Category: chores

Steppin’ Out

Wednesday morning and it’s cold outside this morning. It’s currently in the forties, and I turned on the heat once I came downstairs. This isn’t going to last long–I believe it’ll be back in the eighties for the weekend–but this morning going outside is going to be more than just a little painful, methinks.

I got off work yesterday and swung uptown to pick up the mail–the pothole at the end of the street finally resurfaced, and so my street is being resurfaced at the St. Charles end and is closed to access from that way, which makes getting home a bit more challenging than usual. I have to go uptown on the way home again today–long story short, I ordered a new lunchbox because Tug broke the strap on the old one, and it was overdue anyway; I should have ordered a new one long ago, and the new one is being delivered today in theory. It’s also the first of November, which kind of feels weird. This year has lasted an eternity already and yet here it is almost the end of the year already. I kind of feel in some ways like I’ve frittered the year away–and let’s be brutally honest, most of this year was spent working on things that were supposed to have been finished last year, and somehow nothing since those were both completed. Blame it on what? The heat, a difficult year, the injury, and everything else that seemed to go off the rails for me this year. Paul was working last night so I didn’t get a chance to do much of anything last night. I was too tired to read, and I also had an operating system upgrade to finish on the computer. It’s working in a most lovely fashion this morning, which is super awesome; upgrades have always worried me since the Great Data Disaster of 2018.

Which reminds me, I need to back up the back-up, as it has been a moment.

I honestly don’t know why I was so off last night, or how I managed to waste most of the evening. I started reading the new Lou Berney (Dark Ride) yesterday morning at the dentist’s office (oh wait, that explains the entire day being off, doesn’t it? I hate being so immured in my ruts of routine) and it’s quite good, although I didn’t get very far into it before it was my turn to get in the chair for the dentist. It was the final fitting for my new dentures, which fit snugly and tightly and look marvelous in my mouth. The next time they call me, I will come out of their office with my new teeth, which is very exciting. I am quite delighted at the thought of eating solid foods again. I also had to go out to the UNO campus to record “My Reading Life” with Susan Larson, who is always a delight and is one of the few promotional things I actually enjoy doing. And duh, that is why I was tired and off all day long; the usual daily routine was disrupted. I had to drive out to Jefferson Highway almost to Harahan for the dentist appointment, drove back into the city for work, then had to go out to the lakefront to UNO and back. That’s a serious disruption to my routine, and as I am learning, that’s the sort of thing that drains my batteries now.

But I greatly enjoyed this year’s Halloween Horror Month, even if the bad quality of the videos of Friday the 13th the Series on Youtube caused me to abandon the rewatch of that show for the month. We’ve been watching The Fall of the House of Usher, which has been a lot of fun and very well done, too–hopefully we can get that finished tonight or by the weekend. It was fun revisiting The Dead Zone, and the other reading I did this month was pretty awesome too. I am going back to crime fiction reading again, because the horror reading has been making my brain go into the horror direction, and I’m not really a good horror writer.

Yesterday Death Drop launched into the world–I’m going to do some more promotional posts about the book as well as some for Mississippi River Mischief, which is also dropping next week (this is what happens when you don’t make your deadlines, people–don’t be a Greg)–and it’s always nice when that happens. It sometimes feels a bit anticlimactic, and I am terrible about promotion anyway (doing it always makes me feel very self-conscious, which is something else i need to work on, because it’s also rooted in my anxiety). My anxiety has also been off the charts lately, and I don’t know why that is. The lack of an LSU game last weekend, perhaps, which served as another disruption to routine? I’ve also been studiously not answering my emails since last week sometime, as well, which is also not like me and another sign that the brain chemistry isn’t working properly again. But now that I know what the problem is with my brain chemistry (better late than never, right?) we are going to change my medications because I’ve been on the wrong ones, and come up with a different coping plan. I feel like I’m in the middle of yet another reboot of my life–new teeth, surgery on my arm, writing cozies, thinking about exercise and eating right again–which might be needed. It just feels like everything has been a slog for so long now; I do think it goes back to the Great Data Disaster of 2018, which started the whole mess. Or maybe it was the expense of buying a new car and having a car payment every month, which kind of did me in financially for a while (starting to see daylight again)–there’s no stress like financial stress, after all. Anyway, I’ve not really felt centered or in any semblance of control over my life for quite some time now, and I’m kind of tired of letting my life happen to me–which was where I was at when I was thirty-three and did the first hard reboot of my life.

I feel good this morning, rested and awake and alert and energetic and ambitious, and it’s been awhile since I felt that way. I may run out of steam at some point today–it does happen, after all–but I am starting to feel good again about a lot of things and when I can look at positives rather than be overwhelmed by the negatives…I’ll take that as a win gladly and keep going.

And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a marvelous mid-week, and I will check in with you again later.

Dirty Laundry

Tuesday and soon enough I’ll be heading out to the dentist for my final fitting of the dentures–which means the next time I go, I will actually get them and be off this hateful soft food diet once and for all. I’ve kind of gotten used to it, though–but as much as I will miss the pint of ice cream, I can still have yogurt and the super-hot-and-spicy ramen on top of everything else. I think I am going to give myself to the end of the year–since I missed out on so much unhealthy food since the surgery–before I change my eating habits in order to be healthier going forward. The New Year will also be about six weeks after the surgery, so hopefully I’ll be in better condition by then to actually go ahead and change the way both Paul and I eat–Paul already eats much healthier than I do; so I just need to adjust mine a bit. But I can cut the ice cream out, as well as some of the snacking. Popcorn is really healthier, and it’s not hard to make, either. And I like it, just as I like pretzels, which are also healthier than chips (I think). At any rate, I need to spend some more time in the kitchen figuring out how to cook things I’ll like that are good for me.

And every once in a while, I can make Swedish meatballs or shrimp-n-grits as a treat…

Yes, because looking at food as a potential reward/treat is completely the healthy mindset I should have.

