Category: goals

I Fall to Pieces

And this morning I woke up to the good news that my COVID-19 test came back negative, which now begs the question: what was wrong with me? Was it some weird combination of sinuses, allergies, flu, stress and exhaustion? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely thrilled to not have this and for this whole thing to be over, but…I’m very glad to know that I wasn’t infectious and out in public for a while. So I am just going to take the win, tomorrow’s a paid holiday, and I’m going to take the weekend to sort things out and hope I feel better and continue to rest.

I did wake up this morning feeling good for the first time in a very long time, which is also terrific. Today was the first day where I woke up and felt like myself–I have some things to deal with this morning, as I do every morning, but this time I woke up and didn’t dread dealing with any of it-and since I feel good, that makes me wonder just how much of this has been stress related? Probably more than I want to admit to; and there was probably some PTSD there as well. I also need to remember that feeling fine is also a relative thing and that it comes and goes with the PTSD stuff-and there could even be something today that makes it worse–always remember your emotions can turn on a dime when you’re going through something like this–and there’s never any indication that your mood is going to swing, or how wild that swing is going to be. Fun stuff–and the mood swinging lasts for a while after the situation normalized, too. 2005-2009 was not the most emotionally stable period of my life, if I am going to be completely honest, and fortunately most of it is now hazy in my mind. But I know there was some bad behavior on my part to people who didn’t deserve it–and I hope that I apologized for it.

Yesterday I was fatigued–my energy failed me in the afternoon–and that’s concerning, as I said earlier, but there’s really nothing I can do about whatever was wrong with me other than accept that it wasn’t COVID-19 and go on with everything in my life-and be extremely cautious going forward to make sure that I don’t get it now. It’s funny–knocking on wood here–but somehow I made it through the the HIV/AIDS pandemic without getting infected (I’ve never had any STI–gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis, trichomoniasis–other than HPV, and of course I had the bad kind, but without any re-occurrence) and so far I’ve not managed, despite Mardi Gras and a public contact job screening people for COVID-19, to not get that, either. At least so far–and I am going to be a lot more anal about going out in public and being around people from now on, too.

I read some more yesterday on Ammie, Come Home, and I marvel at how marvelously constructed this novel is. There’s never any point where it drags at all, and Barbara Michaels knows precisely how to build suspense and terror in such a… I want to say genteel way that makes it even more terrifying. The spectral encounters the characters have in the old house in Georgetown are absolutely heart-thumpingly terrifying and scary and creepy; it’s truly one of the most perfect ghost stories ever constructed…which is why it is one of my favorite novels of all time. Barbara Michaels was always considered a Gothic suspense writer, and some of her novels don’t have a supernatural touch to them, but the ones that do (House of Many Shadows, Witch, The Dark on the Other Side, Be Buried in the Rain, The Crying Child) are some of the best, quietest horror novels I’ve ever read; she built a quite large audience of readers who would most likely never read horror–but she certainly straddled the line between suspense and horror-which is why I think Gothic is such an interesting term.

Once I get this Sherlock story wrangled and under control, I am looking forward to going back to Bury Me in Shadows. It’s been on my mind a lot lately–and I’ve been having, as I previously mentioned, a lot of strange little creative bursts over the past week or so–and so today, once I get the business I need to get taken care of taken care of, I am going to get organized. I am going to whip this desk area into shape, organize all my notes and everything that is scattered all over the place, and be ready to hit the ground running once Easter has passed. I want to get this story finished–as well as several others that are in process–and then I am going to set a writing schedule to get Bury Me in Shadows whipped into submission shape so I can get it sent in to my publisher so I can then focus on doing the same for the Kansas book….and then I am going to start pulling together Chlorine. I probably won’t be this organized–I never am as organized as I plan to be, nor do I ever stick to the schedule I always try to stick to–but I like organizing and I like coming up with plans–that’s the sort of thing that makes me happy, and I am going to focus, as one always should in times of crisis, on doing things that make me happy.

And on that note, I am going to go take a shower, get cleaned up, and get moving again.

Have a lovely day, Constant Reader.

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Heaven’s Just a Sin Away

I’m tired.

I think the worst thing of all this is the uncertainty, you know? Every time the fatigue sets in, every time my mind gets foggy, every time I can feel my temperature going up, after the great here we go again thought comes the what if you actually test negative? What does that mean? If you don’t have this, what the hell is wrong with you?

Paul suggested that part of the fatigue could come from the lack of activity, and there’s a possibility that might be true. Once I finish this, I am going to get down on the kitchen floor and stretch, just to see how that feels. I am really not overly comfortable going for a walk, in all honesty; not knowing whether or not I am actually infected makes going out of the Lost Apartment seem like an incredibly foolish and irresponsible thing to do. I do have a mask–an official medical one, and gloves too–I had to buy these when Paul had his heart surgery all those years ago, and my tendency to hoard actually came in handy for once, so I suppose keeping a distance from others while wearing gloves and a mask should be okay, but there’s so much uncertainty about everything–hell, I don’t know if I actually am infected or not–that I just don’t know what I should be doing or should not be doing.

But I am lucky, because if I do indeed have this, at least it hasn’t moved into my lungs, at least not yet. I think it’s the lung part that is problematic for people; the inability to breathe, of course, would be horrifying, as well as feeling like you’re drowning. I go back and forth all the time on everything; it’s horrible to be indecisive, to not know what the right decisions are or even what the consequences of the wrong decisions could even be. This also isn’t like me, and I don’t know if it’s the foggy head or just the times or if I am simply being visited by some good old PTSD. Anything at this point is possible, and there are so many goddamned variables…and being trained since birth to always expect the worst doesn’t help much, frankly.

