Tag: LSU-Mississippi

Hurtin’ (on the Bottle)

Monday morning and back to the spice mines with me this morning.

Well, the office, at any rate.

It’s very chilly in the Lost Apartment on this first day of December, which also means it’s the start of my Noirmas Season project. Huzzah!1 I also slept deeply and well yesterday, after a day of rest and not really doing a lot. I was very low-energy yesterday, which didn’t surprise me. I’ve always been tired the day after driving home from Kentucky, which is why I always have given myself a free day before I have to go back to the office. So being low-energy wasn’t a “still not well completely” reaction, but rather a normal one, which was an enormous relief. Sparky was also very needy all day yesterday, sleeping in my lap or insisting I go sit in my chair to provide a lap for him–he’s so sweet. He was kind of distant at first when I got home, too, but eventually forgave me and starting showering me with attention. But yes, I spent most of yesterday in my easy chair too tired to read, and watching news videos and getting caught up on everything I’d missed while on that Internet sabbatical I took. I had to clean out an unbelievable amount of emails, and I also have a lot to read and respond to at some point this week.

The coaching carousel finally stopped spinning yesterday, with Tulane’s coach going to Florida and a directional Florida university’s coach going to Auburn, with the big story of the day being Lane Kiffin deciding to leave Mississippi in the lurch and come to LSU. (Mississippi elevated their defensive coordinator to head coach–not interim, but head coach.) There was a lot of negativity about this, as there should have been. He is leaving his team with a 11-1 record and a play-off birth, so their fans are pretty bitter and angry2. Mississippi hasn’t had a shot at contending for a national title since at least 2003, and they made the 12 team play-offs before LSU, which no one would have thought possible as recently as five years ago. I’m ambivalent about the whole situation, to be honest. Mississippi fans have a right to be angry and they also have a right to hate him; he left them in the lurch before the play-offs to go to an archenemy. LSU-Mississippi is a trophy game every year, and they hate us and have for decades. The difference between this hire and the Brian Kelly hire back in 2021 is that Louisiana seems to have instantly embraced Kiffin, whereas Kelly was never completely accepted, and even after winning the division in his first season–a good start–LSU never saw that level of success again. I’m willing to give Kiffin a chance, just as I was willing to give Kelly (someone I didn’t like or respect) a chance. He did a great job at Mississippi–not an easy task–and three consecutive ten win seasons there is nothing to sneeze at. LSU is a brand (more on that later) much more so than Mississippi, with no disrespect intended; it’s just a fact. An undefeated LSU team, for example, will always be ranked higher than an undefeated Mississippi team–which is completely unfair–but that’s how this all seems to work these days. (Miami and Notre Dame, for example, have the same record but Notre Dame is ranked higher–and Miami beat Notre Dame. Your guess is as good as mine.)

Yesterday morning I finished listening to Fever Beach, and have lots of thoughts about it. It reminded just how important it actually is for funny writers to use their talents to skewer and satirize politicians and the state of the country. I have wondered myself about how much of the current world situation I should put into my Scotty books, and if so, how to handle it. My readers, of course, probably are more left than right; I cannot imagine how anyone could read that series and believe Scotty and his family are conservatives. I don’t remember if Fever Beach was considered controversial when it was published, and once it got started I wasn’t sure how I felt about it and the approach he was taking, but once I started laughing out loud (which happened quite a few times while listening) and got into the spirit of the thing. Mocking them is really the best way to handle them–and really, we should have never stopped calling them weird last summer.

We also finished watching the John Wayne Gacy series, Devil in Disguise, which was incredibly well done. I appreciated the focus on the families and loved ones on the victims, along with the trial stuff and backstory. This, Ryan Murphy, is how you do a serial killer mini-series. You don’t glamourize the killer. We then watched a documentary called The Carman Family Murders, which was interesting, sad, and horrifying all at the same time. (I think we’re going to make Sundays our “true crime documentary” nights.)

Tonight after work I need to make some groceries and order some to be delivered (or maybe I can order them all for delivery? Hmmm). I need to put the dishes away and finish the load of laundry I started last night (fluff and fold is all that’s left to do). I need to clean out my inbox and start thinking more about working on Chlorine. I also got the edits for new Scotty I have to get done, and I have another chore to do as well.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back tomorrow!

  1. Note to self: find my copy of The Postman Always Rings Twice tonight. ↩︎
  2. Again, who can blame them? There are people in Louisiana who’ve never forgiven Nick Saban for returning to college football at Alabama. ↩︎

Julie Do You Love Me

One can never go wrong with old Bobby Sherman hits, can one? 🙂

Well, it’s Saturday morning, the apartment looks a lot better, and I am not feeling tired this morning, as opposed to yesterday morning. I had a good night’s sleep before my alarm kitty went off this morning–he let me sleep a while longer–and now I am awake, swilling coffee, and ready to get to work today. I have to get my COVID shot today (more on that story later), so am hoping for no adverse reactions so I can get some work done today. Paul is working with his trainer and then going by his office–they have to move out by the end of the month (remember the building collapse last year?), and so he is packing and throwing things away. There are football games all day today, too–including LSU-Mississippi and some other terrific match-ups, so the siren song of my easy chair and the television is going to be difficult to resist, but I do have work to do today, that I have to get done if I am going to be finished with this book on time.

