Wednesday! Short weeks really do seem to zoom past, don’t they? Yesterday was actually a good day. I felt rested and not tired–but by the time I got home from running my errands I had to rest a bit before doing the chores, which I did do: unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher, and folding a load of clothes. Now the week is half-over, and I am staying on top of the daily chores so this weekend I can do some more deep clean, organizing, reading, resting, and writing. I also spent some time reading both Moonraker and Murder Takes a Vacation (which I am loving, but I knew I would because I loved the character, Mrs. Blossom, since Laura Lippman introduced her in one of her Tess books).
And it’s always a pleasure to read good writing, you know?
In other exciting news, the weight loss has stopped. I weighed 177 at the doctor’s office last week; yesterday I weighed 192. It was also a good day; I , I was walking better, and I even walked across the street at lunchtime to CVS to get ice cream and a candy bar (still have some weight to gain back, after all!) and didn’t get worn out. I was tired by the end of the work day and while running my errands, but that’s fine. I stayed at the office all day and didn’t leave early, so that should have been expected. I finally got my new debit card, the purple LSU eye of the tiger card, and it’s gorgeous. I’ve also been kind of overeating lately but am hungry all the time and craving things. This weekend I am going to try one of those delivery apps to get lunch; I need to pop that cherry.
I also picked up my copy of Summer House by Yigit Karaahmet, translated by Nicholas Glastonbury; which came highly recommended by Kristopher Zgorski’s BOLOBooks blog, which always has great tips for books to read. I also swung by the library to pick up Sisterhood of the Lost Cause: Confederate Widows in the New South racism, which I am reading as research for my lengthy entry on the Lost Cause mythology, and an even deeper dive into the history of racism in this country and how it was allowed to perpetuate after the Civil War–which was a huge fucking mistake. It’s also going to be helpful as I continue to unpack my own grooming into prejudice and bigotry as I try to be a better person than what I was raised to be.
I am feeling so much better these days, and people are noticing that I look better, too. I look healthier and not as gaunt and skeletal (that fifteen pounds came in handy, clearly), which is also incredibly nice. I’m still not there and I know it’s going to take a hot minute, and I have to be patient, but I’ve also tentatively scheduled a trip to Alabama to meet Dad for their anniversary in late June. That will be the real test, won’t it? I’ve gotten behind on my audiobooks in the car listening, too, so that trip will probably help get me going on that as well. If someone would have told me twenty years ago that I’d love audiobooks, I would have laughed in their face. I’ve never liked being read to, but somehow audiobooks are different.
As far as the Patti LuPone discourse on-line is concerned, all I have to say is she needs to play Helen Lawson in a remake of Valley of the Dolls and leave it at that.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely midweek Wednesday, and I’ll be back later.
Bold Strokes retreat, Bombay Beach, album cover photo
Nottoway Plantation, one of the beautiful old homes along the River Road north of New Orleans, burned to the ground Thursday.1 But what that lovely old historic home actually was? Just a monument to enslavement and stolen wealth. I also can’t help but hope the backstory to the fire is some Gothic shenanigans, a la Rebecca and Manderly burning to the ground.
Nottoway beforeNottoway after
I’ve certainly come a long way from that kid who was raised to believe in white supremacy and the Lost Cause ideology, haven’t I? My relationship to the South has always been fraught, once I began to read more and understand more and deprogram myself from that horrific grooming as a child. I can remember, though, reading Gone with the Wind when I was ten or eleven for the first time and my hackles being raised by the happy, contented enslaved people and how they were described and how they talked. (I loved the story itself, but the racism was so unrelenting and unending and horrible; I need to do a deconstruction of that book sometime–as well as other “make white people feel better about racism” books.)
Nottoway was a beautiful home, but it was also one of the most monstrous sugar plantations in Louisiana with an excessively brutal history. I am not sorry in the least this horrific place–where they teach nothing about the true history of the place and rent out for weddings and parties for white people (“yes, you too can have a Scarlett O’Hara wedding on an old plantation! So what about the brutal treatment of generations of enslaved people?”). It really was nothing more than a monument to oppression, cruelty, and the evil that men can do.