Yesterday wasn’t too bad, all things considered. I did some chores around the house once I woke up, ate some cereal, and then was exhausted (again, lack of activity, or illness?) and so I collapsed into my easy chair and couldn’t even focus on reading. I did get a few chapters more into Ammie, Come Home but after awhile put it aside and got lost in Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror. ESPNU also decided to replay a series of LSU games from last season–the Mississippi game, then the play-off game with Oklahoma and the national title game–so I had that on while I read and dozed off and on. I never nap; and I always have trouble sleeping–which is the truly weird thing about all of this; the amount of sleep I’m getting, and then again–maybe I’m tired from sleeping too much, I don’t know. After Paul got home and we watched the end of Schitt’s Creek (which I am very sad to say goodbye to; it may be my favorite sitcom of all time), and then I read some more before going to bed.

The exciting life of a gay mystery novelist.

I do have creative bursts, though-which gives me hope that someday soon I might actually start writing again. I’ve been thinking through Bury Me in Shadows, and I think i might have actually solved the mystery of what’s wrong with the story. In fact, rather than reading any of my various books that I have spread out on the end table next to my easy chair (the two afore-mentioned, along with Du Maurier’s The Breaking Point and my iPad, which has a plethora of books in its various book-reading apps) I should probably reread the entire manuscript, perhaps even do an outline, and then figure out how to make it better and revise it, so when I can get back on a roll with writing again I can get back to it. I’ve also been thinking about the Kansas book, and I think I’ve cracked that code at long last–since I started writing it in either 2015 or 2016, about fucking time, wouldn’t you say–and so maybe, just maybe, i can get to that too. I also have to write my Sherlock story. The kitchen is also a mess–there’s a load in the dishwasher that has to be put away and the sink is full of dirty dishes as well, and there are clothes in the dryer as well-and God knows when the last time I did the floors was. I am going to try to get some of this stuff handled at some point today.

And on that note, I am going to try to get started on everything and see how much I can get done before I run out of energy–not that I have a lot right now, but the coffee is helping give me a bit of a boost, which is always nice–and see what can get taken care of before the malaise comes back.

Sorry to be such a downer, and I hope all is well with you, Constant Reader–and stay safe.

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Galveston

So here we are, on yet another Tuesday morning. Yesterday wasn’t a complete loss for me; I was very tired after going out and getting myself tested in the morning, so I came home and decided to take a “Greg Day”; no emails, no work,  and as little social media as possible. Easier said than done, of course, but you know–that’s how the ball bounces sometimes. I did get further into my reread of Ammie, Come Home (I always forget the damned comma in the title) by Barbara Michaels–one of the best Gothic ghost stories ever published, even if a little dated today–and I read a few chapters of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror–the 14th century is my second favorite century, behind the 16th–and when my brain couldn’t focus to read, I watched some videos on Youtube that sent me into yet another wormhole, this one of videos about American Horror Story.

In my defense, it started with a video about Jessica Lange’s roles on the show, which led to Sarah Paulson, and Lily Rabe, and…you get the picture.

And then, of course, ESPN replayed that particular Monday night football game from back in September, 2006. That warm night when the Saints played their first home game since the 2004 season. A year after Katrina, when the roof came off the Superdome and people died and still others were trapped there for days. When the city was almost completely destroyed, its economy gone, her people scattered. Our futures were uncertain that bleak fall of 2005, and even throughout 2006, with our abbreviated Mardi Gras and frustratingly slow, it seemed, recovery. We’d almost lost the Saints to San Antonio when the city drowned, but they’d stayed–and the true hero of that was Tagliabue at the NFL, not Tom Benson–and now the Superdome, long a symbol of the city and now a monument to its worst moments, was ready to reopen and create a new identity for itself, just as the city was seeking to be reborn, just as those who lived here were waiting for hope. I remember that day in the city–I knew the Saints were winning but I was busy; the Lost Apartment was still lost and still wouldn’t be finished for another two months. All we had was a tiny old black and white portable television in the carriage house, whose carpet had been ripped up to be replaced but hadn’t yet so there were carpet tacks sticking up out of the bare, scarred exposed wood. We were sleeping on a mattress on top of a box spring on the floor. Paul’s desk and computer were set up in one corner of the room, the staircase and railing took up another side and the little television, which was rarely watched, sat on top of a dresser. I ran errands that day and sensed something in the air–I knew the Saints were winning games but wasn’t paying attention because I was busy trying to make a living and keep myself to the very strict schedule I had to follow in order to have the slightest chance of getting anything done. But i could feel it when I went out to the car, in the air. People were wearing Saints jerseys, or at least black and gold, everywhere I looked. Saints flags were flying on the front of houses (we take flags seriously in New Orleans). Everyone was in Saints gear–the post office, the grocery store, Walgreens, everywhere–and when I got home I looked it up on-line: yup, the Superdome was reopening for Monday Night Football, and we were playing the hated Falcons. Paul and I watched on that little black and white television, screaming and cheering and getting a little teary eyed.  It gave us something we hadn’t had in a long time–hope. They called the game both “ReBirth” and “Domecoming”; both fit.

And while the Saints had always been our team before, that night they became OUR TEAM. Even New Orleanians who weren’t football fans became Saints fans that night. And the sheer joy with which the team played that night was so apparent, and so obvious, and they made it so clear they were doing it for the city…I’ve rarely felt so connected with a football team the way I did with that 2006 Saints team.