I’ve always had issues with my body and with food, for that matter; a lot of it stupid, a lot of it a product of my malfunctioning brain, and part of it from being, well, shamed for not being in the best physical condition possible. I don’t know when it all started, but I know when I was in high school–when I really started paying attention to male bodies–that I wasn’t built like other boys, and certainly not the ones all the girls were madly crushing on (for the record, I have never, nor will I ever, understand straight women’s taste in men), so I began thinking there must be something wrong with my body. I did eventually stop doing sports and so forth once I was in college, and that was also right around the time my metabolism slowed down from what it had been previously, so I gained weight–and I’ve never really been right in the head about my body and weight management ever since, I’m over sixty now, of course, and a lot of that body image stuff is in the past–but I do sometimes see pictures of myself and cringe at how big I look, which is patently absurd on its face and a mentality I need to get rid of once and for all. This soft food diet has helped me drop some extra weight–about ten pounds or so at this point–and I bet I lose even more after the surgery. Note to self: you need to buy a wagon to carry groceries in from the car, since you won’t have the use of both arms for a while.

It’s below sixty this morning and we’re having a middle of the week cold snap, even getting colder than fifty theoretically tonight. It’s also supposed to rain throughout the day. I am off to the dentist in a little while, so it’s one of those wretched days when I have to run all over town throughout the day, which is fine. I woke up this morning at five–and of course, Tug did his usual morning leap over Paul onto me and curled up on my pillow at around five-forty-five, waiting for the alarm so I would get up and feed him. He really is adorable, and loves to play like all kittens do; I need to buy him some toys, is what I need to do, and several laser lights because he got hold of the original one I bought and it’s disappeared, probably either under the couch or behind something. Maybe I should either swing by Petco or order something from their website to be delivered. I think he’d love one of those birds on a stick things; he was playing fetch with one of Scooter’s mice last night. But he’s adapted completely now to being our indoor cat, and he definitely feels like he is King of the Castle. He’s also curious about everything and still fearless, climbing under the couch or the dishwasher or wherever he can get–and he loves getting into the cabinets. He also broke my lunchbox yesterday; he knocked it off the counter after I packed it, and the clip for the shoulder strap broke. Sigh. I had to order another one.

I also got some book mail yesterday: Adam Cesare’s Clown in a Cornfield 2: Frendo Lives and Lisa Unger’s Christmas Presents. Lisa Unger is one of my favorite writers, but is one of those I always forget to mention when people ask me about favorite authors in interviews and things. I read some more short stories from Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories That Scared Even Me, and they were okay; more morbid and weird than anything else, but interesting. One was “It” by Theodore Sturgeon, which was very peculiar and strange but was kind of fun to read (even though a dog dies terribly in it) and “Casablanca” by Thomas M. Disch, which was interesting; about an American couple visiting Morocco when a nuclear war breaks out between the Soviet Union and the United States, and how things change for them during that period, as they slowly lose their ugly American haughtiness and privilege. It was difficult to feel sorry for them because they were so awful and so used to their being American being a magic ticket that they become nasty and unpleasant as they begin to realize that being American means nothing anymore. It was kind of haunting to remember that paranoia we were so used to living with when I was a child; that fear that at any moment bombs would be incoming that would change the world forever; the American cultural obsession with nuclear doomsday when I was growing up was really something and popped up in movies and books and stories all the time. The one I remember the most (literature wise) is Alas Babylon, and the movies–Testament and The Day After. When I was in high school PBS ran a documentary about the possibility of nuclear war and what it would like; which was when I learned nuclear missile bases dotted the Midwest and particularly Kansas–the abandoned missile base just outside of Bushong in north Lyon County was actually mentioned in the show as a target despite being abandoned in the early 1970’s (that missile base shows up in my story “This Thing of Darkness,” and sometimes I think it might be fun to set an entire book there–high school kids exploring an abandoned missile base only to find something horrible and deadly there), which was all we could talk about at school that week–the morbid fascination that out there in the middle of nowhere Kansas we were still Soviet targets.

Ah growing up in the second half of the twentieth century was such a joy.

And on that note, I am going to get showered and cleaned up and head for the dentist’s office. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later.

You Don’t Want Me Anymore

Monday morning after a relatively relaxing and stable weekend. I did a lot, mostly chores that needed to be done and reading, but it was also very nice. The Saints won their game yesterday, which was a very pleasant surprise, and we finished watching this most recent season of Élite, which I realized yesterday I’ve always put the accent on the wrong e, but it’s pronounced ah-lee-tay, so it made sense to me for the accent to go there.

Or maybe I’ve been saying it wrong.

Anyway, this seventh season was disappointing, as the storylines and the crime focused on parents rather than the students–which was a major error, I felt. The season did end with a murder–I’d wondered how long that character, an abusive and controlling lover, would last without being killed or redeemed; I got my answer in the finale–but the primary issue with the season is I don’t really care very much about any of the characters anymore. One of the show’s greatest strengths in those early fantastic seasons was how well the characters were developed (and the talent of the actors playing them) was that they were multi-faceted; even when they were being bad or doing terrible things, you understood them and why they were doing it so they were sympathetic. Now they are all just kids who bad things happen to who have no control over anything that happens or what they do–which is the problem. Before, in the earlier seasons, the kids had agency, and while originally the show was the Gossip Girl we all deserved, it slowly turned itself into Gossip Girl, which was fun but had little depth. A pity. We’ll stick around for the eighth season, which is the last one, while mourning its former glory.

Tomorrow is Halloween, and I signed up to make a cheesecake. The mistake I made was forgetting that I have to go to the dentist tomorrow morning before work, and the other was I must have gotten rid of my cake carrier during one of my pandemic decluttering purges, so I have nothing to carry it to work with–and I don’t like the idea of it sitting in my car while I am at the dentist. Going back home to get it after the dentist isn’t an option, either, because I am trying to spare paid time off as much as possible with the surgery coming, as I also have to run off to UNO after lunch to record “My Reading Life with Susan Larson”. Big day indeed. I guess I can just put the cheesecake into a box and bring it while still in the springform pan? AH, well, all I know is when I get home from work tonight I have to make a cheesecake and figure out the rest tomorrow.

These difficult life decisions, seriously.

I did manage to read Mike Ford’s The Lonely Ghost yesterday which I quite enjoyed; middle-grade books tend to read a lot faster than those for older readers and there will definitely be more on that to come. I will say for now that had he been writing when I was a kid, Ford would be one of my go-to authors, like Phyllis A. Whitney.