I started dealing with the ghosts of my own Southern past in Bury Me in Shadows, and this new repurposed book from an old manuscript is also going to deal with race in Alabama, too. I just have to finish this damned Scotty book and get it out of my scalp. New Orleans also has its own dark, bloody and brutal history I have to deal with at some point, too. I was reading a piece about Madame LaLaurie and her abuse of her enslaved people, and wondering how to turn that into a short story–and likewise, my Sherlock story will also have to deal with race, because of the Voodoo Queen. I’m not afraid to address any of these issues, really; as long as I do it and am mindful of the potential for offense and/or getting it wrong (I have a great editor, thank God) and tread carefully. You really can’t write about the South authentically without talking about race.
After I finished working yesterday, Paul and I ran some errands (including Costco) and by the time we got back I was completely worn out and exhausted. I started reading a Dana Girls 2mystery (one of the kids’ series I collect) titled Mystery at the Crossroads, which was originally published in 1954–right around when the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew books began being revised to remove problematic content–and ho boy, is there some problematic content in this book! It’s about “gypsies”–and every handy stereotype about the Romani people is crammed into this book. But it was easy to read, it engaged my brain, and now maybe today I can get back into reading something substantial.
I also rewatched two movies last night–the animated Beauty and the Beast (yes, I get that it’s problematic but I love it) and Jesus Christ Superstar before falling asleep in my chair. Paul woke me at one, and I managed to sleep through the night and this morning I feel rested and good. I have some errands to run today, but I am going to try to just clean and read and rest and relax as much as humanly possible. I am still not 100% recovered from the illness, but I am getting there.
And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back on the morrow, if not sooner.
And yes, the Lost Cause traitors are weeping publicly of the loss. Since it was one of those destination wedding/party places that glossed over its hideous history…good riddance. ↩︎
I will be writing about the Dana Girls for my newsletter at some point; I want to write about all the kids’ series I read growing up. ↩︎
Thursday, and it’s almost the weekend. Not a normal weekend, but one where I have to actually be presentable and lucid periodically…and have to leave the house for extended periods of time. I slept pretty well last night, for my first night as a Festival widow; Sparky actually slept in the bed with me, too. I didn’t get much done when I got home last night, because I was tired after I got off work and the errands didn’t help much. I did start a load of laundry and ran the dishwasher, so tat is something I got done. I also managed to get some writing done, but not very much, so hopefully tonight’s writing journey will be better. We shall see.
I did watch the season finale of a reality show I follow for some reason–habit more than anything else at this point (I’ve almost always been a completist, and I usually will only ditch a show before its series finale if it gets really bad and stupid and I get annoyed with myself for watching)–and I think I might be pulling the plug on it. I had come very close to stopping watching a few seasons back when the show took a turn I didn’t much care for, and it seems like the cast has decided to circle back around to the behaviors that had me almost stop watching in the first place. I may watch the reunion episodes, but most likely not. I’m not really interested in the bullying antics of a failed grifter, failed gold digger, and failed child star who are actually so bad at their jobs that they can’t even give me a meme-worthy moment or line. I do sometimes need a break from Bravo’s reality shows because the lack of consequence for any of these horrible women reminds me that horrible people often never have consequences in reality (cough Tulsi Gabbard cough Pete Hegseth cough), and that’s not messaging I can really get behind.
The immorality of rewarding amorality gets to me sometimes, you know? I guess that’s why so many people embrace religion and the whole “afterlife” thing–bad people go to hell, right, so their punishment is in the next world, but the concept of the “get out of hell free card” methodology and epistemology negates every bit of the punishment/reward structure of modern American Christianity. “Faith without works is dead,” remember that part?
I think the lack of consequences in the real world is why I started writing crime fiction in the first place, so the guilty are actually punished. A definite argument can be made that crime fiction’s roots are in conservative ideology; the restoration of order after disorder, the Apollonic v. Dionysian paradigms that lie at the root of all good crime fiction, whether we want to admit it or not. I first started thinking about this in the wake of the police murders of innocent Black people over the last decade (shameful that it took me that long to open my eyes), which made me reevaluated my own biases about the police (the mythology vs. the reality), while all the time knowing that as a gay man the police are most definitely not looking out for MY best interests in any way. I was conditioned as a child, by the Chicago public school system, to see the cops are protectors and friends. (Did anyone else have an “Officer Friendly” who came to talk to your class about safety? I remember distinctly being conditioned to trust the police…)
And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a great day, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later.