As glorious as winning the Super Bowl was, I have to say I think the Domecoming game was probably the greatest moment in Saints history.

Watching the game last night during another social and societal upheaval–one that is affecting the entire world and not just us this time–reminded me of that feeling. Tears spilled out of my eyes once again as Steve Gleason blocked that punt and the Dome erupted; listening to that crowd, seeing their faces and the tears of joy on their faces…having something like the Saints to cheer for, to help us through the hard times, and to give us hope again for the first time since Katrina crossed southern Florida…it’s hard to explain that, I guess.

Try to imagine what it’s going to be like when we have sports again–or the first time you can go out to a restaurant again, or what it’s like to be free of this worry and burden and fear…heady stuff, frankly.

And now…now I am feeling tired again, so I am going to go lie down for a bit. Stay safe, everyone.

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Amarillo by Morning

So, this morning when I woke up, as my first cup of coffee brewed, I dialed the COVID-19 testing hot-line for staff at the day job and made an appointment to get tested. They scheduled me for 9:20 am; I was called at around eight thirty, which left me with about fifty minutes to wake up, drink some coffee, and pull myself together. Our clinic’s COVID testing set-up is in the parking garage which is the ground floor of our building; staff simply drives into the garage and pulls up to the area where the tents and check-in desk are set up, and the doctor comes out and swabs your nose. Needless to say, as I swilled down coffee and brewed another quick cup to take with me in the car, my nerves were definitely feeling a bit frayed. Saturday was a better day than Friday; yesterday was better than Saturday. So far this morning I seem to feel okay other than fatigue–going up stairs to put on a T-shirt and shorts to drive over to the office made my legs and hips ache a bit; it also triggered a small coughing fit (note: the only time my lungs feel tight is when I cough; other than that I breathe fine and they don’t phase me at all. But when I cough, I feel a tightness in the center of my chest that is pretty severe–but as I said, once the coughing spasm passed, I feel fine) but I got dressed and drove over to the office. It didn’t take long as the streets are pretty empty–there’s some traffic, to be sure, and a pandemic and over-burdened hospitals doesn’t seem to be stopping people from driving like thoughtless assholes–and then I pulled into the garage, got checked in, signed my consent to be tested form, and Dr. Halperin came out and swabbed both nostrils.

And while I can see why the vice-president thought it was invasive–I imagine anything put it any of his orifices would be invasive to him–it really wasn’t that bad. It’s certainly not the worst thing I’ve ever had done to me; I’d certainly rather get my nostrils swabbed like that on a regular basis than have an abscessed tooth ever again, and the worst part of it wasn’t the invasiveness at all. The worst part is the chemical on the swab–it doesn’t quite burn per se, but the closest experience I can think of to it is when you accidentally and deeply inhale mothballs; my eyes watered and it burned a little bit, but not painfully.

In a best case scenario, the test results will be back within 2-4 days–it may be longer, who knows? But I have to go into a strict quarantine until the results do come back, which means not leaving the house or running any errands or doing much of anything. Of course I have gloves and masks, so I can theoretically do some things and leave the house if necessary, but I shouldn’t really take the risk of infecting someone else by going out in public until I know for a certain whether I currently have it, or did have it, or don’t have it at all. I was also a little confused because I’d assumed there would be a blood draw to go with the swab test, but I am also conditioned to thinking about testing for different viruses (HIV, syphilis, and Hep C) so I assumed the testing would also have to involve blood. But then I realized, afterwards as I was driving home, that mucous doesn’t carry the HIV, syphilis or Hep C viruses (virii?); but the COVID-19 virus can be airborne transmitted–which means it must be in the mucous membranes along with the antibodies.

At least that makes testing for it that much easier, so that’s kind of a plus?

I also noticed, this morning, a little bit of PTSD kicking in from the good old HIV/AIDS pandemic days–“oh, look, I need to get tested for a potentially fatal virus and have to wait days to get the results back”–but I quickly tamped that down, shoved the lid closed and firmly padlocked it. I suppose it’s a bit of a surprise that particular version of all the PTSD’s I have locked behind various doors in my brain took so long to try to worm it’s way out, but it did finally show up and I was able to beat it down rather easily.

Thank you, coping mechanisms, developed over several decades of seemingly endless trauma.

I didn’t have to take a nap yesterday, but after we finished watching Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, a lovely stand-alone film follow-up to the wonderful Miss Fisher series from Australia (it was kind of an Indiana Jones-lite adventure, set in Palestine in 1928 and quite fun), I got down my copy of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and opened it up to the chapter about the Black Death. Yes, I recognize that my recent fascination with plagues and epidemics and pandemics is probably morbid, given the current state of affairs in the world, yet my curiosity had always had a bit of morbidity to it and it’s really not surprising that it would take this kind of turn. (And I’m actually kind of glad; I was glad to finally read “Death in Venice” even if it left me a little cold; and it also led me down the path to rereading “The Masque of the Red Death”, and back into my Daphne du Maurier short stories) Realistically, while everyone talks about the Spanish influenza pandemic of a hundred years ago, primarily because it was the most recent pandemic (note to self: reread Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse Pale Rider”), the worst pandemic in history was clearly the bubonic plague, the Black Death, or, as it was known more simply during the fourteenth century, “the pestilence.”

