Category: Alabama

Winning Ugly

Well, once I’ve swilled enough coffee I’ll be loading up the car and driving north yet again. And while my trip last weekend involved only driving through Alabama, this is my third consecutive weekend of travel that somehow involves my birth state. I’ve been gone the last three weekends; I am not sure I am going to know how to act next weekend when I actually get to stay home for a change. I’ll drive back first thing Monday morning, so I can get home before the Orpheus parade, and then I’ll be on bereavement leave for the rest of next week. I could have taken it this past week but I also didn’t know when the funeral was going to be so I just went into the office every day this week and muddled through. I know this next week isn’t going to end with everything healed and me past it all–you never get over it, you just learn to live with it–but I need the time to actually recalibrate and settle back into my normal life, which I’ve not really had much opportunity to do these last few weeks. After the trip to the library events then came Mom’s issues and here we are. Throw parade season into the mix for added discombobulation, the whatever-it-is-I-did-to-my-toe–and let’s also not forget my dryer stopped working before the library events weekend, which hasn’t helped either. I’m going to try to fix it–if its just the fuse–after Fat Tuesday is over and I can head over to Lowe’s while looking at repair videos on Youtube; if that doesn’t work then we need to get a new one, which sucks–we also need a new refrigerator, which has been even more of a challenge, because all refrigerators now are too tall to fit into the cubby hole made for it by the kitchen cabinets, which may mean the cabinets over the refrigerator need to be taken out, which is an even bigger pain in the ass than just getting a new refrigerator. I really want one with the freezer on the bottom to alleviate stooping and bending (I’m getting really old, y’all), but those are all too big to fit but even the traditional freezer on top ones are too tall for the space, which is strange and weird and who knows what all.

I slept really well last night. I kept my toe elevated most of the day and was occasionally alternating between hot and cold on it, so it’s not quite so swollen and painful this morning. I think the smartest thing for me to actually do is just wear my house shoes to drive in the car–they will keep the toe cushioned better than my regular shoes–and while it may very well be gout (Paul and another friend have suggested it as a possibility, which I wouldn’t have considered, I’m thinking it might not be. I do have psoriasis and that too can cause an arthritis attack–if that is what this is; gout is a form of arthritis), there are all kinds of other options. The primary concern that I have is that my only option may be going to the emergency room, and how long will something as low-priority as having gout or pain in my big toe keep me in the waiting room there? But I do think it’s something I need to do Monday when I get back here–if it doesn’t clear up. If it does…I don’t know. Like I said, it still hurting this morning but not nearly as bad as it did yesterday so maybe keeping it elevated and alternating heat and cold is the right way to go with it more tonight? I honestly don’t know, but I do know this couldn’t have happened at a less opportune time. But at least it isn’t throbbing today, which it did yesterday. Progress? Improvement? I’ll take either one. I don’t think the driving will help, but who knows? And at least the Hampton Inn should have an ice machine, which should make it much easier to ice it.

And I suppose once I am home on Monday, then I can start the moving on with my life. Before I leave this morning there are some chores around the house I’d like to do (mainly so I don’t have to come home to them after the funeral) and of course I have to swing by a gas station (I don’t really want to even think about my gas credit card bill) on the way out. According to Google Maps, it’s a five and a half hour drive of 349 miles, approximately. Since the first of the month I think, by the time I get home, I will have driven about five or so thousand miles? I hadn’t even hit thirty thousand miles on the odometer since buying the car back in 2017 yet before all this started–and if you take drives to Kentucky and/or Alabama for the library events, I don’t think I would even have twenty thousand miles on it, frankly. This past week has been a weird one. As it progressed I found myself getting less overwhelmed and sad and breaking down as much later in the week than I had earlier in the week, so I guess that’s all a part of the process, and the funeral itself will be the final curtain on all of this. It’s still hard for my mind to entirely grasp yet–oh yeah Mom’s gone–but it’s going to be much easier on me than it is on the rest of the family; they saw her all the time while I only saw her once or twice a year. I’ve not gone down the I could have been a better son route–mainly because I dealt with all that guilt a long time ago and have moved past it all; it is what it was and I’ve never wasted energy on regret, nor am I about to now…although I’ve come close a couple of times since Mom’s death. I also have to pack, but I’m not terribly worried about that. I am going to wear sweats in the car (and my house shoes) and so all I really need to pack is socks and underwear and my shaving kit. I also need to try on my black slacks to see if they fit, else I’ll have to go to Walmart at some point and buy a new pair that will fit my fat ass.

Heavy sigh. Seriously.

And on that note, I am going to make something to eat, get some more coffee, and start getting organized for yet another weekend drive. Sorry, Ladies of Iris–I am going to miss your parade for only the second time since 1996. Talk to you later, Constant Reader.

Undercover of the Night

Work-at-home Friday, during which I also have to get ready to leave town tomorrow. That means making groceries, picking up a prescription, and packing all on top of my work-at-home duties–which means I’ll have to work a little later than usual. I’ll be on Bereavement leave next week, so I don’t have to work again until Friday (which is a work at home day, but it won’t kill me to come into the office that day anyway; I’ll need to pick up my work-at-home stuff at some point–although I could swing by the office on my way home from Alabama…or, I could just drop in on Friday morning next week to pick it all up. I don’t know, I guess I am going to play it all by ear from now on.