We also watched a hilarious (to us, anyway) movie on Prime yesterday, Totally Killer, which starred Kiernan Shipka in the lead of a hilarious mash-up of Back to the Future with a slasher movie playing Jamie, whose mom was the final girl of a spree killer thirty-five years earlier, who comes back in the present day to kill her mom. Her mom is obviously very into self-protection and more than a little paranoid–which of course makes Jamie even more sullen and distant. Her best friend is trying to build a time machine as a science project out of an old photo book, and for some reason the science fair takes place at an old, abandoned amusement park. Anyway, the killer kills her mom and chases her into the amusement park, she ducks into the photo booth and accidentally turns it on, and then the killer stabs the console with his butcher knife–which activates the time machine and sends her back to 1987, with a new task and mission: catch the killer before he kills anyone and thus save her mother–and with the benefit of her knowledge of the history, she knows who is going to be killed and where. A great plan, of course–but her being there slowly starts changing the future. It’s very clever and funny, and the juxtaposition of a modern teenager into a teenager back in the highly problematic 80’s and the cultural/societal differences are absolutely hilarious–especially to those of us who lived through them the first time. It’s light and fluffy, fun and entertaining and not to be taken terribly seriously. Also, because it’s Halloween Horror Month, I’ve been reading a lot of books that would fall into the slasher versions of horror–Clown in a Cornfield, Final Girls–so I’ve been thinking about the trope a lot lately too.

Maybe my next y/a should be a slasher novel? It could be fun.

And on that note, off to the spice mines! Have a lovely All Hallows’ Eve Eve!

Nobody

Sunday morning and I managed to get a lot done yesterday while watching games occasionally. I got bored watching Georgia throttle Florida, laughed about the Kansas win over Oklahoma, watched Tulane almost blow a significant lead and lose to Rice, and got bored with Tennessee-Kentucky so switched over to Elité on Netflix–and this seventh season is simply terrible. We have one more episode in this season and it’s over, and I can’t say I’m sorry to see it go.

But I did get a lot done yesterday. I cleaned. I ran errands,,,and I worked on the filing. Yes, there’s still work to be done, but my workspace no longer looks like I need to. just take a flamethrower to it, and even the laundry room is beginning to look like it’s more together than it should be. I do have to do some refiling, but everything is properly sorted and where it needs to be, if not alphabetized properly. I also discovered a lot of duplicate files–I am sure there are even more to be found, once the filing truly starts getting compiled and sorted properly. I also need for some of these files to just go away; I am never going to get to all of these ideas and I am never going to write all these stories and novels or essays and nonfiction books, either. But which ones to keep, which ones to abandon for good? I’ve been saving ideas and files and stories and scenes and characters for well over forty years now; you can only imagine how much I’ve forgotten about that are buried deep within this insane file-hoarding situation; it’s almost as bad as my book situation.

But getting all this clutter and debris sorted and put into a semblance of order also helped me get focused more–I think perhaps that’s been part of the problem with focusing on writing anything, really; knowing how out of control the filing had gotten and not knowing where anything was, or what I was working on could be found, and so forth. I’m going to try to get back to work on my next book today–after I get some more of these blog entry drafts completed and posted–and I am also going to try to work on the files some more. I decided that I am not, after all, going to be able to get my story “The Blues Before Dawn” finished in time to submit to the Bouchercon anthology, so it’ll go back into the files for now for a while. I never could quite get the story write, but that opening–my main character walking home in the misty morning hours of the Quarter while listening to someone playing the blues on a saxophone on a balcony, hidden away in the fog. I love that image, and I know that my main character is an apprentice waiter at Galatoire’s and sometimes turns tricks for money at Ma Butler’s bordello in Storyville; I also know it’s a Sherlock Holmes story from the perspective of someone who has a crush on Mr. Holmes–and now has to depend on Sherlock to save him from wrongly being accused of murder. The rest? Not so much…and it’s due on Tuesday, so that’s not going to happen. A pity, yes, but a Sherlock story from the perspective of a sometime male harlot was a long shot for the Bouchercon anthology anyway.

I did start reading The Lonely Ghost by Mike Ford, which is quite delightful, along with a reread of Ammie Come Home by Barbara Michaels (also one of my favorite books of all time, and definitely one of the greatest ghost stories of all time) when I had a few down moments to spend (I’ll get back to The Lonely Ghost later on this morning), and I also have to make a cheesecake this morning and get the white bean chicken chili started so it’ll be ready for tonight and the rest of the week, of course. Halloween is going to be one of those frantic unsettling days, but that’s okay; I can make it through it all.

I slept really well last night, which was lovely; my sleep lately has been pretty marvelous, honestly. Relaxing in the evenings last week, letting the anxiety not get to me, and getting good night’s sleeps this past week was really kind of lovely and nice. I also slept late this morning, opting to stay in bed later than I usually do because it frankly felt nice, you know? Today I am also planning some self-care and grooming, which will be nice. Maybe even take a walk later in the day, when it starts cooling down? Although without the humidity yesterday’s low eighties felt marvelously and delightfully cool.

And on that note, the spice ain’t gonna mine itself, so off I go. Have a marvelous Sunday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again.

Heartlight

Saturday and no LSU game, so the day stretches out in front of me a yawning empty chasm. But I feel incredibly well rested after a very relaxing deep good night’s sleep, which is simply marvelous. I have things to do this weekend–out of the ordinary things, different from the usual to-do list–so I have to figure out when to get those things done. I’m going to need to make a grocery run at some point–I have to make a cheesecake for a work potluck this week, and I am thinking it’s probably smart to make some white bean chicken chili in the crockpot at some point (soft food, after all); regardless, I need more ice cream and microwave ramen. I really like that super-hot ramen, and am also very low on yogurt. Maybe I’ll get up tomorrow and head for a grocery run on the West Bank or to the Rouse’s on Carrollton–which I could also just do this afternoon, depending on how I feel. I want to really clean up the house and get stuff done–filing, organizing, and so forth–and I can always have the football games playing on my computer while I am in the kitchen, which desperately needs work. I also want to go for a walk around the neighborhood later on today, to get a look at how the neighborhood has dressed up for Halloween.