I’ve always felt that Tuesdays are worse than Mondays. Sure, it sucks to get up on Monday morning and go back to the office, but at least you’re coming off the weekend. Tuesday means you’re not even halfway through the week and you’ve already worked the day before. Horror of horrors! I felt this way even in high school–which is where and when I started wishing my life away, as my mom always used to say. Of course, she didn’t start saying that until she stopped working and became, for want of a better word, a housewife. Such an ugly and weird sounding word, isn’t it? But it’s better than “tradwife,” which just might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard–and the whole “tradwife values” thing just kind of turns my stomach ever so slightly.
I do want to write about one, of course. I also want to write about one of those horribly creepy “boymoms.” Straight people are so weird…
But this morning I feel rested and good. I ran some errands after work last night, which was not as painful as I might have expected, and I have to run one tonight when I leave the office. I finished revising my short story and send it in (it’s for a queer crime anthology called Crime Ink), which felt really good (the story is an excerpt from Never Kiss a Stranger called “The Rhinestone”), and I did work on the book a little around Sparky’s intense neediness. I think Paul is moving into the Monteleone tomorrow, so after tonight I’ll be home alone with a super needy cat, which will be challenging. I also need to figure out my schedule for the weekend’s Festivals. I am moderating a panel for the Pinckley Prize tenth anniversary celebration, I know, and I have to do the anthology launch Saturday night, and I am in the Dorothy Allison tribute reading. There’s also a panel on Sunday I am on, and of course both the opening and closing parties. Sigh. I get tired just thinking about it, you know?
But it’ll be fun and invigorating intellectually, and it’s always inspiring to be around wonderful people who love books and writing.
Remember the author I talked about who created a firestorm by writing and publishing that dreadful book where the man fell in love with his best friend’s three-year-old daughter but waits until she was legal before doing anything (as though the pedophilic grooming wasn’t bad enough)? She was arrested yesterday and charged (in Australia) for possession of, and intent to distribute, child pornography. The copies of her own book was the evidence they needed for the arrest! I don’t know what the laws are in Australia, but quite frankly, arguing that it’s a “slippery slope” to be arrested for “dark romance” writing? Dark romance actually requires consent, otherwise it’s rape. You’re trying to ban queer books in the US, yet people are trying to defend the principle of free speech about a book that is 100% about grooming? Yeah, miss me with that. Child rape is child rape, period; and I think the fact so many people missed the real point of Lolita and think it’s a “romance” is why no one should be writing about child rape like it’s just another style of “dark” romance.
And who would ever think to themselves, “I’m going to write a dark romance about grooming!”
Someone I wouldn’t let around kids, that’s who.
Not all speech is protected–which no one seems to understand, which isn’t surprising since they don’t understand their own protected right to free speech and what precisely that means. We really are the dumbest country. This whole “let’s share classified intelligence with a reporter in a group chat” thing would be laughable if it wasn’t so fucking terrifying. IMAGINE EISENHOWER SENDING THE D-DAY PLANS TO A REPORTER, or Truman accidentally telling the Washington Post about the plans to use the atomic bomb on Japan the day before?
Americans have never appreciated our system, or they’d have learned how it works better when they were younger. (I wish I had a quarter for every time I had to explain the Electoral College to smart people–or people I’d thought were smart previously–in 2000 I’d have retired years ago.) So, we kind of have the government we deserve right now.
And on that grim note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day. Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again at some point.
Ah, Wednesday and it’s all downhill for the rest of the week, isn’t it? Huzzah! I feel good this morning, too, more rested and alert than I have been for most of the week. So, this week feels back to normal in that weird way of feeling better later in the week as my body again resets to getting up early every day. I was fatigued again last night when I got home from work, but I wrote for a little while once I was home, and did some chores (the kitchen looks presentable again) before zoning out with The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and the news last night. I also ran an errand after work, picking up my copy of Christa Faust’s The Get Off, the third and probably final book of the Angel Dare series. I loved the first two (Money Shot and Choke Hold), and nobody writes like Christa. If you’ve not read Christa, and love noir, you really can’t go wrong with reading this trilogy. It really is fantastic.