Here’s how the chapter opens:

In October 1347, two months after the fall of Calais, Genoese trading ships put into the harbor of Messina in Sicily with dead and dying men at the oars. The ships had come from the Black Sea port of Caffa (now Feodosiya) in the Crimea, where the Genoese maintained a trading post. The diseased sailors showed strange black swellings about the size of an egg or an apple in the armpits and groin. The swellings oozed blood and pus and were followed by spreading boils and black blotches on the skin from internal bleeding. The sick suffered severe pain and died quickly within five days of the first symptoms. As the disease spread, other symptoms of continuous fever and spitting of blood appeared instead of the swelling or buboes. The victims coughed and sweated heavily and died even more quickly, within three days or less, sometimes in 24 hours. In both types everything that issued from the body–breath, sweat, blood from the buboes and lungs, bloody urine, and blackened excrement–smelled foul. Depression and despair accompanied the physical symptoms, and before the end “death is seen seared on the face.”

The disease was bubonic plague, present in two forms: one that infected the bloodstream, causing the buboes and internal bleeding, and was spread by contact; and a second, more virulent pneumonic type that infected the lungs and was spread by respiratory infection. The presence of both at once caused the high mortality and speed of contagion. So lethal was the disease that cases were known of persons going to bed well and dying before they woke, of doctors catching the illness at a bedside and dying before the patient. So rapidly did it spread from one to another that to a French physician, Simon de Covino, it seemed as if one sick person “could infect the whole world.” The malignity of the pestilence appeared more terrible because its victims knew no prevention and no remedy.

The chapter is pretty horrific, and it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to live through in the fourteenth century. It’s impossible to know how many people died because they died so quickly that graveyards overflowed and burial pits had to be dug; people simply dragged the bodies of their dead loved ones to the pits and dumped them there. Estimates were obviously guesses and sometimes exaggerated; one monk’s reported death toll for one particular city, in fact, was more than what its recorded population showed. But it’s not inaccurate to guess that one third of the European population died during the pestilence; towns disappeared, families completely died out. Farms went untended because the farmers and their families died; there were also undoubtedly consequential deaths, not from the plague but because of it; young children whose parents had died starved to death, etc. Naturally they thought it was the end of the world, a punishment from God for sin; and the fourteenth century, which Ms. Tuchman describes as “calamitous”, was certainly ripe for that kind of belief.

One of the interesting things to me about this current pandemic is–and this may entirely be because I am not paying attention and my social media is sort of a bubble; but I cannot believe someone would be saying this about the pandemic and no one i know would notice it and be outraged enough to post about it–where are the evangelicals? Where are all those “end times” preachers and ministers and con artists to prey on the fears of their congregation? Why isn’t anyone pointing out that this could actually be the “rapture” where God is calling his own to him? I have seen that some trashbag minister called this God’s punishment for the gays–but it didn’t gain any traction.

Maybe one of the outcomes of this pandemic will be the ending of that nonsense. I rather doubt it, but you know, hope springs eternal.

I did read for a while yesterday–I got further into Ammie Come Home and I read a short story by Harlan Ellison, “On the Downhill Side”, from his collection Deathbird Stories, which I’d originally read years ago, before I moved to New Orleans, and this story is set in New Orleans. Oddly enough, when I opened the ebook in my Kindle app on the iPad (I was actually looking to see if the collection included his Edgar winning “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”–it does) it was already opened to that story, so I read it, and as always with Ellison, loved it–and while it certainly is brilliantly written, it was written by someone who didn’t live here. I did love the story; like all of Ellison’s stories, the humanity in it was overwhelming and identifiable and relatable. I’ll probably give it, at some point, its own entry here.

And now I am feeling a bit tired, so I am going to go rest for a bit.

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Blue Moon of Kentucky

It’s Saturday, isn’t it? I’m not really sure of my days or dates anymore these days, and if I do wind up having to quarantine for two weeks….that’s just going to get worse, isn’t it?

Heavy heaving sigh. It’s also possible I just have something else. I don’t have the cough, for one thing, which is weird, and I actually thought Paul and I had both had the COVID-19 earlier in March, so maybe this is something else, I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s awful. I’m never a fan of being sick, of course, but this particularly nasty. The worst is being tired all the time and not being able to think clearly.

The cough also started last night. It’s also unpleasant.

But I slept through the night for the first time all week, which is something, I suppose, and this morning I feel good. I’ve also felt good the last two mornings on waking up and that last a little while before whatever is ailing me kicked into super-high gear both Thursday and Friday after being awake for a couple of hours. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and took some DayQuil, so hopefully that will manage it for me. I got very bad last night shortly before I went to bed–fever, felt wretched, the cough started, and then I was unable to keep dinner down–so I guess we’ll see. It’s so hard to decide what to do, you know? What if I self-quarantine and it’s nothing? I hate having to be an adult and make these decisions on my own–it’s so much easier being told what to do.

I spent most of yesterday sleeping on and off in my easy chair, after I got over the horrible shivering experience yesterday morning, and drinking lots of fluids to hydrate, but my mind couldn’t really focus to do much of anything yesterday. I did manage to do my Friday chore of laundering the bed linens–but carrying everything upstairs was exhausting; yesterday after finally being awake after the napping, I finished writing my blog, paid a few bills, and was exhausted by that. I went back to the easy chair and started watching things on Youtube–I should have watched the Moonlighting pilot, damn it–then we got caught up on Schitt’s Creek, and then started season four of Kim’s Convenience,  which is just as charming as ever before finally collapsing into bed. I’m hoping to try to get some work done today–hopefully, taking DayQuil first thing this morning will head off any symptoms, but who knows–and I don’t feel tired this morning, either. (I didn’t feel tired the last two mornings, either, until the symptoms kicked in) I really need to get working on the writing stuff, which I have fallen terribly behind on these last few weeks, and my email inbox is absolutely horrifying.