Several weeks ago, I talked to my doctor about the COVID shot (I am not sixty-five yet, but I am immunocompromised), at which point I was informed that in Louisiana you now need a prescription for it and if you aren’t 65 or older you have to be at “risk”. Well, everyone’s at risk, since it spreads so easily from person to person, thank you again, MAGA garbage human beings who are seriously too stupid to breathe if it weren’t involuntary. Your doctor has to write a prescription for it, send it to the pharmacy, and you have to know which version of the shot they have. So first, you have to check with said pharmacy to see which brand they offer, and let your doctor know so he can write the scrip for the correct version. So, you can’t just can’t get a prescription–if it’s written for the wrong version they won’t give you either. Idiotic, right? This is what comes from living in a MAGA majority state filled with temporarily embarrassed millionaires. After jumping through these hoops, it turned out that CVS, my pharmacy of choice, wasn’t offering it in New Orleans at all…which meant biting the bullet and getting it at a Walgreens. I hate Walgreens. I’ve been boycotting Walgreens for the most part (other than the convenience of having one a short block away, so I might go get milk or bread from there in a pinch)and don’t spend money there if at all possible. Since the convenient one is the one I used to call the Marsten House on St. Charles, I decided to have it called into the one in the Garden District, by Breaux Mart on Magazine. When I went, they made me wait almost an hour–I had another appointment and had to leave. After leaving, about half an hour later I got a notice that my appointment was cancelled–so they expected me to sit there for an hour and half? And were rude about it when I finally asked? Yeah, I walked out and gave them one-star on Yelp. I also was more than happy to fill out the “customer satisfaction survey” they sent me because I had checked in for my appointment. I refuse to go back to that one, but still need the vaccine so had my doctor call it into the Marsten House on St. Charles. I will report back, for sure.

Paul didn’t get home until after I went to bed, and I imagine I won’t see an awful lot of him until they are finished moving into their new, temporary office space. DISLIKE.

A lovely review of Double Crossing Van Dine by Oline Cogdill in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel was published this week:

Double Crossing Van Dine, edited by Donna Andrews, Greg Herren and Art Taylor; introduction by Catriona McPherson; Crippen & Landru; 310 pages; $22

The Golden Age of Detective Fiction that launched the classic genre novel is considered to be from the 1920s to 1930s. But contemporary readers know that a second Golden Age began in the mid-1980s when the novels became more emotionally involving along with the introduction of detectives from myriad backgrounds and cultures. The genre continues to evolve, seeing several golden ages in the past decades.Going out on a limb here, many authors from the ’20s and ’30s haven’t survived the test of time, aside from a few, such as Agatha Christie. And going out on another limb here, S.S. Van Dine, the focus of this short story anthology, probably is among those only recognized by readers steeped in the history of mystery fiction.Van Dine, whose real name was Willard Huntington Wright, was an American art critic, literary editor, biographer and author who wrote the series about detective Philo Vance.

Each story begins describing one of Van Dine’s rules, then crushing it. Fort Lauderdale author Elaine Viets’ “Sweet Poison,” about two young women struggling in New York’s Lower East Side during 1921, forgets the rule that “all clues must be publicly stated,” as they deal with the unexpected death of one’s “Wall Street sugar daddy.”Barb Goffman puts aside the “no love interest” rule in “Baby Love” as a fledgling-but-broke private detective tries to launch his career so he and his very loving wife can afford a baby. Co-editor Greg Herren stifles the “no supernatural” rule with “The Spirit Tree,” in which the solution to a murder comes from beyond. The “only one detective rule” doesn’t work for Delia Pitts’ “Better Together,” which finds two heads are better than one.Boca Raton author Alan Orloff’s “The Society Set” takes a butler who has several jobs for his persnickety employer on a journey of a jewelry heist that actually embraces Van Dine’s version of a “fascinating crime.” Leigh Perry has a work-around for the “no secret societies” ban in “Guilted Lily,” in which a tight-knit group of grifters seek a score.Tom Mead dismisses the rule that servants should never be the culprits in “The Tell-Tale Thumb.” Some people, Mead writes, see only the uniform, not the person who hides in plain sight.The majority of the authors in “Double Crossing Van Dine” have either won or been nominated for awards. A handy brief bio of each of the authors may inspire readers to seek out more of their stories.

Pretty cool!

And on that note, I am heading back into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I will be back tomorrow morning.

Hero

Work at home Friday! Man, I was tired yesterday when I got off work–not the fatigue, thank God, just a little burned out. I had dinner with a friend at Acamaya in the Bywater (highly recommend) and then came home to just collapse into my easy chair for the evening with Sparky the Needy (Paul did stay at the office late, so li’l Sparkster was home alone much longer than he usually is, so yes, he has abandonment issues) and catch up on the news. I didn’t work on the book because I was very tired, but I only have to work a few hours this morning and then I get to run a couple of errands before diving headfirst into the book. The house is also a horrible mess…too tired last night to do anything. I probably wasn’t great company at dinner, because I really did hit a wall, and this morning my hips and legs ache. I’m beginning to think I can’t even have a solitary cocktail anymore; I had one with dinner last night and this morning I feel like I’ve been through the wringer. No hangover–it was one drink, after all, a margarita–but the fatigue is here in a very big way. And the house is a mess, mess, mess.

Heavy heaving sigh.

But the coffee and breakfast (yay, caffeine and blood sugar spike!) are starting to kick in and my body is warming/waking up and so is my mind. Huzzah! It also looks like a bright, sunshine day outside; low humidity and sunny and warm, of course.

When Paul got home we watched this week’s South Park, which was hilarious in its ruthless political satire. I’m not sure why or when we stopped watching South Park regularly; probably in the times after Hurricane Katrina, and while I am enjoying watching again–I am not at the point where I would want to go back and watch the YEARS I’ve not seen. I fell asleep in my chair at some point, waking up to go to bed around eleven thirty. I did sleep well last night, so I am not sure where this fatigue this morning is coming from…is it because of the work week, was it the drink I had with dinner, or was it both? I feel it much more this Friday than I did last Friday, so I am going to have to go with the cocktail. I don’t mind giving up alcohol completely; I was already down to the point where I only had alcohol when having dinner with friends, usually even then only white wine as a rule…so it’s not like I’m giving up something I do all the time and enjoy. And let’s face it; I started drinking alcohol when I was sixteen–so yeah, giving it up after almost fifty years of it isn’t really that big of a deal.