As a general rule, I simply watch the antics of “”book social media” from a removed, slightly bemused distance and don’t get involved, other than a comment about how jaw-droppingly insane the latest controversy on those sites are, and these controversies usually involve the actions of a problematic author and/or publisher. I have my thoughts and opinions about each and every topic in those hashtags and posts that grow heated (remember the fun days of American Dirt? Good times!) but I don’t contribute to them because I don’t see any point. Are there authors that write bigoted, uninformed work that is questionable at best and horrifying at its worst? Are there readers who will embrace those works because said stories confirm their prejudices and values? 100%. Are they all, authors and readers, awful people? Certainly. Will arguing with them on social media do anything other than raise my blood pressure and wreck my day? Not likely. Personally? I don’t want to ever unintentionally offend anyone (unless you’re MAGA, in which case you shouldn’t be reading my work in the first place because you are not my intended audience but if you are reading it, suck it up snowflakes, and fuck your feelings); and I constantly question my choices in my work. My go-to is always if I question it, best to remove it. (Sidebar: I bet the American Dirt author–Jeanine Cummins?– was really happy about the pandemic because it made everyone forget about her and her shitty racist book.) There have been some tempests in this week’s (and last’s) social media teapots1, haven’t there? Sheesh. There was an explosion (again) of homophobia in the m/m writing community, which got people riled up (I love when cishet straight white women inform gay men that books with two men falling in love aren’t for us.) There was another kerfuffle where a romance writer gave her main male character an HEA–just not with the female lead, but another man. Horrors! Needless to say, that also triggered an on-line meltdown, and I am reminded again why I never want to write romance…just like I eschew the y/a publishing community, which is also a snake pit.
I’d rather jump into a piranha-infested river, to be honest. Or be forced to be on a Kardashian television show.2
And yesterday, the “Tori Woods” groomer romance situation blew up on the Internet–and her book, about a “romance” that begins when an adult male is attracted to a three-year-old “but waits for her to grow-up so it’s not child sexual abuse”, is from the same publisher as the last author who wrote racist books and was “canceled” (whatever the fuck that means) deservedly for being a racist piece of shit. Sounds like a publisher issue to me, doesn’t it? I think the publisher has also published problematically racist books before, too. There was some historical romance writer who also outed herself as a racist pos–apparently, people of color only existed in the past to be enslaved or rescued by noble white people–and seriously, how did RWA take so long to burn to the ground in the first place?3
Don’t get me wrong; I still want to write a gay romance novel at some point–and maybe even more than one, honestly. But I’d really rather not get dragged into that on-line community, if I can. (I saw yesterday that someone is publishing a grooming romance–and the grooming started when the girl was THREE. Um…yeah, no thanks.) Did not trying to be a part of the on-line y/a community probably, possibly have cost me some sales? For sure, but at the same time I am really grateful to have my peace of mind.
Peace of mind is priceless.
I also got my assignments for Saints and Sinners/Tennessee Williams Fests, and I am going to be hopping all weekend, it looks like–panels, a tribute reading, the anthology launch–and I will have LOTS of friends in town, too. But this year I took Monday off, too, so I can recover from the weekend and get things done around the house. I’ll also be commuting back and forth so Sparky’s not alone for the whole weekend, and someone needs to feed him, anyway. He is not going to be happy. Paul went to the office yesterday and wasn’t home when I arrived, so Sparky was especially cuddly and needy. I don’t mind, but clearly he doesn’t like being left alone–or puts on a good show after he has been.
My Youtube algorithms, always an interesting mystery, have recently started showing me videos about the classic scifi television program V. I loved V when it originally aired, but when it became a regular weekly series in the 1980s, I stopped watching because I lost interest. I did love the rebooted series, which was fantastic and again ended on a great cliff-hanger. And of course, once I watched one video, it started showing me more. This of course is because I’ve been watching videos about the rise of fascism in Europe between 1918-1939, World War II, and the “America First” movement of that period (newsflash: conservatives were Nazi-adjacent until Pearl Harbor)…and that’s the allegory at play in the series–the Visitors are stand-ins for Nazis, etc. I had grown up believing that it could never happen here…but watching this show made me realize how incredibly easy it is for people to side with their oppressors. It’s something, sadly, that is very human. I also remember a school did a social experiment with fascism, which was made into a TV movie called The Wave, which was again the same thing–the way we can so easily slide into being “good Germans.” I read Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here during the reign of Bush II: Electric Boogaloo, which cemented it even further into my head. I’ve talked before about writing a book that I originally got the idea for in the 1990s, where the queers fill in for the scapegoated minority…interesting, though, that my video research into fascism triggered the algorithm to remind me of V, which was also probably, along with Red Dawn, the biggest influences on that idea.