Yesterday was a pretty good day. I managed to get my work-at-home duties taken care of and made it to my pain management appointment, which was unnecessary as I am not in pain–I think my surgeon thought I was in pain from the injury, which is cute–I wouldn’t have let it go this long had I been in actual constant pain from it. But it was one more box to check off on the list of things that need to be done before the surgery, so that makes it one step closer to when I am going to be rehabilitating the arm. I think having this hanging over my head isn’t helping much with my anxiety or getting things done; I can try to compartmentalize all I want, and try not to think about things, but the truth of the matter is I cannot control my subconscious–especially when I don’t know what’s going on with it. I think I’ve been more relaxed and rested this week because I’ve not been trying to get much done or worrying about anything; I just came home, sat in my chair with Tug sleeping in my lap (Paul is calling him Puma now, because his claws are so sharp), and read or watched television. I did watch another episode of Moonlighting yesterday while doing work-at-home chores (“My Fair David”) and then finished reading The Dead Zone but also Adam Cesare’s marvelous Clown in a Cornfield (more on both later), and am now trying to decide what horror to read next before Tuesday–which is the end of Halloween season as All Hallow’s Eve itself falls on Tuesday. I am leaning toward Mike Ford’s middle grade The Lonely Ghost, which has been in the TBR pile for far too long, and then maybe something by Chris Grabenstein if I get that done quickly–The Hanging Hill looks like it could be quite fun, or perhaps a reread of my favorite ghost story of all time, Ammie Come Home by Barbara Michaels. I also have a kids’ ghost story anthology–Alfred Hitchcock Presents Ghosts and More Ghosts, actually edited and compiled by Robert Arthur, who created one of the best kids’ series of them all: The Three Investigators. After Paul got home from the gym we also watched this week’s The Morning Show.

And just looking at the college football television schedule, I am not seeing anything other than Georgia-Florida to watch with any degree of interest, and it’s tough–I despise Florida with every molecule of my existence, but I also kind of want Georgia to lose…but I just can’t root for Florida. (Georgia always winds up being my default team in the East because I hate Florida and Tennessee both with the white-hot intensity of a dozen burning suns, and pretty much everyone else is kind of irrelevant. Kentucky and Missouri never break through, nor does South Carolina, and Vanderbilt is…well, Vanderbilt.) I’m trying not to get overly worked up for the LSU-Alabama game, which is a must-win for both. I don’t get nearly as worked up over college football as I used to, which is a good thing–as I have slowly began to recognize that while they may be athletes, they’re also kids, and they shouldn’t be subjected to the scorn from fans. The coaching staffs and administrations, on the other hand, can have all the scorn, as can the conference hierarchy AND the NCAA. I’m not overly excited about all the conference expansion because I’m not so certain that the needs of the student-athletes are being taken into consideration as much as they should be in the pursuit of the almighty television deal dollar, and that NIL stuff isn’t something I quite understand other than that college athletes are now getting paid.

I can’t get over how good I feel this morning, and how good I felt all week, frankly. I’ve got to get all this filing under control and work on the kitchen, too–the living room and the laundry room are complete disasters; although I did start working on the laundry room shelves a bit yesterday. I do get to go for the final fitting for my dentures on Tuesday morning (the same day I am taping Susan Larson’s “My Reading Life” at UNO), so I am hoping to get back to solid food in a couple of weeks–and I am definitely going to reboot my eating habits once I have teeth again. I now am down to somewhere between 205-209 pounds, depending on the day and what is in my pockets, and I’d like to get down to 200 again; but until I am able to exercise again I am going to have to do that by changing the way I eat. I’ve frankly enjoyed the ramen (and the Velveeta shells and cheddar) and may continue to eat it going forward–same with the yogurt–but the calories from Haagen-Däzs will need to be replaced by something healthy. It wouldn’t hurt me to go back to having turkey sandwiches and salads for lunch occasionally. It’s the heavy steady diet of red meat I need to dial back on, mostly; and some of the other fatty stuff I eat far more regularly than I should–and go back to looking at Five Guys as an occasional treat for good behavior.

I can but do better in the future.

And on that note, I think I am going to indulge myself in some self-care this morning and get cleaned up before taking on the rest of the day. Have a great Saturday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back soon enough, no worries–I have blog posts on “Don’t Look Now”, The Dead Zone, and Clown in a Cornfield to finish writing, too.

Heart Attack

Work-at-home Friday and here we are. Tug is still snoozing upstairs, and I have to go to my appointment at the pain management clinic later this morning during a break from work-at-home duties. I managed to somehow make it through the entire week without being completely worn out and exhausted by last night–a first–and I’m not entirely sure what that means? Am I getting used to this schedule? Was going in at eight on Monday better than going in at seven thirty? Maybe, but it may have been the evenings spent with a kitten donut sleeping in my lap while I watch an episode of Moonlighting and reread The Dead Zone. It’s actually been kind of a lovely week, honestly, one of the better ones in recent memory.

Last night’s episode of Moonlighting was “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice,” one of the more legendary episodes and one that really made everyone stand up and pay attention to what they were doing. (I’d be curious to know if the guy who created The West Wing was influenced by it as well; while the shows were vastly different they also had a lot of similarities–the rapid fire overlapping dialogue, for one.) It’s a very simple premise; in the course of a job Maddie and David hear a story about an old LA club where a very noirish type murder grew out of a love triangle, in which the band’s singer and the horn player have an affair and eventually her husband is murdered. Naturally, David and Maddie put their own spin on it–Maddie convinced she loved the man who killed her husband and it was all for love, while David is convinced the woman was a Phyllis-type from Double Indemnity type femme fatale who suckered her lover into killing her husband and taking the fall. They argue, go home, and both fall asleep–to dream their own versions of the story. The episode was also introduced by Orson Welles–which I’d forgotten–and this is probably one of the best episodes of television ever produced. (I also realized, while watching “The Lady in the Iron Mask” episode, that the entire plot of my aborted fourth Scotty book, Hurricane Party Hustle, was directly lifted from this episode.)

I have to say, I am enjoying the hell out of my rewatch of this show, which is exceeding my wildest hopes and memories that it was as good and classic as it was when I originally watched and fell in love with it back in the 1980’s when it aired. It’s definitely one of the three most influential television shows on me and my writing–along with Dark Shadows and Scooby Doo Where Are You?–and I am so delighted that it’s streaming at long last.