There are also a lot of great football games tomorrow, so after I get my writing work done for the day I am going to probably just watch games while cleaning or reading. LSU plays at 2:30, and it’s at Mississippi; I don’t think LSU has won up in Oxford since 2019, but I could be mistaken. I know LSU lost the last time in Oxford for sure–that was that insane game than ended up something like 59-54 or something like that, with Jayden Daniels playing unbelievably well; if we’d only had a defense that year we could have gone all the way, methinks. And of course Alabama-Georgia is tomorrow, too; Auburn is at Texas A&M, and I’ve not really looked at much more than that other than Notre Dame at Arkansas (GO HOGS!). So, today I am going to do data entry, have an on-line team meeting, and then I am going to run my errands before coming home to get the house back under control and write, write, write and edit, edit, edit.

And now, I am going to go get another cup of coffee before getting to work on the laundry and opening my data entry website. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I will be back tomorrow morning. See you then!

I will always love Joe Burrow, and will always be grateful for that 2019 LSU championship team. I am also super-grateful that I got to see them play twice in person.

Don’t Cha Stop

It was supposed to rain this morning, but the sun is shining and the sky is bright blue. I slept well again last night until Sparky got me up this morning, wanting his breakfast. (He is such a sweet boy.) I had a lovely day yesterday, actually. I ran my errands in the morning, ordered groceries to be delivered last evening, and had a pretty nice day overall. I finished rereading my Jay Bennett and Barbara Michaels novels1, and hope to finish reading the Megan Abbott today. I also watched a lot of television while doing chores and reading before falling asleep in my chair last night after a nice, relaxing day. Here’s to having another today, right?

Netflix has a new show about the 2024 SEC football season called Any Given Saturday, and so I watched about four episodes of that while Paul slept on the couch. It’s very well done, and while I don’t feel it pays enough attention to LSU–and what there is focuses on games they lost (really? No coverage of the amazing upset of Top Ten-ranked Mississippi?)–it is nice to see the stories on the other teams and get a recap of the season. The show, of course, is hype for the upcoming season; the pro pre-season is already under way. I think LSU can be really good this year, but LSU always manages to find a way to LSU. There are only two episodes of the show left–we switched it off to watch Wednesday, which we also didn’t finish last night–that I may have on in the background this morning while I read.

I think I am going to go ahead and spend some time with the news and my coffee this morning before finishing this. I’ll be back momentarily, Constant Reader. (According to the weather, we should be having a thunderstorm in five minutes, which I don’t think is going to happen, given how it currently looks out there.)

It’s now noon, and it never rained here. It does look like the calm before a storm outside my windows at the moment, but I’ve already closed up my wagon and put it away (I’d left it out last night after the delivery) just in case. I got cleaned up–even shaving–and that woke me up and made me feel being productive for a while. I put Any Given Saturday back on to stream, getting through the last two episodes while reading more of El Dorado Drive and marveling at what a fucking MASTER Megan Abbott is; she may be the best writer publishing today, and is definitely in the top tier without question. I also picked out my next reads: the reread will be Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson2 and the juvenile/young adult will be The Secret of the Red Scarf, which belongs to a close-to-forgotten girls’ series featuring Nancy Drew rip-off Kay Tracey, and I won’t decide on the new new-to-me read until I finish the Abbott–I’m currently torn between Mia Manansala’s latest or Disco Witches of Fire Island or Lev AC Rosen’s Rough Pages; all queer authors, I might add.

But The Hunting Wives might win the race in a photo-finish.

As I finished off Any Given Saturday, I found myself very curious about the lack of coverage for Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Auburn, among others…and LSU and Alabama were only covered in reference to their games with South Carolina and Vanderbilt, period. Was it about getting some of these lesser-known programs more coverage? And it’s definitely difficult to cover 16 teams with any degree of depth and certainly every team had a story to tell this past year. But it definitely whetted my appetite for the return of college football, which was its intent, so mission accomplished, Netflix.

I’d forgotten we’d watched Towards Zero in between the SEC show and Wednesday; I’d seen bad reviews of it so was curious as to what we would think of it. I remembered the story as soon as I saw the geography of the setting, which is crucial to the crime, and yes, I was proven correct in the third episode. It was fine, if perhaps not really needing a third episode? It did feel like it was dragged out more than it needed to be, which is not a good sign for a murder mystery.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. I need to do some picking up and organizing and cleaning, and I am also going to write for a while before probably returning to the Abbott. I doubt I will be back later; I may finish a newsletter today and I may not. If not, I will be here again in the morning before the infusion. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader!

  1. I will write newsletters about both authors at some point. ↩︎
  2. I’ve always wanted to write about this unique Jackson book; I usually reread The Haunting of Hill House every October. ↩︎

You Still Get Me High

So, we brought this little fella home yesterday from the SPCA.

