Tag: crepe myrtles

Last Kiss

And now we are here at Monday morning, yet another three days of clinic to face down, and another tropical system with a potential track to come into the Gulf and come knocking at our door here in southeastern Louisiana yet again. The season doesn’t end officially until November 30th, and I have a sinking suspicion that this one will undoubtedly last longer than they usually do–it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if a Hurricane Omega winds up heading this way for either Christmas or New Year’s.

It’s really been that kind of year.

But I slept really well Saturday night and slept in as well on Sunday morning, and while I did fritter away the morning essentially reading election coverage (and laughing at the Four Seasons press conference perhaps will never get old) before heading to the gym around noonish. Yesterday was the big day–three sets of reps–and while it wasn’t as awful as I’d feared it might be, it definitely had its moments of horror. But I also got to do my stretching ahead of time, came home and had a protein shake, before shaving, showering and heading off to finish the weekend’s errands, with a make groceries and fill the tank with gasoline run. It was all accomplished and wasn’t very terrible; it could have been so much worse. I slept really well again last night, which was lovely–the Saints winning so easily over Tampa Bay and the ex-Patriots was quite delightful as well. As Paul said, as we shut off the television and headed upstairs for bed, it was perhaps the best, more relaxing weekend we’d had in quite some time. I daresay it was easily the best weekend of 2020 thus far.

I definitely didn’t dread going to bed to wake up to Monday morning, that’s for sure, and even though I am up early I don’t really mind it so much as I used to–which is saying something, I think.

This week I need to get back to work on Bury Me in Shadows, I need to finish editing a short story, and I need to finish writing the first draft of another. It doesn’t feel in the least bit daunting, even though I know I am running out of time for the deadlines on everything, but for the first time in a long time I feel like I can get everything done, and done well. There’s some definite distractions going to be happening in my life this week–family stuff, so I won’t go into detail–that will have me nervous and on edge, but I am okay with it all. I feel like I have finally evened out somehow, perhaps even adapted to my reality, at least for the moment.

We started watching the third season of Killing Eve, which is finally on Hulu (with fucking commercials), and I have to say I am not as compelled to watch as I was before. The first episode of season 3 was interesting–the PTSD Eve is experiencing from being shot by Villanelle, as well as the fallout of her interference in Eve’s personal life, and the eventual shocking death of one of the main cast to close out the first episode–but at the same time, I wasn’t compelled to queue it up and watch last night rather than the Saints game–and remember, neither one of us had high hopes for that game going into it. The Saints have already lost twice, and have come close to losing almost every other game they’ve played this year (two wins in overtime; three wins by a field goals and four by one score in total) so while I am still of course rooting for my team, I don’t have very high expectations for them this season….and as for LSU, I am mentally preparing myself for the embarrassment to come this weekend against Alabama. The Tigers aren’t going to finish with a winning record for the first time since 1999, which is a bitter pill to swallow coming the season after fielding one of the greatest teams in the history of college football…but it is what it is.

And we did really have one of the greatest teams in the history of college football last year.

I’m getting used to the loss of the crepe myrtles. The view isn’t nearly as pretty as it used to be–and the more direct sunlight really shows up how filthy the windows actually are–but I can deal with it. I can see more of the sky now–and we have beautiful skies here in New Orleans, a gorgeous vibrant blue–and I have about six months to get either the curtains or the blinds situation handled and implemented before summer returns with all of its brutality to my kitchen. But I think I can manage the curtain situation–blinds are surprisingly not as expensive as I thought they might be–and I think blinds are probably going to be the best choice, frankly. I don’t think I will ever stop missing my shade trees, though; it was part of the joy of the view…and I wonder what happened to the opossum family that was living in them? Granted, I haven’t seen one of them in some time–and I wonder if there was damage to the roof of the carriage house next door from Zeta–several times over the weekend I saw men on ladders doing things to the carriage house roof next door, which would possibly explain why the trees were cut down and others were dramatically cut back.

Nancy Drew may have solved The Mystery of the Murdered Myrtles.

And on that note, tis time for me to get ready to head to the office and get going on my day. Happy Monday, everyone.

22

One of the annual things about November that I enjoy watching–but don’t participate in–is Nanowrimo. Maybe I should participate, I don’t know. For many years I never needed to–I wrote the 95k first draft of the Kansas book in thirty days–but as bad as I have been lately about writing, maybe I should have taken part in it this year. Anyway, it’s always enjoyable for me to watch other writers working hard, being productive, and hitting goals. Well done, all of you! Keep on keeping on, and keep on being inspiring to those of us too afraid to officially set these sorts of goals and accountability!

