Finally Processing the Weekend

Many Things have happened. Many. Muchness went on, and I was there for it.

I got my eyebrow pierced. After the hilarity surrounding the microphone-nosering conjuction, I just had to go for the lorgnette and eyebrow ring conjuction. The Pirate is pleased as all heck, as is the man who sold me the lorgnette. He wants pictures for their website.

My mother thinks the overall effect is "punk granny," the Pirate says "Victorian borg," but Stephanie says "It's just Goth." Ew.

The cat pee briefcase has been restored to functionality. Which is lucky for the damn cat. A little Nature's Miracle and then some saddle soap and mink oil and all that's left is a wierd sort of watermark. That's not bad

And on the writing front, several things are popping and humming. The woman who gushed about Orfeo at the last CWC reading forwarded my name to a friend of hers who teaches at the University of Southern Maine. This woman and I have now hooked up and are corresponding. She wants to use my writing in her class. Mmmmm!
I'm giving another reading of The Birth of Athena this coming Friday at the Borders in Los Gatos. Mike M. has already promised to show up, as well as a couple of the other South Bay Nanos.

I'm also pleased as all get-out to see more people putting up their to-do lists. Let me just say, HOORAY! I love the lists! I want to give each and every one of you a cookie. Perhaps two.

And, in other news, there's a billboard advertising insurance on the 880 going toward Oakland (is that north or west?) just before the Montague exit. It has a huge picture of Andrew Jackson wearing sunglasses and it looks eerily like Mike M. only with longer hair. I've been thinking about that every time I pass it, and keep forgetting to say anything.

What Pimping Gets You

Friday has turned out to be a pretty good day for me. I went to the CWC reading at the B&N, and read the same selection from Orfeo that I had read at Zebulon's Lounge last Tuesday, but it went a little more smoothly this time, even though I wasn't drunk.

It helped that I had a few friends there with me. In addition to the Pirate, a friend and his wife from my new job showed up, as well as a friend from my old job and his fiance, and Mike M. and Ian D. The people who showed up for just me outnumbered those who had come to see everyone else. Thank you to those of you who made the trek out. It meant a whole lot to me.

A nice unforeseen bonus came in the form of another one of the evening's readers, a poet by the name of Carolyn Schuk, came up to me and said that she has a good friend who teaches mythology at the University of Maine. This particular professor would be highly interested in the fact that my stories combine Greek mythology and Mexican culture. Well, as they say, write what you know.

And, in a completely unrelated bout of pimping, the Pirate has caught on. He's had a series of interviews with three large, profitable, well-known Silicon Valley companies. Company G flew him down to Los Angeles, wined and dined him and impressed him with their high-energy corporate-cult atmosphere. Company N had him out for a regular interview at their Los Gatos office, and impressed him with the fact that they're a little older on average, and seem to be a little less out to prove something. Company A has only given him a phone interview thus far. Company G wants him in their Mountain View office on Wednesday for another series of interviews. Company A has asked for a second interview. Company N will make him an offer on Monday. They've already talked money, and the only reason they didn't make the offer is because the guy in charge of that was sick today. So, it's all over but the shouting, and I brought the Pirate home some nice champagne to celebrate.

It looks like the shitstorm is letting up a little at the ol' homestead. Actually, I'm feeling pretty blessed right about now.

Ed. It.

No, I didn't make it to CS last night. The poor Pirate was on his last (good) leg and really needed to be given the night off. We lay in bed, him watching absolutely the best movie ever made, a little slice of heaven that is corn with cheese on it dipped in acid, Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

Luckily, I was very busy with the next section of my novel. So...my total hours for the month are now at 13, only 37 to go. I am hoping that if I can shoehorn in 2 hours a day between now and the end of the month, I'll be doing okay. I think that I can hammer this thing into decent shape by then.

The second portion, Atena, is much like the first in that on my first reading after some time, I found a lot of really strong parts, and a lot of flabby filler. But I'm excited to be working hard on it and whipping it into shape.

Time Well Spent

On Tuesday I did that reading in Petaluma and heard a really amazing piece by a woman who lives in that area. So, yesterday, I decided to email her and tell her exactly what I thought of her work. I wrote her a fairly long email with my comments and praise.

She wrote me back last night, a warm happy letter saying in effect that I'd made her day. She also asked for the text of Orfeo because she said that it went by too fast for her and she'd like to "linger over it." I was tickled and, after finishing my last round of edits last night, emailed it off to her.

Increasing the happiness in the world. It's one of my five pledges.

Family Trouble

Now, you might think that I'm having trouble with my family. Au contraire! It's they who are having the trouble.

My younger sister phoned last night. I haven't talked to her in a while. I thought she was calling me to gossip about our older sister, but no. She's got her own shit.

Now, let me just tell you the kind of shit she gets herself into....
Ximena is a clinical psychologist on Chicago's south side. She works with families in crisis (and believe me, she's got a fabulous firsthand foundation on that). On this particular day she was doing outreach with Xavier, a guy who's getting his degree in counseling. She likes this guy because he's working on his degree after being in prison for 20 years on a murder charge. He's 35.

