What a treat. Got up early to catch up on some routine household stuff that had gotten away from me. Fed the cats and took my coffee back to bed and started in on my Christmas gifts.
I won't whine about not having enough time to read. Bye bye FB.
I made a run to B&N to cash in a gift card and got a copy of "the Bone Clocks" by David Mitchell. I normally don't buy hardcover but after spending an hour trying to find anything else I was happy to find at least one book that was on my to read list.
The contents of the shelves in the fiction aisle was mostly stomach turning tripe if the back covers were any indication of what was inside. Life is good.
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Thursday, January 15, 2015
a spin cycle in perdition
this is copied from a letter to a friend. If you are as tired of illness as I am, skip this one. Come back another day. I'll live.
"This is the first time I've been near the computer since Monday night. On the way home from Charlie's I stopped at Burger King and by midnight I was deathly ill. In all the years I have indulged at fast food joints, this is the first time I've had actual food poisoning.
the funny part is that in my day job, one of the things I do is take reports of customer illnesses from restaurant managers. Sometimes we snicker amongst ourselves. No more. And I know why people don't bother going to the doctor. It comes on too fast and you'd die in the waiting room, if you could get seen at all. There is nothing to do but suffer.
I literally spent most of the night sitting on the john with a trash can between my knees. At one point all three of our cats were sitting there watching me. I think they had a pool going to see when I'd pitch forward to land face down in the litter box.
The next 24 hours I lay in the bed, staggering to from the bathroom. Ebola would have been nice. At least the CDC would have come taken me to a nice hospital bed. Colin delivered ginger ale and water at arms length because, at first, I thought I had finally gotten the stomach virus that Jake and Missy had but the speed at which this blew through my body pointed to a bad whipper.
At some point Tuesday afternoon, my mother's ghost visited me. I wasn't even surprised.
First she called on the phone and then we sat at her kitchen table. Drinking coffee, me waving off her cigarette smoke, the two of us eating half a Sara Lee pound cake. we argued, I appealed to logic. She gave me her wisdom of the ages routine . All the time she was making her Christmas list.
It was so real.
After a night of dreamless sleep I woke up feeling like I had been trampled like elephants. I am fairly sure I have a broken rib. I woke up in time to have my little buddy delivered to my doorstep since I was still breathing and able to be upright. His little face was good medicine.
At some point in my delirium, my friend, the artist Pat Chauncey, died after a long struggle with cancer.
We never met but over the course of the past two years she has been a source of strength and inspiration. She will be missed by a vast army of friends and family.
Sunday, January 11, 2015
choice bits
I wasn't expecting to spend the day with Charlie today but, it was that or housework. Tough choice. He's teething and likes to chew on stuff like a puppy. And put his feet into his mouth.
It was a good writing day. I made myself laugh several times. I don't know if that's a good sign or not, but I'm happy with it. Sometimes you lose your way. Today was a wayfinding day.
Also gave over two plus precious hours to a movie late in the day. "Birdman" starring Michael Keaton, was remarkable. Just astonishing film adventuring, particularly if you are fond of the theater.
I'm staying with my plan of NOT watching trailers - going into a film with no idea what I was getting into. I will not be shy about asking for a refund if a movie turns out to be really bad. So far, no losers.
It was a good writing day. I made myself laugh several times. I don't know if that's a good sign or not, but I'm happy with it. Sometimes you lose your way. Today was a wayfinding day.
Also gave over two plus precious hours to a movie late in the day. "Birdman" starring Michael Keaton, was remarkable. Just astonishing film adventuring, particularly if you are fond of the theater.
I'm staying with my plan of NOT watching trailers - going into a film with no idea what I was getting into. I will not be shy about asking for a refund if a movie turns out to be really bad. So far, no losers.
Saturday, January 10, 2015
trick or tool (from Feb 2012)
I have been idly dreaming about having a small, vintage manual typewriter, as if that would help. I don't even know if I can still type on a manual machine and if I started using one would it wind up crippling me and what about that day job? I still spend eight hours a day on the computer and get paid for it. No matter how I lust after the sleek, shiny black vintage machines for sale all over the web, I'm not going to get one until I actually put my fingers on the keyboard and whack away for awhile; see how it feels.