January seemed to last forever and a day; yet February is flying past like an Air Force flyover at Tiger Stadium. Granted, I think I lost the thread of time after Mom’s stroke, but I was incredibly startled yesterday at the office writing “02/16/23” as the date on forms. 02/16/23? How weird does that look? It makes me vaguely uncomfortable whenever I see it, thinking that can’t be right, can it? But it is correct, and since I put the reminders in our clients’ files for when they need new paperwork along with the date their current expires, I have to use 2024 which really looks wrong.

It’s going to be weird being back in the part of Alabama where I’m from–I’ve not been there since my grandfather’s funeral at least twenty years ago and more likely even longer ago. I had been wanting to go back out of curiosity more than anything else; wanting to see how different it is now from what I remember, and I’d like to drive around taking pictures of things and so forth–I’d also like to see my maternal grandparents’ graves, since I am there–and just in general remember, you know? See how much of it I got wrong in Bury Me in Shadows, and if there’s anything to inspire my next Alabama book. You never know, right? I am probably going to leave early enough on Saturday so I can do some of that driving around before checking into the hotel–see how lost I can get, right?–because really it’s all not very far away from where I’ll be staying. The nearest motel is about seventeen miles away from the cemetery, and the cemetery itself is in between the county seat and where we’ll be staying. It’ll be interesting to see how differently I remembered things for the book as opposed to the current reality.

I didn’t go out to the parades because I have somehow managed to injure my big toe. This is making walking a bit of a challenge, and I am not exactly sure what I did or when it happened. I don’t think it was an obvious oh my God fucking ouch moment, but more of a little twinge or something that I thought I hope that doesn’t hurt and promptly forgot about until I stood up again, but suffice it to say the toe is painful and swollen. I don’t think it’s broken as I can move it without pain, but putting weight on it is an entirely different story. But Paul managed to get his annual shoe from Muses (a particularly nice one I’ll post a picture of at some point) before the predicted downpour occurred and managed to get home without getting wet. So, all in all Muses was quite a victory for Paul again this year, even though I had to skip it. I doubt that I will go out there at all tonight, either. If my toe is better Monday I may go out for Orpheus, but parade season has been a bust for me this year so far.

I slept late this morning, too–it’s been a hot minute since I had the chance to actually, you know, sleep late–and it did feel rather marvelous. The toe doesn’t hurt as much this morning as it did last night and I think some of the swelling has gone down. Since I’m home I can alternate heat and cold on it for a bit to see if that helps at all. I’d rather not be limping at my mother’s funeral–and seriously, how can I not remember when I did it or how? Sigh. But my coffee is wonderful this morning, and it’s chilly outside, and I have a couple of errands that need running later. Sigh–including a trip to CVS to get stuff to keep the toe wrapped up with. Such terrible timing for this, too. Heavy heaving sigh.

But I’ve downloaded Tara Laskowski’s One Night Gone and two Carol Goodmans (The Other Mother and The Seduction of Water) to listen to in the car on the way up there and back; I’ll take my hard copy of whichever one I decide to listen to in the car with me so I can finish reading it while I am there and can listen to something else on the way back to New Orleans on Monday morning.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. May you all have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I’ll probably post here before I leave tomorrow morning before they close the streets for Iris.

Rock and a Hard Place

Thursday and the morning of the Muses parade. There are three parades tonight–first Babylon, then Chaos, and capped off by super-krewe Muses and their shoes–and while I am not in a great parade mood, I will probably go out there for a little while at the very least. Tomorrow and Monday are work-at-home days for me because of the parades, and also the days I have to get any errands or anything done that requires using the car because from about five o’clock on Friday till about one in the morning after Bacchus my car cannot be moved–I mean, I can move it, but won’t get very far because I have to stay inside the box. So I will probably try to make groceries on Friday morning, and then on Monday I will try to get the mail and pick up a prescription. It’s going to be an odd weekend. I have lots of stuff to do and I don’t really want to miss the Iris parade Saturday morning; I’ll probably also do Orpheus on Monday; I may go out there a bit on Friday night–those Friday night parades are fun–but for the most part I think I am going to skip the festivities as a general rule. I am already exhausted, but we’ll see how it all goes.

I’m adjusting. My friend Victoria, who lost her wife just before Christmas, compares grief to an undertow: “one moment you’re perfectly fine the next you’re being sucked under.” She’s not wrong, and it’s a pretty good analogy, to be honest (she’s always been an intelligent writer). I find myself getting dragged under at the most unexpected times, and triggered by the most unexpected things; I was going to wash dishes on Tuesday night, so I filled the sink with soapy water and had just put the last dirty dish in the water when I heard my mom saying you always wash the dishes first because the dishwasher is really just good for sterilizing and so I’ve always washed the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. It made me smile a bit wistfully when I heard her, and then came the waves and I was sucked under, and I never did get back to the dishes Tuesday night (I finished them last night). I wash and fold my clothes the way she did–there’s all these little things I do every day that I do because that’s the way my mom did them.

Sigh. Even though I lived over seven hundred miles away from my parents for the last twenty-four or five years, my mother’s influence on me and how I do things will last until I’m in my own grave. I did manage to get a load of laundry done last night, put the dishes away, and managed another load in the dishwasher as well. I’m not motivated this week, which I suppose isn’t really the surprise that I think it is, really. What makes it worse is I was already in the malaise after finishing two manuscripts back to back. I had hoped to get one of them edited and revised this month, and here we are on the 16th with only twelve days left in the month and I haven’t revised a fucking thing. When I got home from work yesterday I discovered a very sweet voicemail from my father on my phone which kind of sent me into a tailspin of sorts–he was worried about me being down here alone with my grief; at least he “has (my) sister and her kids” around him to lessen the grief and keep him occupied. I was so incredibly touched–even writing the words just now filled my eyes with tears again–that in the middle of what has to be all-consuming grief, living alone in the house they shared for the last twenty-five years and where everywhere you look is a reminder of her, he was able to put all that aside to worry about me?