His name, already given to him when we picked him, is Rum-Tum-Tugger (I announced it incorrectly on social media yesterday with a typo calling him Tigger by mistake) and that will probably change as we get to know him better; he doesn’t know the name at all. He’s almost five months old, and is completely fearless. I wanted to take all the cats home (and the dogs, too; it’s always so sad to me to see their hopeful faces and their wagging tails, thinking you might be their rescuer. All the cats we met were sweet, some a little shy (Sing out Louise!) which made me sad because they seemed to put some effort into making friends, but are apparently used to not being picked they gave up trying to win us over once we walked away from them. Tug was having none of that, and let us know he was the only cat for us. He has the cutest little meow, and there was no shyness at all once we got him home; he fearlessly explored the entire apartment, made cuddle time as well as let us both know, with head butts and purrs and exposed belly and making biscuits, that he was happy to have his Forever Home. I woke up this morning to him purring and curled up next to me on my pillow, and last night he followed Paul up to bed–and then came back down looking for me the way Scooter used to–hey, it’s bed time! He’s a kitten so he’s very playful–he made toys out of wrappers and dust and whatever he could find on the floor–he chased my highlighter around on the floor for a good half an hour or so.

Obviously, he needs some toys. Scooter didn’t care about toys, but clearly our very playful house tiger kitten needs things to play with.

I slept really well last night, despite going to bed so late–we finished off Sex Education last night. I don’t know if that was the finale for the show or just for the season, but it seemed like the perfect way to end the show if that was the intent. The season was a bit uneven, but they all learned important lessons and fractured families and friendships began healing. I also was incredibly satisfied with how the Otis/Maeve relationship was wrapped up. It seems to me that another season would undo this season, if that makes sense, and another one would feel kind of forced. The actors are getting too old for their roles, if that makes sense (much the same as the original cast of Elité), and I liked the note the season ended on.

This morning I am trying cacao instead of coffee, and just brewed my first ever cup of it. Here’s hoping it tastes as good as it smells? It’s unsweetened chocolate, really; and by itself, it’s kind of bland. But adding vanilla and sweet-n-low makes it taste more like hot chocolate. I’m trying this out as a coffee alternative; it’s supposed to give you a coffee-like energy but without caffeine, and without the caffeine there’s no crash later. I kind of like it. I don’t know that it’ll replace coffee in my daily routine, but it’s good and we’ll see how the effects play out with me. I am going to drop beads off today for the disabled kids, and books to the library sale but don’t really feel like I need to make a grocery run. I think we have everything we need, so it can wait until one night after work on my way home. I also need to get gas and air up my car tires, now that the weather has gotten milder. I’ll be taking it in for an oil change and a tire rotation this coming Friday.

LSU plays at Mississippi tonight; it’s the Magnolia Bowl rivalry game so they always, like Arkansas, play like world-beaters when they play LSU. They can make their season by beating LSU, and after last week I am not so confident the Tigers will make it out of Oxford with a win–they also got beat by Alabama last week for the seventh or eighth year in a row, so they also need the win to stay relevant in the division and the conference; it would take a miracle for them to win the West with two losses. (I refuse to call the University of Mississippi by its commonly used nickname for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s a callback to plantation days. That school has been problematic for decades, but at least they no longer wave Confederate treason flags at games; how must seeing that have felt to visiting Black players? Obviously, their fans didn’t give a shit, like how Alabama’s student section was chanting homophobic and racist slurs at the Texas players several weeks ago–nothing says welcome to the SEC like homophobia and racism.) I’m not sure what other games are on today, but I think for me today I am going to clean up around the house some and finish reading Shawn’s book so I can move on to Halloween Horror Month. I feel like I slept well but have low energy this morning, and I am just going to roll with the low energy and rest and relax for the majority of the day so I can get some writing done tomorrow. Next weekend I’ll be in Panama City Beach for the night visiting Dad and my aunts and uncles, so no writing will get done that weekend. I think I will try to work on Jackson Square Jazz during the games today, too.

So, on that note i am going to head into the spice mines. The kitchen is a disaster area, as always, and I should have spent some time on it last night, but that’s what Saturday morning is for; catching up on things. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back at some point.

Skies the Limit

I finished my reread of ‘salem’s Lot (entry to follow at some point) and really enjoyed it, as much as I have every time I’ve reread it. It’s a marvel that the book was King’s second published novel, and while yes, it was, like Carrie, horror–but it was a completely different kind of book, in style, tone, voice and structure. How can anyone have read King’s first two books and not seen the rise of a major new force in publishing? The pacing is stunning as well; the first act is kind of charming and meanders here and there, introducing us to the characters and the town as well as letting us know something bad is coming, and it just keeps picking up steam, faster and faster, until the last hundred pages or so just fly. The ending was left open to a sequel–I remember reading once that King had written the opening of a sequel, or had the idea or something–but it never happened.

Probably just as well.

I also started my reread of The Haunting of Hill House and as ever, am completely captivated by the power of that first chapter and Shirley Jackson’s writing style.

Yesterday’s LSU game was quite fun, if stressful. As always, they got off to a relatively slow start by playing a little loose and sloppy at first; early in the second quarter LSU fell behind 17-3 because of miscues and mistakes–it easily could have been 17-14–but then the team found it’s rhythm and went on a 42-3 tear against a 7-0 6th ranked Mississippi team (who, to be fair, really hadn’t played the meat of the schedule so far; their biggest win had been Auburn, who is floundering this season) to win the game handily 45-20, and to look pretty impressive while doing so. The last time Mississippi came to Baton Rouge 7-0 and in the top ten (#3, actually) was in 2014 when an underachieving LSU beat them 10-7 (apparently, LSU is 1-5 against Mississippi when they are ranked in the Top 10–is it any wonder they hate us so? Add in to that the fact that LSU’s most legendary and iconic play of all time–Billy Cannon’s Run–was against them, and you see where their antipathy comes from. I’ll be the first to admit, I wasn’t a fan of Brian Kelly’s or his fire, but he is 100% turning this program around from the depths of the last two seasons and it’s entirely possible LSU could go 9-3 this season–maybe even 10-2 (I daren’t to dream yet; a win over Alabama this year seems almost too much to hope for; but if it happens Brian Kelly will immediately be crowned King of Louisiana) but hearing people talking about SEC titles and play-off games this year seems to be a bit premature–but watch out for LSU next year. Jayden Daniels is really quite a player–I wasn’t completely sold on him, either, to be honest, but he’s really turned out to be quite the player; fun to watch, and getting better and more seasoned and acclimated as the season goes on. Seriously, next year LSU will be a contender for sure.