This morning I am going to go vote. I had intended to early vote–just stroll over to the Smoothie King Center the last Saturday of early voting–but forgot all about until it was too late that Saturday–and my work schedule didn’t permit going the last two weekdays that followed thereafter. So, this morning I shall bundle up and trundle over the International School on Camp Street to vote, like I inevitably and invariably always do. It never takes very long–I think the longest line I’ve ever been in was four or five people–and then I can walk back home and get ready for the day’s work. Huzzah? Huzzah.

Boy, do I miss the crepe myrtles.

Yesterday, though, was a good day. I didn’t get everything finished that I wanted to, but I made progress rolling the stone up the hill, and I may even be able to start getting even closer to the top. Stranger things have happened, you know. I am starting to feel even a bit more confident about myself and life in general again. I did start rereading the story fragments that make up both “A Dirge in the Dark” and “Condos, for Sale or Rent”–I’ll get to “Please Die Soon” today, I hope–and there’s possibilities there. I’m not really sure of what direction either story is going to go in, and I am not entirely sure how either story ends; but I do think I should be able to get finished first rough drafts of all of them sooner rather than later.

I’ve also decided that I need to get my shit together with the first ten chapters of Bury Me in Shadows before I move on to the final fifteen chapters; there are things I need to set up in those chapters and I also need to strengthen the voice of my main character–as well as make the reader doubt more whether he’s reliable or not as a narrator. And no, that’s not a spoiler…and even if it were, the book won’t be out until late 2021 anyway, so you’d forget by the time the book comes out anyway.

And most importantly, it’s the tone of the book that really matters. That’s going to be the real struggle.

I had dinner with a writer friend in from out of town last night–her daughter goes to Tulane– and we went to Lula, a new place that is located in what used to be a furniture shop on St. Charles for decades whose name I can no longer remember; it was always there, so I never really gave much thought to trying to remember its name–and it will eventually come to me; it’s where we bought Paul’s love seat, which has sadly been tattered and shredded by cats over the years (EDITED TO ADD: the store was Halpern’s; I knew I’d eventually remember!). The service was good, and while we met early for a New Orleans dinner engagement (six pm), it got much more crowded the longer we were there. The food was good–I had the shrimp and grits, and frankly, only in Oxford, Mississippi have I ever had shrimp and grits that was better than mine–and then I walked home. I was very tired by then, and fell into a sad wormhole of Youtube videos about 80’s music (33 80’s Songs You’ve Forgotten! 100 80’s Songs Everyone Grew up With! Fifty 80’s Songs Everyone Remembers!) until I basically dozed off in my easy chair between nine and ten, when I repaired to the bed. Anyway, the dinner was lovely–we discussed writing, publishers, the crime fiction genre–and I always forget how invigorating such conversations always are for me. I love talking to other writers (unless they’re complete assholes–and you know who you are) because it does make me think about my own work more, and what things I could be better at doing (right now, it’s making myself do the work), but I remain ever hopeful that I’ll be able to dive back into my work and get it moving again sometime soon. I did pull the first ten chapters of Bury Me in Shadows into a single document for editing last night, so that’s something, at any rate.

Tonight when I get home from work I am going to go to the gym–despite the slight soreness in my back, which I totally know why I’m sore and what I did wrong, so I am going to skip the lat pulldowns, or use a different bar–and then I am going to come home and read The Hot Rock and/or write for the majority of the evening. I know I don’t want to check the election results or follow them the way I usually do–I don’t think my stomach, psyche, or anything can handle it–but I am probably going to have to take a look before I go to bed so I don’t have to wake up in the morning to bad news. I’m not kidding when I say I am terrified by this election, and can’t remember another such time when the soul of the country was on the ballot the way it is now. I thought the 2008 election was an important one for the direction of the country, same with 1992…but I don’t ever remember living through one this important. This must be how people felt about the election of 1860–which basically boiled down to, are we voting to save the union or are we voting for civil war? We know how that turned out, and this election feels very similar to that one–but at least then they didn’t have 24/7 news and social media. (Which is part of the reason, I now realize, why I’ve been reading Vidal’s Lincoln.) I can remember fearing for the future of the country on election nights before, but I don’t ever remember the existential dread and fear that I been pushing down deep inside of my soul the last few weeks. I really no longer trust my fellow Americans, I’m afraid, to be decent human beings–and given my previously held low opinion of humanity (working service and at the airport stomped most of my optimism about my fellow Americans right out of my system), that’s really saying something.