Well, I just found out the service in Alabama is this weekend, so I’ll be leaving New Orleans Saturday morning before they close St. Charles and staying through Monday–so I can get home before they close the streets for Orpheus. I guess that will be the official closure for me–but I am fairly certain the grief is going to be with me for awhile yet. So no Iris or Tucks or Bacchus for me this year, which is kind of fine, really; I am not feeling parade season this year, honestly. I had been thinking that I’d be able to forget everything and enjoy myself for a bit at the parades, but…last night when I heard Druids passing at the corner the last thing in the world I wanted to do was head to the corner. I also did something to my big toe–sprained it maybe–I don’t know what or remember how I did it or when it happened, but at some point yesterday my big toe started throbbing and it hurts still this morning; whenever I put weight or pressure on it, it hurts. It’s so lovely having your body break down all around you, one of the great joys of becoming older.

I slept pretty decently last night, too, which was nice. I hate the lethargy of malaise mixed with grief; this is a witch’s brew I could have easily gone the rest of my life not knowing about. It’s also going to be weird being back in Alabama, too—I’ve not been back to where we’re from since my grandfather’s funeral, in either 2003 or 2004? Maybe it was earlier, because I think I had a car and there was a year or so at the beginning of the century when I didn’t have one. I should take advantage of this to drive around and take pictures of things for my memories and for future writing…and on THAT note, I think I’m going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I will be back later.

Hang Fire

Well, I’m pretty tired this morning. I got home last night and St. Charles Avenue was still closed from the King Arthur parade, so I got back on Highway 90 and got off at Tchoupitoulas and circled back home the back way, up Annunciation to Melpomene to Coliseum and then home. I listened to Carol Goodman’s The Stranger Behind You on the way home (it’s superb) but had to finish the last seventy pages or so in the hard copy once I was actually home. I am sipping coffee and thinking that it’s going to take me a hot minute to figure out where I was at with everything and what I was actually doing; the faulty memory is not particularly helpful in that regard. To make matters worse, I never did get around to making that to-do list before I got the text from my sister last week–so I don’t have anything to fall back on, either. I know I had started working on the edits for the manuscript andI know I have a short story to write, but other than that I am completely blanking on everything. I need to make a grocery list for sure today, and I also need to figure out what I am going to take for lunch today. I have to swing by the mail as well as the grocery store, too.

Heavy heaving sigh.

I didn’t sleep all that great last night, either. I would have thought that exhaustion, if nothing else, would have helped me go into an incredibly deep sleep, but alas it was not to be. I feel rested and my brain doesn’t feel tired, but I do feel worn out. I think I am functional–and functioning–but things are probably going to be weird for me for the rest of this week, at the very least. I should sleep incredibly well tonight, though–that’s certainly something for me to look forward to enjoying this evening. I think I got microwave Jimmy Dean sausage egg and cheese croissants at Costco before I left town, and I think there’ s something in the freezer I can have for lunch as well. I was going to make something this morning but am too worn out and too worn down to bother with that. Sleep shouldn’t be an issue for me tonight, but I will probably be groggy as fuck tomorrow morning. I sure need to clean out my email inbox, that’s for certain, and I never did finish the filing apparently, based on the condition of the kitchen/office. It’s also weird that it’s parade season as well; we have two nights off but Wednesday night it all kicks into gear again and I have to start planning my life around the parade schedule–which also means not using the car from Friday afternoon through Monday morning, and then again from Monday night to Wednesday morning. It can be challenging, and I’m already tired. Yay!

So I need to make a to-do list; I need to refresh my memory to know where I am at with everything; I need to empty the email inbox; and of course clean and run errands and get a handle on my life again. But I think the most important thing for me to do is get rested and recovered from the exhaustion of the trip, which means being motivated and getting everything under control again because I won’t rest most likely until I know everything I’ve agreed to do and everything that I have to do. I feel very disoriented this morning and adrift–not a pleasant feeling–and, now that I think about it, is undoubtedly because of the suddenness of the disruption; usually when I travel it’s planned in advance and at least I can prepare for it; this was obviously last minute so I wasn’t really able to get things planned the way I usually do. I don’t always have things under control when I travel, but I am always on top of having a to-do list when I do travel so I know where I am when I get back home. That was the one thing I should have taken care of before I left Thursday (it seems like a lifetime ago), and had I done so, I wouldn’t be at sea this morning as much as I am.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines, get cleaned up, and head into the office so I can get back into my routine. Have a great Monday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.

Bad Boy

Masculinity is something I’ve always felt I viewed from the outside.

It’s very strange; for someone who doesn’t look back very often and has a rather healthy disdain for nostalgia, for some reason since the pandemic started, I’ve been revisiting my past a lot. I don’t know, perhaps it was triggered by having dinner with an old friend from high school a while back (which also inspired me to write a horribly dark short story); or perhaps it’s because of short stories or novel ideas I’ve been toying with, but lately, I’ve been thinking about my past much more so than I usually do, and what it was like for me growing up. I wrote a Sisters in Crime quarterly column several years ago about the first time I realized, once and for all, that I was indeed different from everyone else–it centered the first time I heard the word fairy used towards me as a pejorative, as well as the first time I was called a faggot. I’ve also been examining and turning over issues of masculinity inside my head for quite some time (most of my life). #shedeservedit was itself an examination of toxic masculinity and how it reverberates through a small community when it’s allowed to run rampant and unchecked: boys will be boys. Some short stories I’ve published have also examined the same subject.