I also read more of The Dead Zone last night and have reached the third and final act, in which almost all of the storylines introduced throughout the course of the book have wrapped up to set up the final denouement between Johnny Smith and Gregory Stillson, the monstrous populist politician. It’s really remarkable, you know, that King was so amazingly gifted and able to structure a novel so brilliantly so early in his career. I also remember that King wasn’t taken very seriously either by critics or the Academy in the those earlier days of his career; he got roasted pretty regularly by critics even as he was selling books in the millions; horror not being taken seriously as a genre, for one, and the enormous popularity he enjoyed naturally meant “well, he can’t actually be any good, can he?” But he was. Yes, there are some problematic stuff in his earlier work (the depictions of queer people aren’t great–but are there; he seriously has an issue with overweight people; and he does have a tendency to only use people of color as “magical” characters), but the world-building, the character building, the internal monologues of the characters, and the completely realistic way he develops and reveals the characters to the readers all the while telling a very compelling and fast moving story you cannot put down is all there from the very beginning. (Of course, the Straight White Male Literary Icons were the only people getting critical acclaim back then, your John Updikes and Saul Bellows and John Gardners and Philip Roths and William Styrons and so on…and the bestseller lists were peopled with mostly straight white men like Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon and Arthur Hailey and Irving Wallace and Herman Wouk–things are better now, I ‘d say) I’ve just finished the second act, in which Johnny is working as a private tutor for Chuck Chatsworth, with the inevitable call back to the lightning rod salesman’s futile foreshadowing attempt to sell the owner of Cathy’s, a steakhouse/hang out that always hosts Chuck’s high school graduation party. Johnny has a vision of the place being struck by lightning and burning rapidly to the ground with celebrating teenagers trapped inside. He tries to convince Chuck not to go, and even Chuck’s father, not quite believing, offers to host everyone at the Chatsworth house instead–getting about half the crowd…and it is during this get-together that Johnny’s horrible vision comes true and the news of the tragedy breaks. It’s really an incredibly powerful, well constructed scene, and the character of John Smith, the victim of fate who never really understands why he has been so cursed, is really one of King’s best.

I wish I could write a novel half as good as this one, which I am looking forward to finishing tonight. I think next up will be Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare.

And on that note, I need to get back to work and. get cleaned up for my appointment. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in on you again soon.

I Can’t Help It

Yesterday afternoon’s doctor visit went fairly well, all thing considered–I certainly feel much better after that visit than I ever felt after visiting my former primary care physician, who should lose his license (more on that later at another time, but I will share that story at some point not to shame my former physician but as an example of precisely why we have to advocate for ourselves with medical professionals)–and I have to say I am in a good place about everything medical this morning. I don’t have gout (yay!), but rather have psoriatic arthritis in my toe, which isn’t great–but it’s not so painful that I need medication for it. I just know that the toe joint hurts whenever I bend it. Better that than gout, right? And my blood sugar is high, but not quite pre-diabetic, so I do need to cut back on rich and fattening foods (which I should do anyway) and increase my exercise (well, once the arm is healed I will be all over that, thank you very much). On Halloween I have an early fitting at the dentist’s–meaning the day when the soft food diet becomes history and a bitter memory is nigh, and eventually the surgery will be here and then it’ll be recovery time.

Nothing like spending the holidays recovering from a surgery.

I spent some more time with The Dead Zone last night, and got through the part where Johnny’s psychic gift is actually exposed to the world at last, even as he is still recovering and going through horribly expensive surgeries (King was also ahead of the curve in that he was writing about how medical bills can bankrupt people long before it was in the public discourse). This was when he touched his physical therapist and saw that her house was on fire; it was witnessed by several people at the hospital and of course, someone leaks it to the press and reporters descend on his hospital. I am really enjoying this book this time around–I always do–but the days when I could just pick up an old favorite and revisit it are in the past; now I always think about the others in the piles and on the bookshelves that I’ve not gotten to quite yet. I also saw yesterday that rereading books was yet another example of anxiety functioning; drawing comfort from the familiar–you know how the book is going to end already, so the anxiety that comes from not knowing how it will end–which makes me read faster and unable to put a book down–is absent and you can just enjoy it. This is precisely why Paul and I used to always rewatch the rebroadcast of LSU football games on Sunday–so we could actually watch the game without the stress of worrying about the outcome; and there were often things we’d missed in the heat of the moment.

I also watched another episode of Moonlighting, which I am enjoying very much the second time around. It’s held up pretty well, outside of the occasional misogyny; and there’s a lot less of that than you’d think, given it was the 1980’s and misogyny was still rampant everywhere (not that it’s ever stopped, but shockingly things are better now than they were forty years ago). The chemistry between young Bruce Willis and a gorgeous Cybill Shepherd was off the charts–even if her character was a bit over-the-top angry sometimes; it’s easy to see why Addison was a fan favorite, even though she came into the show as the bigger name and no one knew who Willis was. But the show was going for the rapid-fire dialogue of the great screwball romantic comedies of classic Hollywood–His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby, My Man Godfrey–that I absolutely have always loved.

Paul got home after I went to bed, and I was so dead to the world I couldn’t tell you when that was or what time, which is my way of saying I slept super well last night. We have a relatively light schedule at the office today so I should be able to catch up on all my work. Tomorrow I have an appointment at the pain management clinic–more surgery prep–but it’s also my work-at-home day, which means I made it through the week and to the weekend again. There’s also not an LSU game this weekend (it’s the pre-Alabama bye week) and I also looked at what games there are this weekend and yeah–nothing I particularly want to watch, so I should be productive this weekend, even if that means just reading.

I also watched the season premiere of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and doing some more thinking about my reality television viewing and why I am drawn to these shows about horrible people behaving badly. They used to be just a pleasurable, turn my mind off kind of entertainment; much as soaps used to be (and I watched plenty of those back in the day, which is a topic for another time as well) but something’s changed in the last few years, even before the pandemic, really; my mentality about these kinds of people has shifted in some ways that I can’t quite put my finger on. I mean, I know they’ve always been terrible people–even the ones I liked–but I guess before I was able to just see them being horrible to each other and it was entertaining in a weird, performative way–like how you can’t help but look at a car crash when you pass one. The 2016 election and all that followed in its wake made me realize that these are terrible people and that probably spills over into other parts of their lives as well–including things like politics and social justice.