And on that grim note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a wonderful midweek Wednesday, and I’ll probably be back later or tomorrow.
Although I am really hoping the move to cancel Kim Kardashian and her odious family really takes this time. ↩︎
Please, God, let this be the end of all things Kardashian. Haven’t we suffered enough? ↩︎
Racists working with a gay white man (racist) brought RWA down, remember? ↩︎
And here we are on Monday morning, getting ready to dive into another week and I feel like, somehow, I am able to do so? It was a very nice, restful weekend for one Gregalicious, and I felt good and creative and was able to get things going. I caramelized onions in the crockpot yesterday–oh, how marvelous that smell was!–and I made my own version of Salisbury steak for dinner, with mashed potatoes, and I also figured out how to deal with the battle with Sparky over my desk chair. I’ve been trying to use my laptop, but the screen is way too small and I’ve always had issues with the keyboard, so usually when I use it (which is when I travel) I take an external mouse and keyboard with me to set up. I’ve been trying to use this in my easy chair to no avail. I can put the external devices on my lap desk but there’s no room for the laptop itself, and again–small screen means putting it anywhere near the chair doesn’t work, either, because again, small screen.
And then, like a moron, I finally realized I could share the laptop screen through the Apple TV onto my wide screen television.
Voilà! Problem solved!
It’ll still take some getting used to, but it’s definitely workable. And my easy chair is way more comfortable than my desk chair. So, win-win, right? Right. I also managed to write 1300 or so words on the book yesterday, and I started thinking hey this manuscript isn’t in terrible shape the way I thought it might be which was also incredibly helpful and will get me back into writing the book. Huzzah! And for whatever reason, I also realized how to keep the story flowing. Always a good thing, methinks.
I also spent some time thinking about, and making notes, on an essay I’ve been asked to write about sex workers in gay crime fiction. It’s a good topic, frankly, and I am very excited to tackle this subject; it’s a good intellectual exercise as well as a memory exercise for me to think back to writing my books and short stories, and how many times I’ve written about sex workers, and how they are depicted in fiction, particularly in queer crime–and it also extrapolates a further discussion on frank depictions of sexuality in crime fiction, and the always, constantly preached to me “nothing on the page in crime fiction!!!” I have written about any number of sex workers; hell, even one of the books I have in progress has a sex worker character in it–the love interest, no less–so apparently I’ve been writing about sex workers almost my entire career. Who knew?
We finished watching Adolescence yesterday, which was a family drama exploring what happens when your child is accused of murder, rather than a crime drama about a family whose child is accused. The acting was excellent, as was the writing; and the style of filming was almost documentarian, which was interesting. When we finished that (and my dinner; a makeshift version of Salisbury steak that turned out quite tasty) we moved on to a queer horror comedy, The Parenting, with an incredible cast. The premise of the story is a young gay couple has rented a really nice place in the country and invited both sets of parents, so they can all meet. Brandon Flynn (of Thirteen Reasons Why fame) and Nik Dodani play the young gay couple; Flynn is going to be a major star, I think; he’s good looking and charismatic and a good actor; their parents are played by Edie Falco, Brian Cox, Lisa Kudrow, and Dean Norris, with Parker Posey as their eccentric landlady/neighbor. The movie is more funny than scary, but it was enjoyable piece of fluff that went down easy. It’s also really nice seeing how seamlessly you can integrate a film with queer characters; usually in this type of movie it’s a young straight couple. Is it a great movie and an award contender? No, it’s not that, but it’s nice to see a gay couple having relationship/parent issues like every other straight couple in movies and television.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back later or tomorrow morning.