What can I say? My not being the American masculine ideal has played a very major part in shaping my life and who I am; how could it not? I used to, when I was a kid, pray that I’d wake up the next morning and magically be turned into the kind of boy I was supposed to be, the kind that every other boy I knew–from classmates to cousins to everything I watched on television and at the movies.

Society and culture have changed in many ways since I was a little boy who didn’t fit so easily into the conformist role for little boys; roles for male and female were very narrowly defined when I was a child, and children were forced into conforming to those roles almost from birth. Boys were supposed to be rough and tumble and play sports and get dirty and like bugs and frogs and so forth; girls were supposed to be feminine and play with dolls or play house, wear dresses and mother their baby dolls. Boys weren’t supposed to read or enjoy reading (but I was also supposed to get good grades and be smart), and that was all I wanted to do when I was a kid. I used to love Saturdays, when my mother would go to the grocery store and drop me off at the library on her way. I loved looking at the books on the shelves, looking at the cover art and reading the descriptions on the back. I loved getting the Scholastic Book Club catalog and picking out a few books; the excitement of the day when the books I’d ordered arrived and I could go out on the back porch when I got home and read them cover to cover. I was constantly, endlessly, pushed to do more “boyish” things; I played Pee-wee baseball (very much against my will), and later was pushed into playing football in high school–which I hated at first but eventually came to love…which just goes to show, don’t automatically hate something without trying it. But yeah, I never loved playing baseball. I was enormously happy when we moved to Kansas and I discovered, to my great joy, that my new high school didn’t have a team.

One less traditionally masculine thing for me to participate in was always a bonus.

The things that I really wanted to do weren’t considered masculine pursuits, and as a general rule I was denied them as much as possible. My parents forbade me from reading books about girls–Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls, Trixie Belden–which, quite naturally, made me want them more (my entire life the best way to get me to do something is to tell me either not to do it or tell me I can’t do it…either always makes me want to do it). Oddly enough, when my reading tastes became more adult–when I moved from children’s books to reading fiction for adults–they didn’t seem to care that I was reading books by women about women quite so much as they did when I was younger; either that, or they gave up trying as they finally saw me as a lost cause–one or the other; I don’t know which was the actual case. Maybe my embrace of football in high school overrode everything else suspect about me. It’s possible. My family has always worshipped at the goalposts…and I kind of still do. GEAUX TIGERS!

I spent a lot of my early life trying to understand masculinity and how it worked; what it was and why it was something I should aspire to–and never could quite wrap my mind around it. The role models for men always pointed out to me–John Wayne, etc.–never resonated with me; I always thought they were kind of dicks, to be honest. The whole “boys don’t cry, men never show emotions, men make the money and the entire household revolves around their wants and needs” shtick never took with me, and of course, as I never had any real sexual interest in women…the whole “locker room talk” thing was always kind of revolting to me, because I always saw girls as people. It probably had something to do with the fact that I was more likely to be able to trust girls than boys; I had so many boys decide they couldn’t be friends with me anymore because at some point other kids calling me a fairy began having an negative impact on their own lives all through junior and senior high school (to this day, I’ve never understood this; why were we friends before, and what changed? It wasn’t me…I didn’t suddenly switch gears from butch boy to effeminate overnight) it’s little wonder I have difficulty ever trusting straight men…but in fairness, I have trouble trusting everyone. But I never quite understood the entire “boys are studs girls are sluts” thing, but I also never truly understood the dynamics of male/female attraction. Yes, I dated in high school; I dated women in college before I finally stopped entirely. And yes, I also have had sex with women, back then–but never really enjoyed it much.

In all honesty, I still don’t understand masculinity, at least not as it was defined in my earlier decades of life. I’ve never understood the cavemen-like mentality of responding with violence (no matter how angry I get, I never get violent); I’ve never understood the refusal to recognize that women are human beings rather than life support systems for vaginas and wombs and breasts; I’ve never understood the mentality that a man’s desires should trump (see what I did there?) bodily autonomy for women. No man has a right to a woman’s body, nor does any man have a right to tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her body. Maybe always being an outsider looking in and observing has something to do with my mindset, maybe my difference and always having mostly female friends most of my life is what shaped me into understanding these things.

I also mostly only read women’s books, to be honest. There are some straight male writers I read and admire (Ace Atkins, Bill Loefhelm, Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Chris Holm, Stephen King, Jeff Abbott and Paul Tremblay, just to name a few) but I really have no desire to read straight male fantasies that reduce women to caricatures and gay men, if they do appear, as stereotypes; but after I recently read I the Jury by Mickey Spillane, a comment someone left on my post gave me a whole new perspective on how to read such books from the 40’s 50’s, and 60’s; the perspective of reading these books as examples of post-war PTSD…and that opened my eyes to all kinds of questions and potential critical analyses; that the horrors of World War II and what the veterans saw and experienced shaped the development of the culture of toxic masculinity that arose after the war (not that toxic masculinity didn’t exist before the war, of course, but the war experience certainly didn’t help any and it most definitely reshaped what “being a man” meant). I was thinking about doing a lengthier critical piece, on I the Jury, along with the first Travis McGee novel, and possibly including Ross Macdonald, Richard Stark and possibly Alistair MacLean. There’s certainly a wealth of material there to take a look at, evaluate, and deconstruct–and that’s not even getting into Ian Fleming and James Bond.

