and gone, generations of leaves have budded, burgeoned, turned color, and died, small infants have gone from crawling to walking to cursive handwriting, regimes have risen and fallen, and my god-damned dead car is still sitting in the garage, because I am incapable of getting myself mentally organized enough to get someone to come and haul it away.

--After I sent them not one but two e-mails telling them to for godsake go to a thoughtfully-provided URL and fill out an academic-planning form which I spent much labor making as bone-simple as possible, two-thirds of our students failed to do so by the extended deadline, despite the fact that they were told that the form would take five minutes at most, and that if they didn't do it they'd have a hold on their registration; thus, two-thirds of our students are calling their advisors shrieking I have a hold on my registration! and How the hell did that happen?! and their advisors are all pissed at me, even though I e-mailed all of them telling them all they have to do to get the hold cleared is have their student fill out a freakin' form, which takes--wait for it--five minutes at most, and can be done via the bone-simple form at the URL thoughtfully provided, except that apparently nobody reads their freakin' e-mail, and it is All My Fault.

--I still haven't been to the dentist, because I can no longer figure out which dental plan I'm on and in any event it's changing again at the end of December, and even if I could figure out my dental plan I assuredly could not get an appointment by the end of December, and hence my gums will continue their descent into flaccid sponginess.

--Since the occasion of my getting vested in the retirement plan coincided, not only with a morose alcoholic binge on my part involving much moaning about God, I am getting OLD, but also with the semi-collapse of the stock market, it is ever more clear that I will in fact spend my sunset years dumpster-diving and sleeping under the bridge in a refrigerator carton.

--And on those cold winter nights, down by the river, I will assuredly, from time to time, pull a stained and tattered wad of print-out from my heap of rags, and mutter to myself I really, really, am going to finish this god-damned story! This year for sure! Except that it is increasingly clear that only by Act of God am I going to finish a story again in my natural life.

Posted @ 08:40 PM CST [Link]9 comments

Monday, November 11, 2002

A few random things about last night's Angel, put on cutaway for those who'd like to avoid either spoilers or excess snarkage:

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Posted by jones059 @ 07:53 AM CST [Link]2 comments