“We Are Family” is one of those songs from the disco era–the ones that still get played on oldies nights in queer bars and continues to live on. Obviously, it’s an iconic gay anthem–about our found families rather than the blood ones that so often want nothing to do with us–and it’s also really popular with sororities…at least it was back then. It’s a very joyful and uplifting song, lyrically, so it’s also fun to belt out at the top of your lungs. Disco was a really fun time for a gay boy in sparsely populated Kansas…it’s where my love of dancing really took off. The dance floor was, for many years, the only place where I felt free.
Yesterday was a decent day. We were very fortunate to not have any of that bad weather that was forecast, at least not here in the Lost Apartment. I’ve not checked on the storm toll throughout the rest of the South yet, primarily because I’ve not even finished my first cup of coffee yet. But I did see yesterday some horrific weather was happening throughout the South as the result of that storm cell yesterday, so I hope everyone got through it okay and is doing well this morning. Weather events are both terrible and terrifying. It’s kind of ironic that my current book I am writing is set during a weather event. But I feel rested this morning and I got up early (Sparky wasn’t quite as kind about letting me sleep later), and am about to start my second cup. I did okay yesterday. I was still mentally fatigued yesterday so wasn’t able to get a lot of creative work done, but managed some. I also did some chores and picked up around here, and walked to Walgreens in the morning to get butter, which I’d forgotten at the store on Friday (and I need a stick of butter for today’s dinner). Aside–Walgreens actually had stock. The one-two punch of Hurricane Ida and the pandemic dealt it a blow I didn’t think it was going to ever recover from; there were empty shelves everywhere, empty refrigeration cases, and you could never be sure they’d the one thing you needed–which happened more than once over the years since then. But I was very pleasantly surprised to see they had finally restocked, and they had things….not just the butter I needed but some other things I also needed and didn’t think they would have. NARRATOR VOICE: They did have those things, which was most pleasing to mine eyes.
This is delightful news–not quite “oh they opened a new Rouse’s in the CBD that’s actually on my way home” delightful, but it’s nice to know that I don’t have to get in the car to go get things necessarily anymore. I love when my life becomes more convenient.
I spent some more time with Moonraker yesterday, and it’s…something. There’s an unemotional distance in Fleming’s voice (he also uses the distant third person omniscient narrator style of writing, which I was trained so long ago not to use–I always use first or close third person, and it always surprises me when I read a legendary author’s work to find they use it), and there’s no sentimentality to it, either. The casual misogyny of the time is an eyeful, as well as the way Bond (and by extension, the secret service and the culture/society as whole) doesn’t really view women as people, but rather as almost ignorant children who need the guiding of a man). It’s also a good reminder that the Bond novels weren’t as over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek as the films1. The original novels definitely have a completely different feel from the movies, that is for damned sure. Fleming died around the time the first film was being made, so he never saw what Hollywood did to his characters and stories. I suspect he wouldn’t have cared much for them; the books are very cold. But it’s interesting to revisit it, and the similarities/prescience of Hugo Drax to Elmo Dusk are definitely eerie and make the book more compelling to read than it would have been a year ago.
Three out of four of the Lefty Awards last night went to friends–James L’etoile won Best Novel; Rob Osler won Best Humorous; and John Copenhaver won Best Historical–and two were openly queer writers writing about openly queer characters! Woo-hoo! The times, they are a-changing! There were also a number of other friends also nominated, so shout out to one and all the nominees and winners! Huzzah!
We did finish watching Running Point, which was a lot of fun and we greatly enjoyed it. We then watched the first three episodes of Adolescence on Netflix, which is disturbingly real. It opens with a 13 year old boy being arrested for the murder of a classmate, and the child is very definitely disturbed. We’ll finish that today probably, but I also have a lot of writing to do. We’ll see how everything goes.
And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, all, and I’ll be back at some point.