I’ve also always found it rather interesting that Mickey Spillane was Ayn Rand’s favorite writer. Make of that what you will.And on that note, I am off to bed. The last two days have been long ones, and tomorrow and Sunday will also be long days. I’m planning on driving back to New Orleans on Sunday–timing it so I get back after the parades are over so I can actually get home–regardless of what happens here. It’s not been an easy time here, and I am very tired.

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Shattered

Thursday morning, and I am about to head over to the West Bank to have my car serviced before I head to Kentucky.

Kentucky? Why are you driving to Kentucky when parades start tomorrow, Gregalicious?

I curate my life here on social media/blogs etc. I don’t talk about friends or family on here or my day job very often. I try not to be offensive, and I try to protect the privacy of my friends, family, and co-workers. Most of them never signed up for this (my writer friends did, kind of, but nevertheless I don’t talk about their personal lives or our friendships on here) and as a general rule, I try to keep my entries non-personal; I don’t write about Paul (he has specifically asked to be left off my social media other than in passing) or what’s going on with him or us on here. But while I generally like to protect everyone’s privacy–and I usually don’t like bleeding in public–I feel like I kind of have to mention this, even if it’s a violation of my family’s privacy.

My mother has been in poor health since Christmas of 2019, when she had a stroke. We almost lost her that time, and since then, she’s had several procedures and been to lots of doctors and had all kinds of things done; it’s hard to keep track because there has been so much. At one point–it’s hard to keep track–she was having chemotherapy because they’d found cancer; she also was suffering because one of her vertebrae had shattered, and eventually had to have surgery to have bone chips removed. The cancer was along her spine, and I think the shattered vertebrae had something to do with the cancer, but it’s hard to remember and hard to keep track, as it has been relatively relentless ever since, one thing after another. I’ve been watching her decline for the past few years, which has been difficult. For the rest of the family it’s been so gradual as to not be noticeable; for me, not seeing her all the day, it was always a shock to see how much she had changed since the last time I’d seen her, and I also knew, each visit, that this might be the last time I saw her.

So, I am heading up there today, with plans to drive back to New Orleans on Sunday. The situation may change, of course; I may not get there in time. I had debated, after getting the text from my sister, about waiting still longer, but as more time passed yesterday I finally realized that if she goes while you’re on the road, that’s one thing–but I think not getting there in time would be easier to live with if I had tried. So, I talked with my supervisor and left the office early yesterday. I came home to straighten up the house and do laundry and other mindless chores while I decided what to take with me and what audiobooks to listen to in the car (I’m going to finish The Lying Game on the way up there, and will listen to Carol Goodman’s The Stranger Behind You on the way back). Scooter, being an empath like all cats, knew something was wrong and kept insisting that I sit down so he could lay in my lap, sleeping and purring to make me feel better. It comes and goes; that’s the thing with grief–you never know when it’s going to sucker punch you again when you aren’t expecting it–and maybe the way I deal with it isn’t the most healthy. I prefer to grieve by myself, quietly; I don’t want sympathy and I don’t want pity and I don’t want everyone to comfort me because all that does is make me sadder and cry more. Talking about it is when I start choking up and getting teary-eyed; so I’d rather not talk about it. I like to process things alone, work it all out for myself. This is one of the reasons I despise funerals and avoid them as much as I can; putting your grief on display like that has always made me nervous and uncomfortable. I’ve never been good with attention–as I kept saying this past weekend in Alabama, “Praise makes me uncomfortable”–that also holds true for this kind of attention as well. We were always raised to be stoic in public–“never bleed in public”–which convinced me that grief is something private. Unfortunately, that has also translated into making me uncomfortable around other people’s grief; I am terrible when someone I care about loses someone they love. I never know what to say or do, and I always feel helpless because my natural instinct is to do whatever I can to make things easier for the people I love–but I can’t take away their grief and pain, so I feel like anything I do or say is futile and useless.

When my final grandparent died right after Hurricane Katrina, I remember heading up to Kentucky (it was Thanksgiving week) and once there, my dad saying to my mother, “Well, I guess we’re the old generation now.” It’s hard not to think about your own mortality when you are losing a parent; especially when you’re already in your sixties when you lose your first parent. (Ironically, I am almost the age my parents were when the last of my grandparents passed.)

And no matter how prepared you are for this (I’ve been steeling myself since December 2019, and it’s always been there in the back of my mind; every time I get a text message I tense up), it’s never an easy thing.

And I have twelve hours in the car to think about it, remember things from the mundane (oh, I’ll never have my mom’s dumplings again) to the painful (Dad is going to be a wreck) and of course, the ever popular what now?

But I know I’d rather tense up and worry when I get a text message than say goodbye.

Not sure when I’ll be back here, Constant Reader. Take care of yourself and give your loved ones a hug for me, okay?

If I Was a Dancer

Monday and I have to say–as comfortable as that bed was in Birmingham, there’s nothing like my own bed. I really like being home. But being away is much more pleasant when you’ve just spent a weekend away. I slept very deeply last night–I did wake up a couple of times, but was able to get back to sleep again, which was lovely. I also slept later than I intended to this morning, but that’s also okay. I have things to get done, errands to run, cleaning to do and laundry to launder, manuscripts to edit…it’s not easy being a Gregalicious sometimes. (There’s also nothing like coffee you’ve made yourself, either.) Parades on St. Charles also begin this Friday, which means today I really need to get my life and week figured out–parade season always requires a plan. There are three parades Friday night, five Saturday, and two or three on Sunday. We haven’t gotten a Mardi Gras guide for this year, either; I’ll need to rectify that today–but I don’t think I’ve seen any anywhere this year? Maybe I’ve not been paying attention–always a possibility, really–but we really need to have one.