But I have always taking voting to be my sacred privilege and duty; I have nothing but contempt for those who do not hold it in the same regard that I do. Yes, there are problems with a two-party system (we’re really seeing that right now), and yes, many times you are voting for the lesser of two evils than for a candidate who mirrors your beliefs and values–but this country was founded on the basic principle of citizens voting and being participants in the process–abdicating that responsibility, regardless of how deeply cynical you might feel about voting and everything else about our political system, is in and of itself a statement of contempt for the country, your fellow citizens, and probably the most unpatriotic thing you could do other than sell state secrets to unfriendly foreign governments. If you don’t like the system, work to change it. That’s how it works, and how it was always intended to work. The founders imbued the citizenry with the right to change things if we so desired–and yes, they were racist misogynists with a side of homophobia and religious zealotry, but they designed the government and the system so that it could be changed, course corrections made, and always improved…but it has to start with voting. Whenever someone complains about something to do with the government or the system, I stop listening the minute they try to justify their not casting of a ballot–because they aren’t interested in actually making change; they are only interested in complaining, while at the same time claiming moral superiority by not participating in a “rigged” or “unfair” system. Well, guess what? Our judiciary is also a flawed, rigged, unfair system–but you don’t get to “not participate” in our legal system simply because you think it’s a failing system–as you will soon find out if you are accused of a crime. You don’t get to tell the police or the district attorney that you don’t believe in the system and therefore you won’t participate–that’s the fastest route to a jail sentence I can think of. And maybe it’s a failed analogy–always possible–because you have to be accused of something before you get dragged into the legal system–perhaps the better analogy would be taxes. You can’t get out of your taxes because you don’t believe in the system.

Although it would be interesting if someone sued the IRS to get out of paying taxes because they felt disenfranchised by the electoral college (taxation without representation)–but I’ll leave that to the lawyers.

And on that note, tis time to get on with my day. Stay safe, Constant Reader, and stay sane. Regardless of today’s outcomes, we will endure.

The 1

November 1st, or All Saints’ Day; which is the perfect day for a Saints game, don’t you think? LSU lost yesterday, badly, and while it was incredibly disappointing to watch, I felt worse for the players. We always forget, regardless of how talented they are, they’re really little more than kids. And since so many starters are either true freshman or sophomores…I think they’ll be really good next year…if they can survive what looks to be a season on par with the late 1990’s. Yeesh.

I am up ridiculously early because of Daylight Savings time; I’d be up early regardless, but I am wide awake and decided, since I have to get up early the next three mornings, that it made sense to go ahead and get up now–one advantage of the so-called “extra hour” (because if 2020 needs anything, it’s more time) is that by not using that hour to get extra sleep, I can recalibrate my body clock to my own advantage for the next few mornings. The sun isn’t up yet completely, but the cutting down of the crepe myrtles next door–many of them, but not all–means that my workspace and kitchen are going to be flooded with a lot more direct sunlight, which is going to make it unbearable in here once it gets hot again; which means I am going to need to do something about window coverings, whether it’s curtains or blinds. We’ll see how much time I have before that becomes a massive priority–hell, it might become one later this morning.

I was still very tired and physically exhausted yesterday. I ran my errands, and then working on cleaning up our side of the house–leaves, branches, debris–and so I watched the LSU game, doing some cleaning and organizing around here in the meantime, and then for Halloween watched House of Dark Shadows on Hulu. I originally saw this movie in the theater–my grandmother, who got me started watching the soap in the first place–took me, and it was a very different take on the Barnabas Collins story. For one thing, there was no redemption of the character; he remained an evil, cruel vampire till the end, when he was killed for his crimes, and he also kind of killed off the entire family, other than Elizabeth and David, by the end. It was straight up more horror than melodrama, and the movie did well enough to inspire a sequel (with none of the same characters or actors), but it really wasn’t as good a story as the redemption of the vampire arc the show did.