And do I really want to spent my off-time encouraging and feeding into the machine that makes these terrible people famous? And what does it say about me that I watch these shows so I can sit in judgment on them and their behavior and feel morally superior to them? It’s one thing when they’re fictional characters designed specifically to prey on your emotions–judging Monica Quartermaine on General Hospital for bad choices is one thing because she’s fictional. Her trials and tribulations are scripted for maximum drama, nor do they matter outside of the context of the program…it’s not real. It’s an entirely different thing to watch Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and judge Erica Girardi (which I’ve done plenty of, believe you me) when her life and behavior actually have real life consequences. She’s a real person, and what we watch on television is some of her reality but not all of it; we only see what the producers want us to see as they shape her narrative and influence how she is viewed. “Blaming the edit” has become widely mocked–you can’t get a bad edit, really, if you haven’t said or done something that can be used to make you look bad, but the reality is anyone can cherry-pick anything to make someone look bad–Fox, Newsmax, and OANN made a fortune doing that very thing. Don’t get me wrong; I have judged her many times and found her wanting, but at the same time…there is that element of well, she put herself out there to be criticized and judged, but does that make it okay? Does she deserve it?

So sometimes, even as I judge and roll my eyes, I do feel a bit squicky about watching. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the lie that the shows are real. They remind me of professional wrestling before Vince McMahon outed the sport as entertainment with predetermined results (to avoid the federal regulations of actual competitive sport and escape culpability for steroid abuse); fans swore it was absolutely 100% real, when those who weren’t fans could clearly see it was not.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. May your Thursday be as marvelous as you are, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.

Gloria

Wednesday Pay the Bills day has rolled around yet again! I slept well again last night–I’ve been getting very good sleep lately, which has been lovely–and I don’t feel tired the way I generally do on Wednesdays, which is kind of nice. I have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon so I have to leave work a little early, but not a big deal–this is a routine follow-up to all the tests she had ordered when I switched primary care physicians, which was a huge relief to my mind about everything–and I am going in for my next fitting for my teeth on Halloween morning. We’re having a pot luck at the office that day, so I am making a cheesecake–which I will probably do on Sunday so I don’t have to mess with it on Monday night, which I won’t want to do, guaranteed. It has been a hot minute since I’ve made a cheesecake, and I think this weekend I am going to make white bean chicken chili, too.

And no, I am not wearing a costume to work that day. I also have to go tape “My Reading Life” with Susan Larson that day, and yeah–not wearing a costume to the studio at UNO for this. I also can’t believe that it’s already almost November. LSU has a bye week this weekend, so technically there’s not any real reason to watch games this Saturday, but I will have it on in the background as always and hopefully there will be some good games on this weekend; I haven’t looked yet to see who is playing.

I also spent some time with The Dead Zone again last night, and marveling at the way the novel is constructed; I don’t think anyone today (other than perhaps King) could get away with structuring a book the way he did this one, but it actually, absolutely works 100%. One of the things I’d forgotten in the years since I’ve read the book the last time is how many point-of-view characters there are, and how King uses them to build the structure of the book. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say the main character–John Smith, the most simple and basic male name of all time, no middle name, either–is in a terrible car accident and is in a coma for nearly five years, only to wake up with some psychic abilities. This is compelling and interesting enough–the concept of losing five years, how much the world and society can change in that short a period of time (even now, if you think about it, if someone went into a coma in October of 2018 and just woke up this month…think about everything that happened in that five year span, and then imagine having to get caught up on all of that after suffering a traumatic head injury and spending five years in a coma–with a psychic gift/curse of some sort on top of it. But that structure he uses–the first person point of view of the Castle Rock Strangler (Castle Rock’s first appearance in a King novel, too); the lightning rod salesman, and of course the book’s big bad, Greg Stillson (and yes, the similarities between Stillson and a real life politician struck me as far back as 2015)–all of these things are set-ups for story that comes later–the Castle Rock Strangler pov was something else–even all these years later the the words I’m so slick raise goosebumps on my skin. I’d also forgotten how sad the story actually is; Johnny’s mother’s descent into religious mania, in part triggered by his accident; his broken father, crushed by his son’s accident and losing his wife to insanity; Sarah, who was falling in love with him and would have married him but for the accident; and so on. As a teenager reading the book I marveled at how real all the characters were, how fully realized and actualized and developed; they seemed like people I would know and King’s marvelous skill at depicting the conflicting thoughts and impulses through internal monologues was something that blew me away, something I as a writer wanted to try to emulate.

I worked briefly on a short story last night; I wasn’t really tired when I got home, but Tug wanted to sleep in my lap and the story was a struggle, so it wasn’t hard for me to walk away from the computer, in all honesty. Tonight I am going to let him play with the red dot; he needs to play and exercise as he is a kitten, and I have to break myself of the oh Scooter just wants to sleep and never wants to play mentality; he had the zoomies again this morning and it amazes me how he can just leap and bounce off surfaces to launch to a new spot and then flies off the counter and gallops into the living room. My arms and legs are, of course, all scratched up (I also have a long scratch next to my nose; he launched onto my face from the ledge above the bed one night last week), but he’s so cute and adorable; it’s hard to stay mad at him even as he scampers over my keyboard and fucks things on the screen up.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and sorry I am so dull this morning. My life generally tends to be not all that exciting, really. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Truly

Tuesday and back to normal around here. Yesterday was kind of nice, actually; I felt rested and was able to get a lot done at the office, and wasn’t exhausted when I got home after running errands. This was unusual, particularly because not only did I do things over the weekend I actually left the house and was social. I assumed that I would be, naturally, quite tired and exhausted–but it was actually kind of lovely. The weekend itself was lovely, and yesterday was really nice at work. I felt rested all day-to the point I was a bit worried I might not be able to sleep. But I did sleep, fairly well, and now that I am up at the hour I usually am, well, I’m thinking that maybe getting up this early every day isn’t necessary? Leaving the office at five instead of four thirty doesn’t really spare me much traffic grief on the way home, and staying in bed yesterday until seven didn’t stop the world from turning on its axis. If I didn’t have appointments this week and thus needed to make up time at the office, I might actually start getting up at seven to be there for eight thirty every morning from now on.