Although I suppose the parade tracker app can serve in its place?

Perish the thought.

It feels chilly in the apartment this morning but the heat isn’t on, which is odd. It felt relatively temperate in the apartment when I got home last night, so I’ll have to check the setting.

It’s always slightly disorienting to reacclimate to your day-to-day existence after a lovely weekend of being an author, you know? I’ve never had much trouble erecting firewalls to compartmentalize the different aspects of my life; I keep my day job out of my writing profession and I keep my author life out of my day job, and so on and so forth. I think I am able to compartmentalize my life so easily because I’ve always compartmentalized my life; every queer person who has ever been closeted should be good at this as we are used to living two separate lives–always terrified that somehow the two lives would intersect at the worst possible moment. I do recognize in myself that separating aspects of my life is such an ingrained habit that even after successfully merging my two lives when I was thirty, that I still have the habit of separating. I separate my private life from my public life, and am fiercely protective of my privacy (and yes, I know how weird that sounds, given I have a daily blog–but I rarely talk about my personal life on here other than generic references to dinners or drinks with friends, and I try very hard to leave my friends’ names out of here as well; they didn’t give me permission to talk about them publicly), and I also separate my author life from my day-job world. It’s nice and humbling to know that even if my co-workers know that I am an author, they don’t think about it much or if they do, it’s more of a how cool and then they move on and forget about it as well. This is even more true now that Jean has retired; I used to pop into her office to talk about a book one of us was writing, or something that we just read and liked, or just to share industry gossip with a heaping side helping of snark. I do miss that from time to time.

But I need to shake off this weird adjustment feeling. I have things to do, even though I’d rather just curl up in my easy chair and finish reading The Lying Game. I need to write my review of Carol Goodman’s The Night Visitors; I need to clean out the refrigerator and see what’s spoiled in order to make a grocery list for today; I need to figure out what to take for lunch for the rest of the week; I need to make a Costco list; I need to make a plan to get through parade season; I need to finish a short story and look at some in-progress ones to pick ones to finish for submission calls; and of course, there’s always filing and organizing to do. At some point I need to start tearing my manuscripts apart for the revisions; and I will probably do that today. There’s laundry to launder and computer files to look through and file properly; there’s mail and groceries and a prescription to get. So, on that note, I need to make another cup of coffee, find something in the cabinets for breakfast (add cereal to grocery list), and get my normal life kicked back into gear, much as I’d rather bask in the afterglow of the weekend.

So have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later.

Emotional Rescue

Well, I forgot my power cord in New Orleans, so have been trying to use this laptop as sparingly as possible so that I can at least get this posted before I head to Wetumpka this morning for Murder on the Menu. Today was nice; the Homewood Library always has a nice turnout for the panels, people bought my books and were very lovely to me–always a plus–and I got to spend some more time with friends I don’t get to see very often, like Dean James and Erica Spindler (name-dropping!) and I also got to spend time getting to know Debra Goldstein and Christopher Swann better, and I got to spend some time with Bobby Mathews, whom I met briefly at Bouchercon this last fall. He’s quite funny, and I picked up his Working the Gimmick, a pro wrestling noir! How fun is that? And since one of my in-progress projects is a pro-wrestling adjacent gay noir, I’m kind of looking forward to reading it! I am going to listen to Carol Goodman on the drive to Wetumpka (The Night Visitors), and when I finish it–probably about halfway between Wetumpka and New Orleans, I will switch over to Ruth Ware’s The Lying Game, which I am also looking forward to. I’ve also been writing lots of notes and ideas in my journal during yesterday’s panels. Alas, after mine today I am departing back to New Orleans because I do need to get home–parades start next weekend, so I really need to start preparing for the coming limitations on running errands that is the inevitable and unenviable result of parade season.

I did sleep really well Friday night–the key is that even if I am now in that partial sleep that is the bane of my existence, my body and mind are resting, which makes such a difference. My Fitbit does actually monitor my sleep; the goal is to always have a sleep score of 80 or higher; I think there’s only been one night since I came home from New York where the score wasn’t over eighty, and usually it’s averaging in the high eighties, which is great and not very common for me. I slept really well again last night–at least, rested well; not sure how deep the sleep actually was but the rest was lovely.

I did not manage to finish this entry this morning. The battery in my laptop did indeed die as I was typing (I’d managed to save it as I watched the battery very quickly evaporate once it got to 15% charge) and now I am home. Today I had a lovely drive to Wetumpka, and the panel and signings and stuff there went well. We managed to sell thirty (!) copies of A Streetcar Named Murder, which was very pleasant and a very pleasant surprise. I really love Wetumpka, and the folks there seem to really love me, too. They are absolutely lovely, they read my books and like them, what a pleasant surprise, you know? Small town Alabama–who knew that was my sweet spot?

I am home now and very tired. The drive home was smooth–and I did start Ruth Ware’s The Lying Game before I got to Mobile (the Goodman novel is fantastic; more on that later), and I am really enjoying the Ware as well. I really want to set a book in Wetumpka–I have a Ruth Ware kind of idea for a book to be set there, and I have a cozy idea that could easily work in a town like Wetumpka. Although the Wetumpkans may not like what I may do to their town….LOL. But the more I listen to/read Carol Goodman and Ruth Ware, the more I think I want to write something more along those lines, too. That’s me, the sponge; anything I read that I also enjoy I always wind up wanting to write something in that style. The 70’s book that I am thinking about–I almost have the title down–is also something entirely different than what I’ve written before or want to write in the future, which of course makes me want to write it all the more. But this week I need to start tearing manuscripts apart and stitching them back together, getting these other two books finished so I can get back to the others I want to write, so I can then write the 70s book. (I am resisting the urge to start writing it, you have no idea how hard it is to resist that urge, especially with that little voice in my head whispering you can always start editing the manuscripts next week why not take this week to get it started which is how this stuff always winds up getting out of hand. I also think that my creativity sometimes gets a bit over-stimulated when I do events like this.