I also took the time to read four novellas of Cornell Woolrich, collected together in one volume with the name Four Novellas of Fear (which is really not the best title, as it gives the impression that the novellas are more horror than suspense/crime; which is what they really are). The novellas are all interesting takes, some of which are dated and wouldn’t work today, alas: “Eyes That Watch You”, the first, was my favorite, in which a woman who is completely paralyzed and cannot speak overhears her daughter-in-law and her lover plotting to kill the woman’s son. Unable to communicate and warn him, the crime takes place…and then she becomes determined, somehow, to expose the murderers to the cops and send them to the chair. Great concept, marvelously handled. The next, “The Day I Died,” is about a man who finds out his wife is planning to kill him for the insurance; he comes home early from work and surprises her with the man she has hired to kill him. The hired assassin winds up dead, and the hard-boiled heroine convinces her husband to go through with the plan–they have a ready made corpse whose face they can disfigure and claim it’s suicide. But as he leaves town he runs into a co-worker on the bus…and now he has to kill the co-worker somehow. It’s very noir, very well done–but again, wouldn’t work in a modern setting because of technology and the difficulty of disappearing in the modern world. The third story, “You Won’t See Me Again,” is about a young newly married couple who have an argument, and she walks out–storming home to mother. When she doesn’t return–as he suspects and expects her to, after a day or so–it becomes a missing persons case and of course, the husband is always the prime suspect in those cases. So now he has to find not only the wife he loves to make sure she’s safe, but also to clear her name. It’s yet another story that wouldn’t work in today’s world because of technology, but it’s a charming time capsule. Likewise, “Murder Always Gathers Momentum” is about the slow descent into crime of a person who is broke and desperate and owed money he was cheated out of; rather than confronting the man and asking for his money he decides instead to break into his house and steal it. He’s caught, commits murder, realizes how easy it is to become a criminal, and starts killing people to cover his initial crime….(this is very similar to Agatha Christie’s Murder Is Easy, in which Dame Agatha and Miss Marple also explored the idea that once you’ve killed, it becomes easier to keep killing) and there’s a terrific ironic twist at the end, worthy of The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Despite being dated, I enjoyed all four novellas–which were all very distinct and different, and cynical in their own ways. I certainly enjoyed them more than I enjoyed Night Has a Thousand Eyes, that’s for certain, and my own curiosity about Woolrich–who was a gay man, an alcoholic, and horribly unhappy in his personal life–deepened. (Just as watching The Other the other day, and thinking about the author of the book, Thomas Tryon–a closeted gay actor of the 1960’s who turned to writing novels in the 1970’s–reminded me that I had once thought him worthy of a biography, and I still kind of think that way; I just wish I had the time to devote to doing the research and traveling to Connecticut to examine his papers and so forth; he was also the long-time lover of the first gay porn star, Cal Culver, which is also an interesting footnote to his interesting life as well as of gay historical interest.)

I’m trying to decide what to read next, and have narrowed it down to four options (and may choose something else entirely): Owen Laukkanen’s Deception Cove; Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages (which I may have already read, but I don’t remember finishing it); The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier; or The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake. I am leaning toward to du Maurier because I am thinking it may be time to finish her canon; but the others all look tremendously good, which inevitably always makes choosing difficult. I also want to start reading short stories again–I still have two volumes, for example, of Shirley Jackson stories to read–and I need to get back to my writing–if I can only remember where I was. I know I was rereading Bury Me in Shadows in order to get a grasp of the story–I also have been thinking about the tweaks it needs–and the deadline looms. I also need to revise my story “The Snow Globe,” there’s about a million emails to catch up on, and there’s also the bills to pay.

Heavy heaving sigh. I also want to make it to the gym this morning. One good thing that has happened in this past week is managing three workouts; my body feels wonderful, my muscles feel more stretched and better than they have since the pandemic closed my old gym (we belonged there for eighteen years) and that’s got to count for something, doesn’t it? I think so, and I like that I am developing better workout habits. I’ll worry about correcting my diet and going full on Mediterranean diet after a few more weeks.

I’m also going to write a story–or rather, try to finish one–for the next Mystery Writers of America anthology. Getting a short story into one of those is on my bucket list, and I have two potential in-progress stories for this one; three, really: “Condos for Sale or Rent,” “Please Die Soon,” and “A Dirge in the Dark”. I guess I’ll need to read what’s been done on all four stories and then see about finishing any or all of them…it’s not a bad idea to get all three stories written, pick one to submit to the MWA anthology, and then send the others to other markets.

So many stories in progress.

The sun is rising and the loss of the trees has also made a significant difference to my view–which isn’t nearly as pretty or scenic as it was before, and will take some getting used to. The great irony is my landlady has been trying to get the property owner next door to trim the trees back for years–and trying to get her to trim them regularly, as they are problematic for hurricanes/tropical storms. It took Zeta for her to take the risk presented by the crepe myrtles seriously, with the end result that some were not only trimmed back dramatically, but others were removed entirely. I may have to hang up a small blanket or something in the meantime as a stopgap until I have the time and financial means to get curtains or blinds.

And on that note, I must head into the spice mines and start working on getting caught up, a Sisyphean task at best. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and enjoy your Feast of All Saints.