Ayn Rand, in writing about “heroes” in film and novels, wrote about the early Bond films in an essay about art. I remember how much she loved Dr. No–really one of the only Bonds to be done as a serious film–and how much she hated Goldfinger.↩︎
Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment and all is sort of well. I slept extremely well last night, and was awakened by a very hungry and needy Sparky this morning. I didn’t mind getting up–the bed is so comfortable on Saturday mornings–but here I am, having quickly scanned through my email inbox and having finished my first cup of coffee this morning already. I feel good, actually. Yesterday was a nice day. I got my work duties completed and we went to Costco, as well as ran another errand on the way (Paul had to stop by his office, which wasn’t easy since O’Keefe is still only partially open most of the time and yesterday it wasn’t open at all. But it was no big deal, and Costco actually had several things they’ve not had in a while that I like (like a half-case of Clearly Canadian1 bottles, which is my FAVORITE sparkling water of all time; I just wish they’d bring back green apple, which was my favorite. However, during Paul’s time at the office I picked up a few things at Cadillac Rouse’s and they now carry it by the bottle as well–and had STRAWBERRY! That’s a new flavor I’ve never seen before), which is always a lovely thing. We came home, put things away (I still need to reorganize things to be more efficient) and I did some chores before it was time for the LSU-Georgia Gymnastics meet, which was very fun to watch. They had a great meet, the Tigers broke their own record for highest score ever (and I still think they were underscored), and looked incredibly impressive. They beat Georgia by almost a full point and a half, and Georgia had a pretty good score. We watched another episode of The Madness, which is still really good, and I went to bed early–probably why getting up this morning wasn’t such a chore. I also worked on some editing and paid some bills–need to do some more of that this morning, in fact.
My neck has oddly been sore the last two mornings. Maybe I’m sleeping at a bad angle, I don’t know, but it’s annoying.
Today I need to take care of some things, and I am going to spend some time trying to finish reading my book before I head into the spice mines and do some writing. I want to get both of those short stories revised this weekend, as well as get some good work done on the book as well. I need to clean out my inbox, and there’s some filing that needs doing–and as I mentioned before, I need to really organize the cabinets, the pantry, and the refrigerator to accommodate everything we got yesterday. You know, I’ve been going to Costco since at least 2016 (or whenever it opened here), and we’ve spent an insane amount of money there. I didn’t really have much of a problem cutting Target out of my shopping life when they spat in the queer community’s face last year, and I can honestly say I don’t miss shopping there in the least. When it was a viable alternative for gadgets and kitchenware and so forth to Wal-Mart, I didn’t mind spending the extra money it cost shopping there because they supported my community. Now they don’t–they seem to only want to pander to MAGA trash, who will never shop there–so they are welcome to market to and develop that market as much as they can. Good luck to you with that, by the way.
The first thing I learned in my first business course in college was “never piss off your customer base.” That’s rule number one. You aggressively use “ally-ship energy” to bring traffic into your stores, make marginalized communities your primary customer base, and then you decide to piss all over them to appease a minority that doesn’t even patronize your company? Well, keep finding out, Target. The great thing is that if you do collapse into bankruptcy, another chain will rise to take your place until you’re as forgotten as K-Mart.
And good fucking riddance.
Heavy sigh.
I took a little break before finishing this to have breakfast and read some more of The Bell in the Fog, and got so caught up in the story that I just went ahead and finished it–and I have thoughts (more on this later). I did really enjoy it, and I have to say again how exciting it is to be a queer crime writer/reader now…because there are so many amazing queer crime writers publishing today. Y’all need to check out Lev AC Rosen if you haven’t already–stop everything and get the books, okay? You can thank me later. I also think my next read is going to actually be a reread; I may also read something new concurrently. I want to revisit an original Ian Fleming James Bond novel; it’s been a very long time since I read one of the Ian Flemings, and that revisit (Live and Let Die, to be exact) reminded me that the books were written in a horrifically bigoted era. I read the Ian Flemings all when I was a teenager, and I did enjoy them–even as I saw they were very different from the films; I was able to read them as a different thing from the films rather than “the movies are better” or “the films ruined the books” or any of that sort of thing. I mean, it’s right there in the name: adaptations.
But I am going to bring this to a close. We just had a downpour, and the sun is out again. I am going to go get cleaned up, read a little bit more, and then get back on the writing horse. So as I prepare to go into the spice mines for the rest of the day, I hope that you have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.
I don’t know why precisely (it could be the utilitarianism of the room) but this picture always makes me think “bath house.”