But what a problem to have, right?

And on that note, I am going to go start digging out from under everything that has piled up since I left Friday afternoon. Have a lovely rest of your evening, Constant Reader!

Dance Little Sister

Today I am off to Alabama. I’ve ordered groceries to pick up for Paul, which I will drop off on my way out of town. I am a bit excited about the trip–it’s always lovely to see Margaret and Tammy–and I just love this event. This is my fourth time going, and I’ve always had a good time whenever I’ve headed up there. I’ll be back here on Sunday evening, probably exhausted and ready for the incredible comfort and joy of my own bed. I am looking forward to the drive (lunch at the Arby’s in Toomsuba! Carol Goodman audiobook on the stereo!) and I’m not in a huge rush to get up there, either. I think it’s about six or seven hours? Never mind, it’s only five total– I also checked the distance and the timing it takes, and I realized last night that I don’t, in fact, have to get on the road by nine or ten. Since it’s five hours, give or take, without stops, so really, as long as I get on the road around noon I’ll be there tonight by six. So, why make myself crazy trying to rush out of here?so yeah, no need to put the pedal to the metal and speed or anything. I’ll probably just put the cruise control on after I get past Slidell and cross the state line into Mississippi. I also checked the distance and the timing it takes, and I realized last night that I don’t, in fact, have to get on the road by nine or ten. Since it’s five hours, give or take, without stops, so really, as long as I get on the road around noon I’ll be there tonight by six. So, why make myself crazy trying to rush out of here? I do have to go pick up those groceries, swing by the bank and post office, get gas, and run another errand. I can also take my time and make sure I have everything packed that I need as well–when I finish this I’ll probably go ahead and make the list after checking the weather. I slept extremely well last night, too.

I was exhausted when I got home from work yesterday, hence the great relief that I could just laze about and not do much of anything last night, which was helpful. I think the malaise really struck hard yesterday, and by the time I got home from the office I was exhausted, so much so that I collapsed into my chair without a second thought and pretty much stayed there the entire night, rather than packing or organizing or anything. Paul did come home so we could finish The Recruit–and I have to say, that was a season finale. It’s already been renewed for a second season, and I can’t recommend this show enough. It’s a lot of fun, has humor, a great plot and story, and the acting is top notch. I also rather like the cynical way the CIA works on the show–as well as its depiction of how Washington works–because I suspect it’s much more like this than people would like to believe. I did go to bed early, too, which helped with the sleep, and even though I woke up at six this morning I chose to stay in bed for another couple of hours like a slug. But it felt marvelous–last night I was thinking to myself I was too tired to make the trip this weekend if I didn’t get a good night’s sleep, and how fortuitous for me that I got one. Here’s hoping I can sleep for the next two nights at a hotel in Birmingham, shall we?

But I can feel my batteries recharging, if that makes sense? And that, too, feels good to me. I know I have a lot of editing work to do in front of me–as well as other writing–but this fallow period is needed to rest the earth of my creativity so it can spring back into action when I need it again. I think I was a bit too ambitious with thinking about my schedule for the year, too–but the schedule has kind of sorted itself out again, which is kind of nice. I’m not sure when I am going to get to some of the things I had planned to write this year–but I do still plan on writing them; I don’t think ambition is going to be a problem to get me motivated this year. In fact, I suspect motivation is actually not going to be a problem for me this year or any year going forward.

Then again, it isn’t summer here quite yet, either. Summer definitely takes its toll on me and my psyche; usually by August I am feeling relatively defeated by the heat and humidity, but I don’t think that’ll be as much of a problem this year as it has been. Now that we have the new HVAC system, it’s always cool in the house in every part of it. And by then I am hoping to have my return to the gym ingrained as a habit by then. 2023 is the year I want to take better care of myself and get things taken care of–hearing and teeth to start with–and of course going to the gym is integral to my health. I need to start stretching at home every day in the meantime, maybe even working my way back up to some push-ups and ab crunches before I start going back to the gym. It also has occurred to me that stretching at home before going to the gym is probably a better approach; I’ll be warmed up and the walk will keep me warmed up as I head over there and then back home again. I also think I’ll feel more like myself once I am going to the gym again more regularly. And feeling more like myself, returning my life back to what it used to be, is really kind of important to me. I feel in some ways like I’ve lost my sense of self and who am I and what really matters to me the most over the course of the last years because I’ve been so busy. It’s also been really tempting to think oh I have so much free time I should start volunteering again, but I cut those thoughts off very quickly and at the pass. This is how I become over-committed and stressed out and inevitably kicks my anxiety into high gear again–so I always have to take a step back and think whenever that impulse rears its head in my life again.

And I won’t feel bad for being selfish and more jealous of my time. I’ve been volunteering almost non-stop since 1998–twenty five years ago–and so see no reason to feel bad about not giving back for a while, if ever again.

And on that note, I need to start getting ready for the trip and ready to hit the road. Have a great Friday, Constant Reader; I probably won’t check in again with you until Monday morning.

Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)

Well, I’ve decided on my audiobook for the drive to and from Alabama this weekend: Carol Goodman’s The Night Visitors. Carol is one of my favorite writers (and has become a friend! I love my life) and I love her works; if you’re not reading her already you need to get on it–and there’s a healthy canon to dig into as well (always a plus). She also has a new book coming out this spring, called The Bones of the Story, which is a great title. I’m working on a short story this week while I am letting my novel manuscripts rest, and it’s definitely some slow going. I got about two thousand words into this story about a year ago, and I think it works perfectly for this anthology a friend of mine is putting together; I just need to finish the damned thing. But tonight I have a ZOOM call I have to do and I have to pack for my weekend in Alabama, and tomorrow morning I’m getting up, writing a post and hitting the road while listening to the divine Carol Goodman.

Does life get better? I think not.

It’s actually kind of funny; after I finished yesterday I realized I could, for the first time in quite a while, take some down time to myself for a minute or two without guilt or something looming over me needing to be done. After I sent the manuscript (such as it is) in along with my editorial thoughts and analyses, I thought, wow, I’ve sure written a lot since just before Christmas and showed an incredible amount of discipline–the kind of single-mindedness you’ve not had for quite a while, and I should feel drained and tired but I don’t. That was an incredibly over-confident assumption to make, even though it was true at the time I thought it. When I got home from work I realized my candle wick had burned down so far that it needed to rest and be replenished for a while. I am still feeling motivated and creative, though; I was simply drained yesterday. Before I went to bed last night (after watching another episode of The Recruit, which I am really enjoying) I kind of felt like the batteries were already starting to recharge. I feel very tired this morning, too–I slept well, don’t get me wrong, but I think I needed to sleep longer. Ah, well. I don’t have to get up before the sun rises tomorrow, so that’s something.

I always like Thursday nights.

But the kitchen is still a mess. I wasn’t in the mood to clean last night when I got home, either. I just felt disoriented, emotionally and intellectually spent, and physically tired. I used to call it the malaise, because it felt like melancholy brought on by the utter exhaustion of my creativity and drive to write. It’s very weird. Usually, the malaise also brings with it the feeling that I don’t even want to think about writing anything else ever again–which is not the case this time, which is very weird to me. I am champing at the bit to get to work on more things, new things, even to start working on the editing of everything else. It is very weird, and I will keep you posted on how this weird new version of malaise works itself out.

But I’ll have to clean the kitchen before the ZOOM thing tonight. That, or turn off all the kitchen lights.

Heavy heaving sigh.

I watched an interesting documentary on Youtube in my tired malaise last night, a new one from James Somerton called The Death of Queer Privacy, which was interesting. The primary focus of the documentary–Somerton does popular media critiques from a queer perspective–was, to begin with, about outing as well as the potentially problematic tropes in Paul G. Tremblay’s A Cabin at the End of the World and it’s film adaptation, A Knock at the Cabin. It was another look–deconstruction, if you will–if whether a straight identified (I don’t know how he actually does identify) writer centering a gay couple/family at the heart of a horror novel/movie is either good representation (they could just as easily have been a straight couple, a mixed-race couple, lesbians, etc.; sexual orientation didn’t play a part in the plot and if anything, the fact that the gay family was presented as normal and not a big deal tends to undermine any critical analyses of this as intentionally or unintentionally sinister) or if the book/movie, at heart, centers the trauma of a queer family as entertainment for the masses. I may want to watch that again; I wasn’t paying a lot of attention because I was tired and scrolling through social media on my iPad, so I may have missed some things, but the critique and look at the film itself was merely an introduction to the main topic, which was the attack on queer people’s right to privacy–which served as an interesting counterpoint to a lot of the public discourse about queer celebrities and how much of their lives, if any, needs to be shared with the audience. The recent forced outing of Kit Conner from Heartstopper is perhaps the best example of this; the idea that queer people in the public eye need to–nay, must–come out and be publicly queer, no matter how they themselves feel about revealing that much of themselves to the world, is problematic on its face. Somerton then went on to talk about how gossip blogger (and garbage human being) Perez Hilton essentially dragged a couple of people out of the closet. And really, are the personal and private lives of any celebrity any of our business? Simply because we enjoy someone’s performance in film and television, or like someone’s music, doesn’t really give us the right to know intimate details of their personal lives. I’ve never cared, beyond mere idle interest in hearing gossip; but I don’t care that much about it because I don’t know these people. What does who Taylor Swift is dating have to do with her music–other than her break-ups tend to spawn some amazing music–and why do I care? Why would I care who Tom Hiddleston is fucking, unless it’s someone I actually know? (There’s an interesting dialogue to be had about our billion-dollar celebrity gossip industry…) To circle around back to Tremblay, I knew he was publicly identified as straight as far as I knew (and didn’t care to know more). I was a fan of his before reading A Cabin at the End of the World (having greatly enjoyed A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock–I’ve not read the others yet–and so I was delightfully surprised that the family the book was centered on was a gay couple and their adopted child. It was yet another entry in the “people go to secluded place and then horrible things happen” trope of horror, but with a remarkable twist that made it even more intense and terrifying. (I’m really looking forward to the film.) I read the book and enjoyed it, and I didn’t read anything sinister into it; but I was also reading it from an entertainment perspective rather than to gain a sociopolitical perspective for writing a critique…which now I kind of want to do, thank a lot, James Somerton–this is how this kind of thing always happens to me.

In fact, an essay exploring three mainstream novels by non-queer writers centering queer characters could prove interesting–and the Tremblay, S. A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears, and Laurie R. King’s Back to the Garden would be the perfect trio to look at as they are relatively current, critical successes, and often award recognized.

And on that note I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely morning, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later.