And yes, it’s petty, but I also kind of enjoyed that Texas A&M lost to South Carolina last night, and good for USC, really (I started to write “good for the Cocks” because I am ten years old; but in fairness they call themselves the Cocks). Petty because they wanted Jimbo Fisher at LSU, and now having seen what he can do with all the money and resources behind him at A&M? Yeah, glad you chose College Station instead of Baton Rouge, Jimbo. Have fun with the Aggie alumni, and let us know how that goes. I can’t believe they wanted him so bad that his buy-out had no restrictions…they are either going to be stuck with him for a very long or getting him out is going to be extremely costly. Again, oh, well, too bad so sad. You had some success at Florida State, but they were already circling the drain before you bailed on them, Jimbo…and this is yet another year A&M won’t be in the SEC title game. Oh, well.

Another rather interesting football season. Tulane also won, so they are 7-1 now, too. Good on you, Wave!

I feel very rested and relaxed this morning. I was stressed during that first quarter of the LSU game, so rather than sitting in my chair stewing in my worry and letting myself get worked up (I literally sometimes get so into games that I have to remind myself, Dude, it’s a sporting event, not the end of the world) so I decided to use that nervous energy to clean the house and work on the book while I watched the game. I planned some of the next act of the book, so I can get some chapters written in the meantime, and I also pruned the books; did some more laundry; did the dishes; and cleaned the floors. I also did some filing that needed doing. Paul had some errands to run in the afternoon–he didn’t check the game time when he made appointments–so he didn’t get home until the fourth quarter, and then we watched the short programs from Skate America, which I’d recorded. The young American “quadgod” Ilia Malinin is definitely a rising star, as is Isabeau Levito, the young American woman who looks like she’ll be our best and most successful since at least Sasha Cohen, if not Michelle Kwan (although achieving more than Kwan is unlikely for any other skater). Today there’s not a Saints game, and I am going to finish this and do some things before diving deep into my book to get it going again. Paul will be gone next weekend, and LSU is on a bye week, so I have literally no excuse next weekend for not being highly productive and getting caught up on things–I still have to empty the dishwasher and fold clothes; and I want to make white bean chicken chili today as well–it’s getting to be soup and chili season in New Orleans, and I do love this time of year and would even more if it didn’t get dark so early.

I’m glad I feel rested this morning, to be sure. Hopefully I will be able to motivate myself to work my way down and through my to-do list. But I am not getting there by doing this, so I am going to bid you farewell now, Constant Reader, and head back into the spice mines.

Everywhere

Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment and all is well this morning. I slept in a bit (I also went to bed later than I usually do, so I slept about the same amount, really) and feel rested and relaxed this morning, which is always a nice, pleasant thing to feel. I didn’t get much work done on the book yesterday (355 words, all of them bad except maybe “Scotty” and “Frank” and “Colin”) but that’s okay; I feel a lot less stressed and a lot less pressured this morning about everything that needs to be done now. The stuff all needs to get done, of course; that hasn’t changed, but I am not feeling as much stress about it as I was feeling yesterday.

I read more of ‘salem’s Lot last night while I was waiting for my friend Ellen Byron (buy her books! Bayou Book Thief is amazing!) to text me to meet her for a drink. I picked her up at the Sazerac House (Canal and Magazine) and it had been quite a while since I drove down that way in the evening, and yikes. SO much traffic, so many people everywhere. I’m still not used to pedestrians in the CBD at night, even though the area hasn’t been a ghost town at night in years, but then we swung around and came up to have drinks at St. Vincent’s, which has been renovated and redone and remade and turned into a boutique luxury hotel right here in the heart of my neighborhood. I’ve posted some pictures of the place when I was doing my walks through the neighborhood last year; it’s even more beautiful inside than I imagined. These weekend is Tulane Homecoming, so there are a shit ton of people in town (that’s actually what brought Ellen to New Orleans, in fact; she is an alum) for that, and of course the people from Mississippi here for today’s LSU game in Baton Rouge (Geaux Tigers!). It was lovely to sit and have a drink and talk about writing and books and this crazy business we are in; she’s an absolute delight (buy her books!) and I look forward to the next time I get to see her.

But this morning I realized how utterly I am failing at reading. October is winding down; Halloween is a week from Monday, and I still haven’t finished my reread of ‘salem’s Lot, let alone done my annual Halloween reread of The Haunting of Hill House or getting caught up on the horror novels in my TBR pile. I’ll spend some more time with Mr. King this morning before I run my errands–I have to go get the mail and I have to stop at the grocery store because I want to make white bean chicken chili tomorrow, and have nothing I need for that–and I am debating whether I want to grill burgers today or not. The LSU game is on today at 2:30, and of course Skate America is airing this weekend (yay for figure skating!) so I’ll have to write around those times.