Although I had an ancient manual typewriter as a kid, I never learned to touch type until the late eighties on a computer keyboard. The whole notion is probably a pipe dream fueled by watching a couple of episodes of Band of Brothers last weekend. There were several scenes of a soldier pecking away at portable typewriter, so incongruous yet so ubiquitous during World War II.
I spent a lot of time over the weekend looking for an archive of the music that used to be on my Ipod. Last week I accidentally gave the poor little thing a lobotomy and thought that restoring it would be a click or two away. Hah! That restoration took the better part of the weekend but mission accomplished. I'm finding that sleeping with earbuds in and the volume turned way, way down on the playlist sinisterly entitled “sleepingpod” is has a canceling effect on my increasingly aggravating tinnitus. Some interesting dream trains have left the station as well.
In the middle of that file search I came across a long lost short story that I started back in the early '90s. To my surprise it still had legs, crookedy and wobbling, but legs. What started out as a harmless and common fantasy tale rolled quickly into Twilight Zone/Stephen King territory, no surprise to anyone who knows me. This file was created and saved in an ancient program called Lotus Word Pro (I still have the floppy discs somewhere) and had been clumsily converted to a more universal file type. There were many errors in that conversion; formatting was lost and a myriad of crazed hieroglyphs were randomly inserted in the text. It was also obvious that there was no spell checker in the house and/or the writer was somehow impaired.
Dropping this file into OpenOffice and starting to edit it just for typos and formatting was good for most of yesterday morning. What with the side trips and diversions that are all too available when working on a laptop with a great internet connection, the morning evaporated with little to show for it and now, Tuesday morning is well on it's way to history too. All this brought me back to thinking about what it would be like to use an old typewriter with just enough interference between the brain and the paper to check my pace and keep my thoughts in order, without the distractions.
My first typewriter was a behemoth from the thirties or forties that my mother dragged home from a yard sale. I really can't recall the make, something common like Remington or Underwood, but due to it's advanced age, ribbons for it were impossible to find. I bought fresh, replacement ribbons for whatever brand I could get cheap and then wind them by hand onto the large metal spools of my machine – messy but effective. It had trapdoors on the side for access to the ribbons and at some point, I allowed my pet rat to hide out inside the machine. We won't talk about the day that I idly tapped a key and snipped off the tip of his tail.
I typed my homework for fun which probably bothered my teachers. I don't know what they were expecting when they came across my typed papers in a stack of hand scrawled assignments but I rarely delivered if my grades were any measure of success. When I figured out that a C or B would keep me out of jail or the doghouse with my parents, that was good enough for me. Grading should be kept secret from kids as long as possible.
I also wrote letters, specifically, begging letters to all the missions to the United Nations for every flyspeck country that belonged to the UN and a few that didn't. I'm sure my name got on some government lists when I was eight or nine.
What I was begging for was canceled postage stamps from their home countries and, man, where they happy to oblige. I think I must have created at least a handful of jobs for people working at carefully tearing off the colorful, beautiful stamps from letters sent from all over the world. I didn't really even have a collection – I had a hoard! I started out with the best intentions, like all those skipping down the road to hell, but the response to my letters was so overwhelming that I quickly became blasé about the stack of fat, brown envelopes that would be waiting for me when I got home from school. After a quick perusal for anything new or different, everything got tossed in the desk drawer but I kept pounding out letters and spending my allowance on postage.
Once I got tired of getting duplicates of stamps that I already had too many of, I turned to typing papers for classmates who would dictate to me over the phone or give me chicken scratch notes on legal pads. Bigger brains than mine who didn't have access to a typewriter abounded. Then again there were the papers that I corrected and finally, rewrote, until a couple of teachers twigged and recognized my style scattered throughout the three fifth grade history and English classes. My career as a copywriter/editor was squashed by a short meeting with the principal where I promised to stop giving it away and promised myself to charge more and work more carefully.
All these years later and I'm still giving it away and someplace in a second hand store or, more likely, a landfill, there is a hulking, golden typewriter with the mummified remains of a rat's tail tip deep in it's bowels.
Thursday, January 08, 2015
thanks
Just a quick note of thanks to everyone who commented here and to those who reached out to me privately.
To better days, lots of them.
To better days, lots of them.
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