Last night was nice. I stopped on the way home to get the mail, which was very lovely. I got the Christmas cards I’d ordered, for which I already have the stamps, and I think I am going to get a jump on that this year and have them all ready to go and to drop into the mail in early December. I got home, finished the laundry I’d started in the morning, and then we started watching the new season of Big Mouth–I felt like I wanted to laugh rather than enjoy the high camp drama of Elité, so that’s what we did. The show is so wrong on so many levels, but so hilarious about the sex obsessions of raging hormones during puberty and dealing with those physical and emotional changes that I laugh out loud multiple times per episode. It was a lovely evening to spend with a cat donut in my lap.

I do love a kitten donut.

I also did some things yesterday that I’d been avoiding–avoidance is always a sign of depression for me, I’ll look at an email I need to answer and think ugh I’ll deal with it later or if I answer this then they’ll answer and I don’t want to deal with that, either and so…yeah, it’s always been a problem for me. But at least I recognize the problem, right? I always think that should count for something, whether it actually does or not. I feel like I’ve kind of come out of the funk I’ve been in for a long time? I feel like myself again for the first time in a long time, and that’s a good feeling, frankly. Maybe having to leave the house this past weekend and be social shocked my system back into place? I did spend a lot of Sunday reevaluating my life and my attitudes and so forth; and some harsh truths were also brought home to me at the wedding itself. I realized, among other things, that the people I work with, while no fewer than twelve years younger and as many as forty–well, I’ve kind of kept myself aloof from them for a number of years now. My mentality was, oh, you’re sixty and if you show any interest in them they’ll think you’re a creepy old gay–something I’ve never wanted to be seen as–and so I let them do their thing and I do my thing and while I am deeply fond of all of them, I don’t really mix with them outside of work and don’t really know much about their lives. When two of them showed up, they said “Oh, we were wondering if you’d come” and I replied, “If for no other reason than to prove I do exist outside of the office” and they both started laughing–because they’d made the same joke in the car on the way there. I also commented to one of them how much I love the way they dress when they aren’t at work; some of my co-workers have the most amazing sense of style, which I love to see (just like I’m thrilled to see young celebrities pushing the boundaries of male fashion and formal wear on red carpets besides the traditional, incredibly stuffy and tired tuxedo. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved a tuxedo, but the reason I never developed a sense of style and fashion is because I always found men’s clothes to be boring, and I try to liven it up a bit with things like shoes. But when I was younger, you could never get away with going different stylistically, and so I never bothered to care or try) and I made that very observation to one of them, who joked about how I always just wear jeans and work T-shirts every day…which I do because it’s easy and I don’t have to think about…which made me think about it and so this week I’ve been wearing the collared polos that have been collecting dust within the closet for years now–even tucking them into the pants rather than just letting the shirttails hang free.

And oddly, it does make me feel better about being in the office and more participatory in my life.

I also realized, as I watched my co-worker marry his partner, that I’ve only been to same-sex weddings over the last decade (I don’t go to a lot of weddings; I hate them for any number of reasons that will be a subject for another time). I got a little misty during the ceremony, which never happens, and realized it was because I was delightedly happy for my co-worker. Standing there in the beautiful but simply decorated back yard, I started thinking about Paul and me getting married, where we would have it and what that would be like, who would we invite and who would we not, and what it would look like and I think that played a little part to my being misty during the vows and ceremony?

Having dinner with my friend Ellen on Sunday night was also incredibly helpful. Sure, I interact with other writers in emails and social media, but there really is something lovely about a face to face conversation–with wine–and conversation about publishing and writing and so on and so forth. It kind of brushed away the cobwebs that have been in my brain since the last Bouchercon, and woke me up a bit about writing and procrastination and depression and so forth. Dealing with the anxiety is also tiring, but the strategies and coping mechanisms are working. (For example, I am always early; ridiculously early in some cases, because I get anxious about getting there and anxious about being late and work myself up into quite a state until I leave early and then wind up arriving at parties and events waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too early, which is awkward and embarrassing. So Saturday the wedding was 4 to 9; I didn’t summon a Lyft until 4. Sunday the reservation was for 6:45; I got there at 6:39 and walked around the block taking pictures and came back at 6:45; Ellen was early! That was a good laugh)

And ultimately, this week I feel better about myself, my life, and my career. Of course tomorrow I could slide back down into the Pit of Despair, but for today…I’m gonna roll with it. Have a great Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check back in with you again tomorrow.

She’s Out of My Life

Sunday morning and it’s below sixty today in New Orleans, which is fine. I slept super-well last night, which was great, and feel pretty rested this morning. I have a lot of things to do today before I meet my friend Ellen at San Lorenzo (the restaurant in the Hotel St. Vincent, which used to be an orphanage and then a very inexpensive hostel in the Lower Garden District for a very long time but has been gentrified into a lovely boutique hotel with a café, fancy restaurant, and poolside bar) for dinner. And having left the house yesterday for a wedding last night…that’s two nights on a weekend where I’ve left the house. Peculiar, isn’t it?

Yesterday was a very good day. I woke up feeling rested, did some chores, finished reading Angel Luis Colón’s Infested, which I really enjoyed (more on that later) and then did a reread of Daphne du Maurier’s marvelous long story “Don’t Look Now” (more on that later) before watching some football games before it was time to summon my Lyft and head over the bridge to the wedding. Today I am going to start a reread of The Dead Zone–which might not be as thorough as it could be–and I need to get to work on some things. There are also some chores I never got around to yesterday that need to be addressed this morning and I really should write today since I didn’t anything yet this weekend. I worked on “The Blues Before Dawn” a bit on Friday after finishing my work-at-home chores; I’d like to work some more on that today. I also should work on the mess in the laundry room and should finish the organizing and filing, etc. I haven’t ever finished reorganizing the files at all; and I really need to get back on top of that. I need to finish the dishes and run the dishwasher too; and I am going to make potato leek soup in the slow cooker today–I can’t believe it’s never crossed my mind with this soft food diet to make a batch of that soup. It’s incredibly filling, for one thing; usually one bowl is all it takes, and it will last for a week at least. Same with my white bean chicken chili–all soft, will last a long time, and it’s both filling and delicious. Obviously, I didn’t think this soft food diet through beyond “oh, no burgers or pizza.”