The reread of ‘salem’s Lot is a lot of fun, actually; I am really enjoying this revisit of the book and seeing why I enjoyed it so much the first time around. King wasn’t STEPHEN KING yet when he wrote and published it, so I am sure it didn’t get the kindest reception from critics of the time; particularly when you take into consideration what they considered to be great writing back then. I don’t remember when it was that the Literati changed their mind on Stephen King, but I do remember how he wasn’t taken seriously as a writer by them for a very long time (he writes horror! He’s too prolific to be a real writer!), and some of his best work was already behind him by the time he got the anointing he deserved for a very long time. I mean, he had quite a run, and quite a varied one at that, before he finally published a book I didn’t like (The Tommyknockers, for the record) and it seemed an aberration as he seemed to climb back on the horse and right the saddle in the next one after that. I love how many points of view he uses in ‘salem’s Lot, giving us little glimpses of fully realized characters and their lives to show us human beings so that when they actually wind up becoming vampires, you do feel a sense of loss. Many of these minor characters are objects of sympathy, while others you just kind of shrug when the vampires come for them and think, well, you were a shitty person anyway, oh well, this is justice of a sort. The scene where Mike Ryerson has to finish burying the coffin of Danny Glick is one of the most terrifying scenes I’ve ever read, and it still holds up today. I like how King gets into the point of view character’s head and gives them a voice–which is still King’s, but different from the other voices he uses–and that sort of structured stream of consciousness is something I really like and enjoy reading; I sometimes use that style in my own writing.

(I started to write something self-deprecating, but am proud of myself for catching it and not doing it. Progress.)

And on that note, I am going to head into the manuscript and do some cleaning before the errands are run. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later or tomorrow.

Stop!

It’s Sunday morning in the Lost Apartment and slept relatively well again, if a bit late; my body clock is now all messed up and tomorrow morning’s waking up at the crack of dawn is going to be harder than usual.

Not that it’s ever easy, frankly.

LSU played terribly yesterday and lost, as expected, to Mississippi 31-17 (first loss to them after five straight wins) but I managed to finish reading Not All Diamonds and Rosé while it was on, and also read some more in Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, which is, as all books by Paul Tremblay, very well done–but I am not deep enough into it to have an idea of what’s going on. It focuses on the disappearance of a thirteen-year-old from a state park outside of Boston; it opens with his family–along with everyone else in the community–finding out he is missing and dealing with the emotions and fears that come along with a kid gone missing; but something out of the ordinary has already happened (no spoilers, sorry) which means there’s more to this than just your average child gone missing story.

Which, given it’s written by Paul Tremblay, was always going to be the case in the first place.

After the LSU game, we spent the rest of the evening watching Skate America; we used to be (still are) big figure skating fans, but the Internet and so forth has kind of ruined figure skating, really–when you know what the results are before the competition airs, it’s not nearly as exciting or suspenseful; so the only way to recapture the way it used to feel to watch something pre-recorded is now to watch live, which Peacock (NBC’s streaming service) does now provide. (I also think the new scoring system has a lot to do with it as well. Sure, the old 6.0 system had serious flaws and corruption in its judging, but I am not convinced that corruption still isn’t there and now the scoring system is so mysterious and complicated that it’s almost impossible to tell anymore if anything untoward is going on. The great irony is the scoring change, claiming to be more fair and to rule out bias, simply made it harder for viewers to see it for themselves.) There’s also tension brewing in the ISU this year as well, as a Russian judge and coach has made horrifically homophobic comments about French ice dancer Guillaume Cizeron (who came out last year) and his partner Gabrielle Papadakis. They have a silver Olympic medal (it would have been gold had Papadakis not suffered a costume malfunction in the original dance) and are three time world champions. It was an obvious attempt to smear them in an Olympic year and potentially influence future judging pools at upcoming events, only making it all the more disgusting….particularly since Russia couldn’t even officially compete at the last summer Olympics because of widespread doping and cheating. This piece of shit Russian essentially said that since Cizeron is gay they cannot “convincingly portray romance” the way the top Russian team can; to that I say, “hey, you homophobic needle-dicked piece of shit, if you want to see a gay man convincingly play a romantic lead, watch Pillow Talk some time and tell me Rock Hudson didn’t deserve an Oscar. And by the way, go fuck yourself and drink bleach.”

I am so fucking sick of this shit. Seriously.

I did manage to get some things done yesterday, but I am still looking for my old journals. I cannot for the life of me remember where I stored them; I know sometime over the past few years I found them in a box, but now I don’t remember what I did with them. It seems unlikely I would have simply shoved them into another box and stored them somewhere; but I can’t seem to locate them anywhere inside the apartment, which makes it appear that must be what I did with them. Generally I don’t go back and read my old journals very often–I don’t really like to see how much of a mess I used to be, written down plainly in ink on paper–but I kind of need to because I am writing a novella set in the summer of 1994 and I kind of need to go back and see what I recorded back then about music and pop culture and so forth. One of the hardest things about doing research on gay life in the past is so much of it is hidden, or wasn’t recorded anywhere, really–like there’s no listings anywhere on the Internet of “what dance songs were popular in gay dance clubs in 1994?” and my memory banks simply are not substantial enough anymore for me to summon those answers up out of the muck and mush my brain is slowly turning into as I age. That summer I went out dancing a lot, but I honestly don’t remember anything much about the music other than there were a couple of Pet Shop Boys songs that were really popular that summer–“Go West” and “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing”, and Erasure had a great remix of their song “Always”, but beyond that I have no memory of much.

Today I am debating as to whether I actually want to go run errands; making groceries is kind of necessary but I really have no desire to leave the house and go out in public. There’s not a Saints game today–they’re on Monday Night Football this week–and next weekend is LSU’s bye week, so I don’t really need to spend Saturday watching football (despite it being the weekend of Georgia-Florida and Auburn-Mississippi), so here’s hoping I can get some serious writing done today and this coming weekend. Stranger things have happened..and I am definitely running out of time to get this book written, which is incredibly stressful for me, as always. Heavy heaving sigh.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader.