I used to drink Clearly Canadian in the early 1990s. It’s the only sparkling water I’ve ever actually liked, and then I couldn’t find it anymore. I started finding it again a few years ago in stores…but the gold mine is when they have the half-cases at Costco. Three bottles of four flavors–and while there’s one I don’t like (cherry), it’s bearable. ↩︎
Sunday morning and it feels cold here in the workspace again. I slept later than I’d intended (getting up at my usual time for work is going to be horrific tomorrow), but we’re still getting back to normal around here. I drove uptown yesterday to get the mail, and most of the snow is gone (bits here and there that haven’t melted yet). I made groceries, too, but I was right about the store being picked over; no deliveries had been made yet, but I didn’t need to get much in the first place, which was great. I was still exhausted when I got back home, so I settled in and watched the US Figure Skating Championships with Paul before we moved on to season 2 of The Night Agent, which is fun enough (I remember loving the first season, but am not loving the second as much as the first. but the main character, played by Gabriel Basso, is very sexy). I didn’t write anything yesterday because I was so tired, and my brain was a bit too fried to read anything. My shoulder was also very sore, and it feels tight and uncomfortable this morning, so I might push today’s gym visit to either later on today or later in the week. I’ll probably try to read some more this morning, and I’ve pretty much zeroed in on She Who Was No More as my next read because it’s French, so completely different (most likely) than most crime novels, especially those of its time. And my next read, methinks, won’t be in the crime family; I have books by Celeste Ng, Jami Attenberg, Valerie Martin, and Ann Hood in the stack, so general fiction next rather than genre.
I also read this marvelous thread about Huckleberry Finn that reminded me that 1) I’ve never read it, and 2) I really should. I was never really interested in Mark Twain as a writer when I was growing up; we were force-fed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in junior high, and I absolutely hated that book; Tom was an asshole and thoroughly unlikable (I’ve always read books and watched film/TV with this perspective: would I like themin real life? I hated Tom, and the only character in the book I actually cared about was Huck, because he seemed decent–certainly more so than Tom, which was an interesting early lesson in how there’s no reward in life for virtue; Tom was acceptable to people as an orphan being raised by his aunt–whereas Huck was “trash”, despite his bad circumstances of having a criminal father and very poor and from the outside of “society.” The only thing I really took away from reading Tom Sawyer was that society, and it’s thoughts and opinions, were really stupid and required behaving towards people based on a caste system that did not tell whether someone was actually a good or bad person, and how wrong castes in a civilized society are–and really, how unAmerican society can actually be (I’ve always hated snobs, mainly because I am usually the one on the receiving end of their scorn)…which, fifty years later, can concede was a pretty good lesson. But I couldn’t get over how the teacher was trying to push Tom on us as a comic hero–which seemed to encourage that kind of behavior–and never liked Tom and have had no desire to revisit the book, and it also kept me from reading more Twain (we also had to read the jumping frog story, which I also hated) for well over a decade–and it’s why I also have never read Huckleberry Finn.1 When I did come back to Twain in my mid-twenties, I read the lesser known books–Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and the essay collection Life on the Mississippi2—but never got around to Huck; maybe because it was praised so highly? I should probably correct that this year, and I should probably finally read A Confederacy of Dunces, too. Sigh. I know, I know, I’ve never read the great American novel or the great New Orleans novel. Maybe this year.
The NFL conference championship games are today, and I only care because I’d really enjoy seeing Jayden Daniels go to the Super Bowl and make history as a rookie; one of the great pleasures of this past football season is seeing the Washington fans–and the NFL, really–fall in love with LSU’s Heisman Trophy winner. I don’t know if they’ll beat the Eagles today or not, but hey, when was the last time the Commanders3 made it this far? I won’t watch another team in the play-offs–feels too much like cheating on the Saints–but I look forward to hearing the scores later on today.
I’m actually looking forward to going back to work this week, believe it or not. This unexpected weather-related week at home was a lovely and pleasant surprise, but at the same time I like having structure to my life. Yeah, it’s very easy to not be motivated when you’re at home and have things to do, but if it was a permanent condition I’d do better with it.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Cleaning to do, coffee to drink, and lots of writing and reading to get caught up on, so I am going to bid you adieu this morning and…may be back later. One never can be sure, after all. Have a lovely Sunday!
When books are overhyped to me, I end up being disappointed by them. ↩︎
Queer and Loathing in America 