The wedding was lovely. One of my co-workers (whom I absolutely adore) married his partner in their backyard on the West Bank last evening, which was marvelous. It was nice seeing my co-workers outside of work in their fancy clothes (they all looked fantastic) plus it was nice to spend time with them outside of the work environment. I had some nice conversations, and I realized that I’ve kind of isolated myself from them because of my age; I feel the age difference far more than they actually notice it. I do like them all, and find them all very interesting; it’s my loss more so than theirs. Anyway, it’s something to think about going forward anyway. I am glad I went for any number of reasons–I will only attend same-sex weddings pretty much now, as they are an act of defiance now more so than ever–but not the least of which is spending more time with my co-workers, or as I like to always call them, “the kids at work.”

Football was interesting yesterday; I’ve not really looked at the results from yesterday much. LSU was ahead of Army 14-0 when I got into my Lyft and checked my phone; by the time I got home it was 28-0 and still the first half. It wasn’t much fun–I only enjoy LSU games where they score 62 points if they are playing an SEC opponent–and so I didn’t feel guilty for switching over to Auburn-Mississippi (Auburn ended up losing), or for watching Skate America once Paul came back downstairs (he got bored with the game as well). Checking the scores and results, it looks like this could be another chaotic year like 2007–which will make the play-off decisions interesting once the season concludes. LSU can still win the West with a win over Alabama if Mississippi stumbles again–they have to play at Georgia, so chances are good that will happen–and winning out. I also realized this is the fourth year of LSU’s championship cycles: they won in 2003, 2007, and 2019; played for it and lost in 2011, with 2015 being the only four year cycle that didn’t end in them playing for the national title. Perhaps this will be the second time that cycle is broken.

Twitter continues its slow death spiral, and I am checking it less and less these days, and staying there very briefly. I do have some friends still there that I like to interact with, but of course the others are slowly becoming what Twitter became as well. Yesterday a straight white man came barging onto a thread of George Takei on Threads, in which George was talking about how difficult it is for queer people–for any minority–to deal with elections, when our rights hang in the balance every fucking time, and how sometimes as a queer person or a person of color, you have to grit your teeth and vote for the Democrat because no matter what or who, the Republican option isn’t an option for queer people or people of color—unless we really hate ourselves to the point that we hate other people like us, or only care about our money rather than our rights. The example George was using was campaigning and voting for Bill Clinton after he signed both DADT and DOMA into law during his first time despite his avowed belief in the rights and dignity of queer people in 1992 on the campaign trail. Fox News and the right used his support of queer rights–along with a ridiculous scandal with no evidence of wrong-doing by either Clinton (remember Whitewater? I sure the fuck do)–to take back the House in 1994 and handicap any attempts at being progressive. I also remember Bill Clinton trying to get a form of the Affordable Care Act passed–the right also used that battlecry of “socialism” to scare people into giving them that House majority with Newt Gingrich as speaker (I remember it all too well). The reason I remember this all too well is because HIV/AIDS was still killing people and there was no cure as of yet; a positive test meant a very good chance of death relatively soon. I fucking lived through the 80s and the 90s, thank you very much.

I also remember that Bill Clinton was the first presidential candidate to mention HIV/AIDS, and to notice that queer people actually exist–so you can fucking miss me with the Hillary hate, thank you.

Anyway “straight white man” (hereafter referred to a Mr. Mediocre) barged into George’s thread to lecture him about compromise voting and how if we would all just really get behind true progressives, change would be that much easier and how he could just never ever bring himself to the point where he could vote for someone who ever voted for a war.1 That told me everything I needed to know about Mr. Mediocre–the “ally” who couldn’t bring himself to vote for Hillary in 2016 because she voted for the war, believing the lies the Bush Administration and his fully supportive Congress were pushing on us all, calling those of us who didn’t want the war cowards and/or traitors, questioning our very patriotism. Blaming Hillary for believing the lie so you threw your vote away in 2016 so you could remain “pure” fucked over your so-called “allies,” you miserable piece of shit. And instead of ignoring and blocking, which is what I usually did, the audacity of Mr. Mediocre lecturing George fucking Takei, a gay Japanese-American who grew up in an American concentration camp for American citizens of Japanese descent on purity politics just didn’t go down with me, so I replied, Oh, look, another straight white man who will be okay no matter who is in power lecturing those whose rights are on the line with every election about his purity. Don’t hurt yourself patting yourself on the back while you screw over minorities over some purity test that we don’t have the privilege of applying to our votes. “Allies” like you gave us Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016. Thanks for that, by the way.

If you think Mr. Mediocre would let that go, let me introduce you to The Progressive Straight White Man. They can never let that shit go. You know he read my response and climbed back up on his High Horse–how dare a gay man call him out and speak to him that way! He told me “You should want better, but I’ll still keep working for women and minorities.2“

I replied, I do want better but am realistic as a minority in this country to know that no matter what I have to vote for the least damaging candidate because my rights are actually on the line with every election, so don’t condescend to me about your purity tests and progressive bonafides when a real ally will show up, hold his nose and vote for the Democrat. We warned you the Supreme Court was at risk, but her emails! That pesky vote for the war! So forgive us for not applauding you for your purity. Now the Supreme Court is poised to take us back to 1860 but hey, at least you can sleep at night for not voting for the warmonger.

Asshole. After all, Dobbs didn’t affect him–and when his daughter is forced to carry her rapist’s baby, I hope he remembers that purity vote in 2016 with pride.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. I need to eat something and make another cup of coffee and get the potato leek soup started, no easy chore. Plus I want to write up what I read yesterday and the impressions they left with me. Have a great Sunday, COn

  1. which means he wouldn’t have voted for the two most progressive presidents we’ve ever had, I might add; FDR declared war, and LBJ voted for it, as well as intervention in Korea. Some progressive this dude is, right? ↩︎
  2. Love that pathetic attempt at progressive shaming, which again tells me everything I need to know about his politics–if he doesn’t get the perfect candidate that aligns with everything he believes (a pipe dream that will never happen), he won’t vote for them no matter what that means for women and minorities. Some ally. ↩︎