But even as I sit here, before drinking my first swig of coffee, I can feel my body changing. I can feel tiredness creeping into my legs and my brain getting cobwebbed. MY coffee does taste different, and I’m not so sure about my sense of smell. Sigh. Going to be another one of those mornings, I fear. But we’ll see how much I can get done before I return to the chaise, shall we?

At least let me get this finished and some other things accomplished, okay?

Heavy sigh.

I’ve also been invited to do Art Taylor’s blog The First Two Pages, for my story “The Silky Veils of Ardor” and if I am not mistaken, I have agreed in my fever dreams to do some live ZOOM things and conference calls and so forth over the next week. One of the things I apparently need to do this morning is figure when and where and how all of those things are, and what technology I need to possess in order to do whatever it is I’ve agreed to do. I am always terrible at the marketing aspect of being a writer; I’d be much more successful if I were better at these things–I have a tendency to say what I actually think and feel rather than what people want to hear (always has been a problem for me, all my life) and I am terrible at selling myself. Readings always make me tense, as does moderating panels–I often find my hands are dripping with sweat and my heart races during these things–but they are an essential part of being a part of this business, so I kind of have to do them.

My kitchen is also a disaster area.

And on that note, I am going to bring this to a close and head into the spice mines for however long as I feel half-way decent and stay focused. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader!

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Behind Closed Doors

Well, somehow we survived again until Friday. Sometimes survival is the best thing you can actually hope for, you know? Day in, day out, try to keep your head up and try to keep going forward, focusing on task after task until the sun goes down and you can somehow try to get to sleep again, to get up in the morning and get going again

I had to leave work early yesterday because I started feeling not well. It hit me suddenly after ten in the morning; nauseous and a really bad headache and my joints and muscles were so tired they were aching. Naturally, my first thought was oh fuck I’ve got it don’t I and then my second thought was, maybe not. I let my supervisors know, got in the car, and headed home.

 I was exhausted, dehydrated, and having a sinus/allergy thing going on as well. After I got home I napped, off and on, for most of the afternoon. (Bear in mind that I never nap, and I not only was I  literally  in and out of naps from about eleven to six pm, I never nap. Ever. I always envy people who can nap–Paul can nap for like ten minutes and be completely revived; napping always just makes me tired, and always makes it harder for me to go to sleep at night. But yesterday there was no problem whatsoever with that; I sat down in the chair, got my copy of The Breaking Point by Daphne du Maurier out of my backpack, opened it up to the page I had left off on, and Scooter climbed into my lap. I started reading and within a few sentences had dozed off–and continued to doze off and wake up for like six or seven hours. This morning I feel much better–rested, not tired, nothing achy–but I decided that it would be best for me to not go to work and work from home instead. Paul and I both think we had the COVID-19 virus already; we were both fairly sick for about four or five days after the time change; we both thought it was part and parcel of the time change plus the start of sinus/allergy season. Now, we’re not so sure that’s what was wrong with us; and the symptoms we had–with the exception of t the shortness of breath, we pretty much had the symptoms as described–but I read a piece on the Mayo Clinic’s website that pretty much explained that it’s also possible to get an upper respiratory infection (congestion, sinuses, post nasal drip, wet cough) before it moves into the lungs, where the breathing issues come into play and the cough becomes dry. We never reached the lung portion–and it would make sense because I couldn’t understand why the combination of DayQuil and Claritin-D didn’t get rid of the post-nasal drip.

I’m also not 100% positive that you can’t get re-infected, either. So probably best that I stay at home today and do data entry and perhaps work on cleaning out my work emails, which are even more out of control than my personal ones.

 Between naps yesterday I finished reading du Maurier’s “The Archduchess” and started reading the next story in her collection The Breaking Point, which is called “The Menace,” and then we finished watching Tiger King. 

“The Archduchess” is an odd departure from Daphne du Maurier’s usual style and themes. I’m actually kind of curious how she decided to write this story and where it came from; it’s about a fictional small European country named Ronda, and in the story she traces the fall of the royal family of the country and how easy it is for manipulative people with something to gain (in this story, two greedy and ambitious men) can turn public opinion with lies, half-truths, and rumors to stir up a complacent population against their government and the governing system that has been in place for centuries. Ronda was a unique country with some unique properties–spring water that works as a kind of sedative, the royal family holds a secret formula that gives them eternal youth–and while it was an interesting read, again, it’s so weird and so unlike anything else of du Maurier’s I’ve ever read. The dark cynicism was there, of course, and the bleak outlook–the point of the story is how easy it is to convince people to go against their own interests in the name of progress, which may not be progress at all–but it was more of a dark fairy tale or fable than a short story. (Remember, fairy tales in their original form are much darker than the Disney adaptations we are all more familiar with) “The Menace” is also a bit different than the usual du Maurier fare; it’s about an actor, a star, but I’m only a page or so into the story so I don’t know what is going to happen or where the story is going to go.