You Surround Me

And here we are, on Saturday morning of the LSU-Mississippi game (GEAUX TIGERS!) and lots and lots to do, as always.

I slept in this morning, much later then I have done in a while. I feel rested, though, and not foggy in the least. It’s taking me longer to get over this procedure then I would have thought, actually–I assumed it would be over and the next day I ‘d be my normal self again, but that really wasn’t the case. I guess it has to do with being older, but also going a night without any sleep at all takes a much harsher toll on my body than it would have done ten or twenty years ago. I actually don’t mind getting older–it’s always a surprise that I have gotten this far, really–and I generally don’t think about it all that much until I notice something like this. I used to always bounce back very quickly, but that appears to no longer be the case.

Which shouldn’t come as a surprise, either. I’ve not lived the healthiest lifestyle for vast portions of my life, and I still don’t eat as healthily as I probably should. But I also tend to think that one should, in the limited time they have on this planet, enjoy themselves as much as possible, and denying myself things that I like and enjoy–well, life provides enough unhappiness and stress and misery on its own without me needing to make myself miserable, right?

As a reward for the procedure, I downloaded a book that I’ve really been enjoying–Dave Quinn’s oral history of the Real Housewives shows, Not All Diamonds and Rosé. I have talked in earlier blogs about my falling out of like for these shows recently; but I started reading this on Wednesday and got totally sucked into it and stayed up later reading every night since then I should have. It’s fascinating, but again, who knows if what they are saying is true, if the women are actually being themselves or if they are maintaining the characters they created on television. But it’s very addicting to have production staff actually commenting on the controversies and things that happened, the dynamics between the women and with production, and behavior on and off camera and the differences. There’s a lot of shade thrown–Carole Radziwell is particularly shady in the chapter on New York, as is Heather Thomsen; Teresa Giudice certainly goes to town on everyone in the chapter on New Jersey; and the production staff really have nothing nice to say about Lisa Vanderpump of Beverly Hills either. What’s interesting to me is how so many hang on to the feuds and fights, so many years later, with resentment and bitterness still; sometimes the behind-the-scenes stuff talked about is more interesting then what actually went on in front of the camera. How much of it is true, how much of is calculated, how much is actually just more promotion and advertising for the shows? Who knows? But it’s a lot of fun to read, and after all the difficulties I’ve been having reading fiction…it’s kind of nice to get sucked into something, even if it is just kind of fluff.

We watched Dune last night, which I also greatly enjoyed. I’m a fan of the books–although on a reread several years ago, I was a lot more critical of the writing then I’ve ever been before–and I even enjoyed the flawed David Lynch film from the 1980’s, which I saw in the theater. This was epic film-making, on the scale of David Lean masterpieces like Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago; I kept thinking as I watched, awed, this would be stunning on a big screen. The scale of the film matched the scale of the book, which the Lynch version didn’t really; this was the film’s ultimate flaw, as was the Syfy mini-series that was produced earlier on this century (although I thought the sequel series, Children of Dune, was much better). It’s also very well cast. I wasn’t sure at first about Timotheé Chalamet, in all honesty. He’s a very attractive young twink of a man, and his career has certainly taken off to major stardom–too boyish for me, but I do concede he is pretty, and he really did a great job; much better at inhabiting the character then earlier actors in the part. They also managed to pick a terrific place to end the movie, cutting the story into two parts: I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that it ends with Paul and his mother, the Lady Jessica, escaping the betrayal by their enemies and the closing of the trap that sending the House Atreides to Arrakis set in motion and meeting up with, and being accepted by, the indigenous people of the planet, the Fremen.

I did spend some time yesterday organizing and cleaning and filing and trying to get my shit together; that will continue again today as I finish getting organized so I can focus on getting my book finished. I have to go over the first part of the final edit of #shedeservedit this morning to get it back to my editor; I made the corrections I noticed were needed yesterday afternoon, but I want to read it one more time to be certain I caught everything and/or didn’t miss anything else. I think it’s a good book, and it’s very different from the one before, Bury Me in Shadows, and probably very different from the next thing I am going to write–which I really need to work on this weekend. Time is slipping through my fingers, as it always does, and that deadline is looming just over the horizon and the world keeps turning towards it, bringing it closer and closer.

AIEEEE!!!!!

But my coffee is quite marvelous this morning, I am slowly coming to life, and I think I am going to go read for a moment before I get up and start working on finishing the cleaning/organizing project I started yesterday. So have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I will check in on you tomorrow.

Star

Well, I survived my first ever colonoscopy, with an endoscopy thrown in for good measure (my gastroenterologist was concerned about the heartburn medication I take daily, so he wanted to take a look around in there). It was a thing, really. The colonoscopy was originally supposed to be in 2018, but there was a problem with my insurance (insurance companies are really of Satan) so it was rescheduled for last April…and then pandemic. Men really should get their first at fifty; so of course I got mine at sixty.

But ugh, what an unpleasant experience prepping for the procedure was. I didn’t sleep at all Wednesday night because I was getting up all the time to run to the bathroom; the final dose of the purge medication was supposed to be taken at 1 a.m. (!!!!), along with another 42 ounces of water–following the first dose and 42 ounces of water five hours earlier. Oh, and you’re supposed to drink all the water over an hour. So I went to bed finally at two in the morning, and then UP DOWN UP DOWN UP DOWN all night, plus the stress of worrying about sleeping through the alarm because I was up so late…yeah, it was pretty ugly around the Lost Apartment yesterday morning before we summoned the Lyft to whisk us off to Touro Infirmary. They had also originally told me I needed to stop in and get a COVID test the day before “around four”; you can imagine my horror to get the confirmation call Wednesday afternoon at two-forty-five, which was when I was informed that they cut off testing if you aren’t there by two-thirty.