They are at some building in Chicago that used to house a large mental hospital, but is now being used as a sort of outpatient facility. After completing their outreach calls, my sister turns to Xavier and says "Hey, you wanna go up and see the twelfth floor?"

"What's on the twelfth floor?"

"That's where they kept all the real f-ed up folks. It's totally Girl, Interrupted."

Xavier is skeptical, but goes along with it. The twelfth floor does not have any direct access from an elevator. In order to get to it you have to go up to a higher floor and then down a series of staircases that are not necessarily near each other and that, at one time, were all kept locked. Ximena and Xavier thread their way in the near-dark through the series of stairs and doors until they find themselves in a large room on the twelfth floor. There is dusty, knocked-over furniture and trash on the floor, and the whole thing smells like mildew. Xavier, who is still on parole, does not come into the room with her. He is a sensible man who knows that if they do find anything untoward, he can't afford to be the one to find it.

And, sure enough, my sister spots a pair of legs. The feet at the end of the legs do not have shoes on them, and the legs themselves are twisted up in a position that suggests that their owner didn't just lie down for a little nappy-do. My sister is immediately wigged out and turns and runs out, screaming at Xavier "Let's get outta heeeeeeeeeere!"

Xavier is not only a sensible man, but a very large one. He has not seen anything, but scoops my sister up and rushes back out the way they came. As he's running down a hall with my sister in tow, he says "What are we running from?" "A body!" she pants. He rolls his eyes and speeds up.

They get out to the nurses' station at the front lobby and my sister is overcome with an attack of conscience. Xavier would much rather leave this theoretical body that he has not seen where it supposedly lies and get the heck outta Dodge, but my sister will do no such thing. She goes to the nurse at the desk and says "Um...there's a guy....upstairs...on the twelfth floor...um...lying down."

The nurse's eyebrows shoot up. "What were you doing on the twelfth floor?" My sister had to do a little fast talking, but her clinical psychologist cred gets her and Xavier out of being arrested. A pair of security guards is summoned and Ximena and Xavier are asked to lead them to the "guy lying down."

Ximena had completely lost her sense of direction, but Xavier, being the self-possessed person he is, knew exactly where he was going. As Xavier is saying "Left here...right through this door....down the second set of stairs..." Ximena looked at these guys and thought "Okay, Xavier is Freddy, this guy over here is Velma, that guy is Daphne...and I'm Scooby Doo."

They get into the room and Ximena and Xavier hang back. There's no way she wants to see that sight again, and she feels that now that she's led the security guys to it, she's done her duty. On the other hand, she is not without a sense of morbid curiosity. Who is it? It couldn't possibly be anyone who accidentally wandered up there.

The guards looked carefully at the body without touching it. One of them bent down for a closer look, then beckoned the other to do the same. Both of them burst out laughing. Ximena is horrified. She runs up to them, asking them what's so funny. They turn the body over...and she can clearly see the mannequin's face in the dim light.

The rosy glow coming from Ximena's face is enough to illuminate the scene.

Now that the tension's been broken, the four of them turn even more Scooby Doo. They decide that while they're here.... They start walking around the rest of the floor. The rest is much the same, trash and dusty furniture. But WAYYYYY in the back, they find a queen-sized bed up on cinder blocks. The sheets are clean, the bed is made. Someone has been up here recently. The guards immediately turn to Ximena and Xavier and ask "So - what do YOU TWO know about this?"

After a little more poking around, Ximena and Xavier are escorted out. Upon reflection, Ximena has decided that the dead body was an amazingly creative first line of defense for someone's Fortified Love Nest.

Bedtime Reading of the Terribly Pedantic Lifestyle

I've been listening to a history of Alexander the Great written about a hundred years after his death, but it's a little hard to get into as an audiobook.

There are lots of descriptions of places that no longer exist and a lot of passages that sound like this "And so Alexander met with Thorax. This is not Thorax of Hypnotia, whom some of the early Lucites worshipped as a god. This is Thorax of Biodegradia, son of Beltsander." And then there are the countless battles with triremes and quadriremes and lemoncremes until your eyes no longer blink in unison.

The Pirate took Peaches off to the library tonight so that she could get some books for a school project and came home with histories of Mesopotamia, Sumaria, Babylon, Assyria and the Persian empire.

Frankly, there is a whole big hunk of history that I just have a hard time getting past. Everything between....fire and the invention of Popeil's Pocket Fisherman. Okay, maybe not that big, but anything that doesn't already come with a compelling narrative is just tough to get past. Even the Bible skips past all this and gets right to the sex (you know - Hashish begat Diphthong who begat Target who begat Hut who begat Tarnashun who begat....). And then you go right to a place where we begin to have written record.

So, right now he's sitting next to me reading about how the little Mesopotamuses went to war with the Sombrarians under Xanax and created the first empire. Meanwhile, in the Persian empire, Zoroaster was creating the first religion to be picked up by a country music singer and made into a chain of fast food restaurants, Kenny Roger's Zoroasters.

This is really motivating me to find a wall-sized map of ancient Greece so I can go back to Alexander the Great and skip the whole history of the Assyrians who invaded the Sombrarians while the Sombrarians were busy using their little hats as flowerpots. Or maybe it was the Babbleonandonians.

I can never remember.