As for Tiger King…well, it’s a viral smash on Netflix, and everyone seems to be talking about it, which is why we started watching it in the first place. It certainly isn’t something ordinary; and who knew the world of exotic animals was so crazy and competitive and could turn so dark? The real victims in this series are the animals. I don’t know whether Carole Baskin murdered her second husband or not (I am leaning towards “probably”), and I am also not convinced that Joe Exotic conspired to kill  her or was set up–I can see how it could go either way, but everyone involved is a shady person so it’s also entirely possible that both are true. The show certainly held my interest enough to keep watching to see where it would go next, but ultimately I felt bad for the animals. I joked on Facebook that I didn’t want to watch it because I was afraid I’d have “family reunion PTSD and flashbacks”, but having watched now, and remembering things I’ve seen posted on line and comments and so forth, there’s also an element to the show of “pointing and laughing at the uneducated redneck morons”. I’m not entirely sure there was a way of filming this without that coming into play, but it was also shocking to see the poverty and conditions in which some of these people lived. It was also an interesting look at how people can start out with good intentions (I want to save the tigers!) and slowly but surely that becomes subsumed within the person’s ego–it was certainly the case with all of them, including Carole Baskin. Maybe she was portrayed and edited to look like a hypocrite, I don’t know; but she came across very poorly.

Apparently she isn’t happy about how she was portrayed. I’d have been really surprised, actually, if she was happy with how she looked in the show.

And now here it is, quarter to three in the afternoon. I started feeling poorly right after I typed the above sentence, and went back to bed–I’ve now returned to my desk hours later, and my coffee cup, half full,  is still right there to my left. I started shivering as soon I got back in bed–shivering so hard the bed was shaking and it woke up Paul–so I moved downstairs with my blankets and curled up in my easy chair and slept again, on and off, for several hours, dosing myself with DayQuil and Claritin-D. I still don’t feel great, but I do feel better than I did, and I’m not really sure what’s going on with me. Is this a relapse, an initial infection, or something else entirely? I think I am going to have go into quarantine for sure, and see about getting tested at the office on Monday. I didn’t want to  have to go into COVID-19 exile completely, but if that is what this is…I can’t really take any chances on it. I just hope I don’t get Paul sick with whatever this is.

And on that note, now that I sort of am feeling human again, I think I’m going to try to get something done.

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Hello Darlin’

I was reminded yesterday morning of one of my favorite shows of all time–Moonlighting–which made me think of how this particular show (and television crime shows) have influenced me and my writing.

For those of you who are too young to remember, Moonlighting was a television show in the mid to late 1980’s, that starred Cybill Shepherd as Maddie Hayes, a wealthy retired supermodel, who had been completely wiped out by an embezzling accountant (or agent, or manager; I’m not sure I remember which clearly) and the only asset she had left was a private detective agency–which she had primarily invested in as a business loss to reduce her tax bill every year. Facing financial ruin, Maddie needs to turn the Blue Moon Agency into a source of income, which puts her squarely into conflict with fun-loving extrovert David Addison, the private eye who enjoys life, takes nothing very seriously, and has a joke for everything, and is the primary boss at the agency. David Addison was played by Bruce Willis–this role, along with Die Hard, made him a star–and he and Shepherd had the most amazing chemistry. The writing was whip-crack smart, sometimes breaking the fourth wall, with the two characters always arguing and talking over each other, kind of like classic comedies like His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby, and out of nowhere it became a huge smash hit. The first season was abbreviated–a spring replacement, with maybe four or five episodes–but season two was absolutely phenomenal. But the pressure on the writing and production staffs was incredibly difficult, the show always ran behind on filming, and it didn’t help that Willis and Shepherd hated each other. She also got pregnant during the run of the show, and they wrote the pregnancy into it.

Ironically, the chemistry between them was what drove the show’s success–kind of like Sam and Diane on Cheers–but once the show’s focus moved away from their cases and onto their relationship, the quality went down and so did the ratings. It’s a pity, because those first two seasons were pure gold.

One of my favorite things about the show was how every episode opened with David and Maddie arguing about something–and then over the course of the episode, the case made each other see the other’s side, and then at the end they had reversed themselves, arguing the opposite positions from the original argument….and sometimes, agreeing that they could the other’s point, and accepting that there’s another way of seeing everything.

I absolutely loved that. My goal, years ago, when I started the Chanse series was to make sure that Chanse learned something about himself by working on, and solving, whatever case came his way.

I really wish someone would buy the streaming rights to the show. I’d love to watch those first two seasons again. Like I said–all those episodes were pure gold.

I took yesterday afternoon off–I’d intended to work from home, after getting the mail and stopping at Rouse’s–and also started the lengthy process of trying to get my email inbox cleaned out, which is a Sisyphean task, to say the least. But progress was made indeed, and far now the rock is at least most of the way up the hill. I also sat down in my easy chair and read some more of Daphne du Maurier’s odd Gothic fairytale “The Archduchess” with Scooter purring in my lap and, as one is wont to do with a purring cat in your lap, fell asleep for about an hour. People rarely talk about how cats all possess that super-power; adorable little agents of Morpheus that they are. I did manage to read some more of the story, though–I’m interested to see where it’s going to go, since there’s such a dreamy, fairytale-like quality to the story, which is about the fall of the monarchy in a fictional little European county called Ronda. It’s weird that it’s taking me this long to read the story, but this is also my first full week of going to work at eight every morning, so there’s little wonder that it’s getting harder to wake up and harder to stay awake the further the week progresses.

But today is Thursday, and I only have one more day to get through before it’s the glorious weekend, and I really do need to get my shit together. I’ve got to get that Sherlock story done, I have to pay the bills, I need to get back to work on the Secret Project…there’s so much to do, so little time in which to do it, and I can’t keep wasting precious time.

On that note, tis back to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and stay safe out there.