Womp womp.

So then I had the added stress of oh my God what if I am doing all this prep and my test comes back positive? (It didn’t.) But they couldn’t do anything with me as far as anything actually medical is concerned, until the results came back (negative, around nine thirty). I got wheeled in and anesthetized around eleven thirty, and we were home before one. Exhausted, hungry, and still wonky from the anesthetic, I decided to take their advice and just relax and chill at home and not worry about anything pending; my body, after all, had two invasive procedures (and any procedure is traumatic to the body), so I figured–and still think–that I was allowed to have the day free from any worries or constraints about anything else. I was very tired–no coffee, no sleep, anesthetic–to the point that my joints ached from exhaustion, which also was rather unpleasant. I was too tired to do much of anything, really, and actually dozed off in my chair for a while (I did, however, stream the first half hour of Dune; and it looks incredible.) I did go to bed early and I think I slept deeply all night; at some point will have to download the Fitbit data to get an idea of just how much sleep I did or didn’t get over the last few days.

I wound up working from home needlessly on Wednesday (I read the prep instructions wrong; I thought I was supposed to start at eight a.m.–but it was actually eight pm); but I was very low energy all day anyway so it was probably best that I not see clients when I am in a low-energy place; undoubtedly it was stress about the procedure sapping my energy. I made condom packs and did some data entry and other work-at-home things while bingeing the non-Jamie Lee Curtis Halloween movies. As I have said before, I came to the Halloween (and most other non-Freddy Krueger slasher fare) late in life; in fact, it was Paul who got me to start watching. Anyway, I had realized that I’d never seen any of the other ones from the original series that don’t have Jamie Lee Curtis in them….so for my Halloween Horror Film Festival what could be more apt than finally watching the rest of those movies?

Maybe apt, but seriously–if Jamie Lee Curtis isn’t in it, why bother making it? I mean, seriously. Halloween III: Season of the Witch was just terrible. I’d heard at the time it was released that it wasn’t good, but I thought I had seen that people had revisited it and it was becoming a cult classic, under-appreciated at the time and now coming into its own? It had lesser production quality than any old made-for-television movie from the late 1960’s/early 1970’s. The plot made no sense whatsoever; the acting, editing and production quality was horrific–I kept watching all the way to the bitter end, waiting for something, anything, that would make me think I was correct in seeing that it had been rediscovered as better than originally thought? Stonehenge, some weird plan to turn children and people into androids…fucking weird. I did research it, though, and apparently John Carpenter wanted to do the films as an anthology series built around Halloween; kind of like American Horror Story, only with films. The film tanked, so they brought back Michael Myers with Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, which had Sasha Jenson, my crush fromDazed and Confused, as a supporting character. I went on to watch Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers–but again, no Jamie Lee Curtis. Instead, these two movies focused on Laurie Strode’s DAUGHTER (!!!!) who was a child; Laurie and her husband died in a car accident or something, and so the little girl was staying with a foster family, and Michael came for her.

As far as slasher movies go, these last two weren’t bad; they just didn’t feel like Halloween movies. It was also unsettling because he was psycho-stalking a child, and that just didn’t feel right or fun to watch. I mean, it’s one thing when the victims are relatively attracted and slightly talented twenty-somethings pretending (badly) to be teenagers…but a little girl? Too may squick factors there for me to enjoy the movies as much. But…now I can say I’ve seen practically all of them, so that’s something, I guess?

And now it’s Friday morning, and I need to, once again, reconnect to my life and everything that’s going on and everything I need to get done. The Lost Apartment is again a disaster area, I haven’t been to the gym all week, and…ugh. All I really want to do is go back to bed and sleep for the rest of the weekend, frankly. But I am way behind (my constant refrain) and need to get caught up. The Saints are on Monday night football (note to self: alternate route home from work Monday night) so I have all day Sunday to get stuff done, and of course the LSU-Mississippi game isn’t until two-thirty on CBS Saturday, so I have most of Saturday morning as well to get things done. I think we’re going to watch Dune tonight; I just wanted to get a feel for the movie last night, which is why I started watching and it looks amazing in scope and style and visuals.

I first read Dune when I was in high school, and loved it. At that point there were only three books–the original trilogy; the other two being Dune Messiah (which I didn’t like near as much) and Children of Dune (which I did enjoy very much) and was very excited when Mr. Herbert continued the series; I think I only read the next three (God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, Chapterhouse: Dune) and loved them all. (I stopped reading the books when Mr. Herbert died and his son took over; no offense to his son, but…it just didn’t feel right to me. And while I appreciate series being continued by new authors after the original passes, I’m not interested in reading them because the original mind behind them isn’t controlling the direction anymore, if that makes sense? This is entirely different to me than authors who become brands and new authors come in as “co-writers”; I don’t expect those books to be the same as those by the original, brand name author–like James Patterson and Robert Ludlum) Dune was my first forage into science fiction, actually; I’d never read any before, and that’s another reason why I am so partial to the book/series: it was my gateway drug. The next summer Star Wars came out, and by the end of the decade I was reading Azimov* and other science fiction writers, like Heinlein and Bradbury and an entire new world had opened for me in fiction. (I feel like this might be the proper place to mention how much I admire science fiction/fantasy authors; the world building alone requires so much work and so much attention to detail that I cannot wrap my mind around it, let alone attempt doing it.)

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and deepest apologies for not checking in with you yesterday.

*I have also started watching Foundation on Apple Plus; but more on that in a later post.