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Coal Miner’s Daughter

Wednesday, and here we are, in the middle of the week suddenly. It’s also a new month; didn’t March seem to last forever, to the point where it actually felt like it wasn’t just March but Bataan Death March? Does anyone besides me even know what the Bataan Death March was? Americans’ grasp and knowledge of our own history is astonishingly slender and leaves a lot to be desired–which is why the same policies that have failed, repeatedly, throughout our history–“trickle down economics”, anyone–always end up coming back around and fucking us all over again, repeatedly, as new generations continue to be fooled by the desire of the rich and the corporations to fuck us repeatedly, counting on the knowledge that no one knows it has all happened before.

It is astonishing how no one studies the past so we can learn from mistakes made and not repeat them, isn’t it?

I’m actually not, as today’s title might suggest, a coal miner’s daughter but actually a coal miner’s grandson; my grandfather was a coal miner, and received disability until the day he died for the black lung disease he acquired as a result. Alabama isn’t known for coal mining, and I do know that he used to go away to work in the coal mines, so I’m not exactly sure where it was he went to do the work; as a child I didn’t really listen to the stories as closely as perhaps I should have, or it’s the old memory-sieve thing, but I do remember seeing Coal Miner’s Daughter in the theater when it was released, and thinking, when they showed the shack Loretta Lynn grew up in, how similar it was to my maternal grandmother’s house. The house my father grew up in–where my grandfather lived up till pretty close to when he died, I think–wasn’t as ramshackle as my maternal grandmother’s. It never dawned on me to think about how much poverty my parents grew up as children; my maternal grandfather died when my mother was around eleven, and so the only money they ever got was his military pension from serving in the Pacific during the war–and it wasn’t much. My grandmother used to make most of her children’s clothes as well as her own; when I was a kid I remember my mother had mad sewing skills, but they fell into disuse as we moved up the economic ladder as I got older. My parents were, in fact, a perfect example of the upward mobility, the American dream, as it used to exist in those decades that followed the second world war. They married young and moved to Chicago when they were barely twenty and had two small children; they both worked in factories while my dad went to school at night to finish his engineering degree. By the time they were thirty they owned a house in the suburbs and my father was on his way up the corporate ladder; my mom stopped working when he finally made it to management and we were transferred to Kansas. It was always ironic to me that when I was a small child my parents both worked while everyone else I knew’s mom was a housewife; when the economy shifted in my teens my mother became a housewife while most other families became two income.

I didn’t grow up in Alabama, but I grew up thinking of Alabama as home and was raised to have a fierce, deep pride in not only being Southern but in Alabama. I grew up understanding the importance of both Alabama and Auburn football to the pride of the state, and pride in that the fierce rivalry between the two programs was one of the biggest and best in college football. My love for Alabama has grown more conflicted over the years, as I began to reexamine things I was raised to believe in as moral and right and developed my own code of ethics, morality, and right and wrong. Writing Bury Me in Shadows is, in some ways, an attempt to regurgitate and make sense of that through writing. The vast majority of my writing has always firmly centered New Orleans, and writing about New Orleans is probably what I’m best known for, if I am known at all. I have written bits and pieces here and there about other places I’ve lived; I turned Fresno into Polk for the frat boy books, and Tampa into Bay City for other stories, and of course, with the exception of Dark Tide, which was set in the panhandle of Alabama, I primarily fictionalize where I’m from in Alabama as Corinth County–which is where the main character of Dark Tide was from.

Bury Me in Shadows is my first book-length writing about Corinth County; and I decided to show it from the perspective of a native who didn’t grow up there, whose mother moved away before he was born, and has spent very little time there–and hasn’t, in fact, been there since he was eight years old. I am having some fun with it–you can’t go wrong with a meth lab, a burned out plantation house, and the rural woods in northwest Alabama–but it needs some work, and I think I’ve been away from it long enough now so that when I do have the time to go back and start revising and reworking and getting it ready to turn in, my eyes and perspective will be fresh.

I am starting to get more tired though, and it’s harder to get up in the morning than it was earlier in the week. I am only working the morning shift today; this afternoon I have some errands to run and I am going to do some work at home. I think that will help me with the tiredness–the screening process can be draining–and if I get my work done early, I can maybe spend some time reading or writing. I was too tired to read much more of “The Archduchess,” the du Maurier tale I am trying to get through this week, but it’s very interesting. The darkness that always imbues her work is there as the story goes on, which is about a very small European nation whose spring water has some kind of mystical rejuvenating power, but I haven’t gotten to the meat of the story as of yet. But it’s interesting, and I am curious to see where she is going with the story.

I also have a gazillion emails to try to get answered at some point today.

Just thinking about it makes me tired.

And on that note, it’s off to the spice mines. Have a lovely, lovely day, Constant Reader.

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The Dance

Someone told me once, long ago, that life was a dance. You could either stand in a corner or off to the side and watch; you could find a partner and go out on the dance floor and participate, or…you could go out on the dance floor by yourself and celebrate your life. I spent the first thirty-three years of my life on the side, watching and envying the people out on the dance floor. At thirty-three was when I decided I’d dance with myself if I had to–and within a year I wasn’t alone out there, and haven’t been since.

The dancing metaphor has come in handy more than once–my lengthy essay in Love Bourbon Street  was titled “I Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet”–and while I don’t actually go out dancing anymore–the noise! the people! the late nights!–I still think of myself as out on the dance floor of life, under the glittering, sparkling disco ball while the bass is thumping and some diva is holding a note for what seems like five minutes.

Yesterday wasn’t a bad day, all things considered–although I suppose a very strong case could be made for days being judged currently on a scale of degrees of bad would perhaps be the easiest way to do it–but I got through, as did we all, and that’s another day in the dustbin of history. I am currently in this bizarre space of being  in the midst of something–as is everyone, again to varying degrees of bad–that is so vast and overwhelming that it cannot be considered in its entirety, for that path is the darkest one and must be avoided at all costs so I have to keep it at as much arm’s length as I can in order to cope with what my little piece of its reality is.

As much as I tamp down on it, it bubbles up periodically and runs wild for a horrifying moment or two, before I can get the lid forced back on and held down with all my strength until it subsides again.

And then I get on with it, as one does.

I started reading another du Maurier short story yesterday, “The Archduchess,” which is interesting and different and quite unlike anything of hers I’ve ever read before–always part of the delight of reading her work for the first time–and so I read on warily, wondering what she has in store for me the reader. I also managed to burp up about 500 or so words on my short story “Condos For Sale or Rent,” my quarantine noir story that has come literally from nowhere and is currently demanding my attention, and its urgency is impossible to resist or ignore–despite having any number of other stories and various projects requiring, yet not receiving, said attention–and while I am generally fairly good at harnessing my creativity and making it do what I want it to do (with varying degrees of success, but it generally winds up doing what I want in some way), now I just don’t have either the will or the energy to wrestle my creativity into where it should be. Anyway, I like the voice and I like that it’s set in the NOW. It’s an isolation/quarantine story, yes, and it has some potential, quite frankly. But we’ll see where it goes and how it turns out–but for now, I am having some serious fun with it.

And isn’t that what matters?

We finished watching Season 3 of Ozark last night, which means tonight we are most likely going to either continue with the insanity of Tiger King or move on to something else; I am thinking either Locke and Key on Netflix, or perhaps His Dark Materials on HBO; or something else entirely. There is a lot of really great stuff out there, and so that makes it even harder to decide what to watch. Or I could just read some more. I have to finish reading the du Maurier story, and I would also like to start the reread of Ammie Come Home, which is, naturally, one of my favorite books of all time.

And on that note, tis time to get back to the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader.

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Forever and Ever Amen

Yesterday afternoon I got sucker-punched; there I was, having a good day and getting things done and then–WHAM! Right between the eyes–Southwest sent me a reminder email about my scheduled and ticketed trip to New York for the Edgars at the end of April. The 30th, to be exact, but because of the symposium and other duties, I was going to be flying up there on the 28th, hence the reminder email. It didn’t help that the email reminded me that today would have been the closing for TWFest/S&S, and I got teary-eyed and sad and overwhelmed and had to get off the computer and away from the world for a little while.

It was out of the blue–I’ve said this before and it’s my own advice to other people (“remember something unexpected will happen–a tweet, a Facebook post, an email–that will catch you off guard and trigger something internal”) but it’s still rough when it happens, and it did, in fact, derail the rest of my day; there was no writing accomplished yesterday, and I didn’t really do much of anything afterwards, other than binge a few more episodes of Ozark (greatly enjoying this third season; the performances are stellar, particularly Laura Linney and Julia Garner) and then went to bed early. I slept fairly well, and this morning I feel even, but man–was that ever rough yesterday or what?

This week I have to go to work at 8:15 at our other building (campus?) every morning before leaving around noon to head to our other building (campus?) on Elysian Fields for the afternoon shift. Adapting to what is essential a 9-to-5 life isn’t going to be easy for me; it’s something I’ve managed to avoid my entire life until age fifty-eight, although I have to confess (as I said the other day) there really is something to eight hours five days a week. I like getting home earlier than I usually do (around eight), and I just have to  adjust to having those early evenings free. Hurricane season is coming, and so is termite swarm season and the time when stinging caterpillars rain down from the live oak trees like something out of C-level horror film from the 1950’s–usually the second bill on a drive-in double feature; you know the kind of film I mean–and then comes the heat and humidity of the summer. It’s already hotter this year than it usually is at this time of the year; I can only imagine how truly unbearable July and August are going to be this summer. There are but two days left in this hellish March, and then it’s April. (And I do hope nobody is foolish enough to play pranks on April Fool’s Day…)

I’ve decided since my attention span is so limited that it’s time to go back to both the Short Story Project (which I’ve been doing these last few weeks, really) as well as the Reread Project. I had considered rereading Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic next, since I don’t really remember much of it at all, but have decided to reread one of my all time favorites, and definitely my favorite ghost story of all time, Ammie Come Home by Barbara Michaels. It’s been awhile since I read it, and it was, of course, the first novel by Michaels I read. I had originally watched the Made for TV movie that was based on it (The House That Wouldn’t Die, starring none other than the magnificent Miss Barbara Stanwyck), and then later found it in a volume of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books (remember those?) about a year or so later at my grandmother’s. I eventually bought a used paperback copy when I was either fifteen or sixteen and read the full novel, and it’s been a favorite of mine ever since. (In those days, I preferred her work as Barbara Michaels–it wasn’t until years later that I really got into her novels under the name Elizabeth Peters, and there was no turning back from that moment.)

I have a lot of emails in my inbox to answer–remember, I was in a flurry of responding to emails when I got the reminder from Southwest that derailed my entire day yesterday–as well as to sort and file. I’ve absolutely got to get back on that horse and dive into my emails headfirst today, and I’ve got to generate some others and consolidate all my notes and create an overall to-do list. My primary concern with so many seemingly endless tasks is that I am going to forget something important; I need to get my equilibrium back–hopefully getting used to my next work schedule will be helpful in that regard–and I need to get better organized.

I always seem to be saying that, don’t I?

Hmmmmm.

But the sun is rising and the world is gray outside my windows, and it’s about time for me to head into the spice mines. Stay safe, everyone, and have a lovely day.

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