Tag: short term memory

You Were On My Mind

Thursday! I’d ordinarily be more excited about it being Thursday, but I have to get up super-early to have fasting lab work done and then I have to go into the office for a department meeting, so no work-at-home Friday for me this week. I am taking Monday and Tuesday off, though, so I have a lovely four day weekend to look forward to. Huzzah indeed!

Last night I noticed that my Louisiana landscapes calendar that I hung in the laundry room was still on January. I’d never once flipped the calendar page. It’s a gorgeous calendar, by a Louisiana photographer (we have some amazing photographers taking gorgeous images of all of Louisiana; I follow many on Facebook because the images are so gorgeous they take my breath away, and it also stimulates my creativity. I think there’s a metaphor in my forgetting the flip the calendar page for eight months, don’t you think?

It’s very gloomy this morning, which was weird to come downstairs and have it still look dark outside after turning on the kitchen lights. No worries, it’s going to be hot and humid all day–not a big surprise there, really, is there? I did run errands after work last night, picking up the mail and swinging past the Fresh Market on St. Charles on my way home, and was a bit tired when I got home. I roused myself to do the dishes last night between episodes of Evil, which is really getting a lot more interesting in this second season. I was too tired to work, and Paul’s not been very well this week (I have felt off this week myself), and so we both settled in to watch television and just relax for the evening.

It’s going to “feel like” 118, and there’s a fifty percent chance of rain today, which means it will feel hot and soupy outside all day. Please let it rain before I get off work today, so it will have mellowed out a bit outside. It’s been supposed to rain every day this week and it hasn’t, so I am not so sure of the fifty percent chance as perhaps the weather folks would like me to believe. It would be nice, if for no other reason than to cool things down for a moment or two. Heavy sigh. I do feel rested and awake this morning, which is pleasant. Not motivated, but that might change when I have more coffee. I’ll just come straight home from work tonight, and tomorrow I have to go in to the office for a meeting and then I’m just going to stay there and keep working until my partial day is over, and I can make a grocery run on the way home and run other errands, too. I’d love to not leave the house for my long weekend, but that is very unlikely. I should make it to the gym a few times, and start getting myself back into decent shape. It’s really hard to get motivated to go in the summer, and a Greg at rest always tends to stay at rest. It is remarkable how I’ve lost my dedication to working out over the years as I’ve gotten older. It’s not even about vanity anymore (much as I’ve always denied that, there was a part of me that liked looking in shape and fit and getting complimented on my body), and maybe that’s a sad statement about me that I have to face up to–with vanity removed from the equation, the motivation simply isn’t there any more?

I was also getting ideas about short stories I have in progress. What I am going to try to do is alternate between writing the book and finishing the collection. It’s almost finished–I just have to finish and polish two or three stories and I can turn it in, so there’s really no reason I can’t bounce back and forth between the two differing projects. This has worked for me before (I also remembered just now that I’ve also agreed to write a short story for two different anthologies, too), so we’ll see if that works again. This is why I don’t like the stress and pressure of deadlines anymore; I’d rather not force the work because I don’t have a choice, but would rather keep working on things organically. Again, the short term memory loss I’ve been experiencing since I got COVID in 2022 isn’t much help in this regard, because I don’t remember what I actually wrote and what I thought about writing anymore, so it also is taking me longer. I’d love to build myself back up to my old glory days of 3k words per day, but right now I don’t think that would even be remotely possible. But…you never know. I’m just out of the habit, just like going to the gym, and reestablishing both habits is going to be hard work. But that’s okay; lazy as I am and reluctant as I am to work hard, I actually kind of enjoy it once I am back in the groove.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a great Thursday, Constant Reader, and I might be back later. You do, in fact, never know.

You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling

Bring back that lovin’ feeling now it’s gone, gone, gone….

One of the worst things about being a writer with a very vivid imagination is that I often think I’ve written more of a short story than I have, and inevitably am a little shocked when I open the most recent draft of the story and what I remember writing isn’t there…and then it hits me that I either thought the story through until that point, or I scribbled ideas for it in my journal…so that gradually morphed into oh I never did write that scene/story/ending. I then sigh in disgust at past Greg for not actually writing it into the story itself and then try to remember what I can of it as I try transcribing it. The loss of my short term memory also plays a relatively large role in this madness, too. Can you guess why I am mentioning that this morning? Yep, this was the case when I looked up two short stories to add to my collection; I was trying to decide which stories I have unfinished that just needed a revision and I thought I was there with several more stories than I clearly was when I looked at them last night.

One of the ghastly things for me about being a writer is thinking I’ve written something when I actually haven’t. I was tired yesterday when I got home from work; I hit the wall at some point in the afternoon, so I succumbed to Sparky’s demands and let him cuddle with me in the easy chair when I got home from work. Paul worked at home yesterday, so when he came down we watch John Oliver and then finished Dirty Pop, the Lou Pearlman documentary. It did feel weird not having the Olympics to watch, but this is that fallow two weeks or so between the Olympics and college football getting started. Has the NFL preseason started? I am terrible about that, but since I no longer (refuse to) pay for the Times-Picayune (a ringing endorsement for the red candidate from their editorial board was the final nail in that coffin once and for all) it’s harder to remember about the Saints. I shouldn’t be surprised; the billionaire who bought the paper also is a dyed-in-the-wool Republican who ran for governor back in the day. Maybe I am wrong, but I don’t remember the paper being slanted so heavily to the right back in the day. Anyway, there’s certainly no excuse for me to not get a lot done this weekend other than laziness….and laziness isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either; I think it’s your body telling your mind to rest. I also have a four day weekend this weekend for my birthday, so that should be really nice. I suppose I should make a to-do list of projects to work on for those four day–definitely taking books to the library sale will be number one on the list.

I did sleep really well and got up pretty easily this morning. I’m still in that I could fall asleep again if I went back to bed stage, but the body is starting to awaken and my mind is feeling sharp. I hope I don’t get tired this afternoon the way I did yesterday, but I don’t really have any control over that. It didn’t, in fact, rain yesterday as was promised; it’s possible again today as well and we’re hitting a heat index of 112. Yay. It didn’t seem so bad yesterday as I drove home, picking up the mail on the way. I’m still listening to the podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno, which makes me laugh multiple times in the car; it’s attempt at being sexy and provocative laughably bad, and their reactions to Belinda Blinked are hilarious. There’s many seasons of this, so I should be set for listening in the car for quite some time. I just haven’t been in the mood to listen to music lately while driving, which is unusual. I’m just tired of all my playlists and albums on Spotify, and I’m so disconnected from what is popular music that I have no idea what everyone is listening to these days, and odds are I wouldn’t care for it if I did. (The first time I heard something popular and thought what the fuck is wrong with kids today was when I was in my thirties…so yes, I’ve been a cranky old man shaking his fists at the clouds for thirty years)

One of the things I have been doing in the evenings is paging through a book I read several years ago called Weimar Culture: The Outside as Insider by Peter Gay (I’ve had Weimar Germany on my mind since about 2015 or so) and it got me to start thinking about my work as art, and its place in the overall world of queer art and literature. I don’t think students of queer literature in the future will be reading and/or studying any of my work, by any means; I think the only thing I have going for me is being prolific and producing a lot of work. I think there are many queer crime writers whose work would be seen as more influential and of more literary and artistic value than mine–Michael Nava, J. M. Redmann, Ellen Hart, Kelly J. Ford, Lev Rosen, Christa Faust, Margot Douahy and John Copenhaver, just off the top of my head, are far more likely to make up the reading list for a Queer Crime Lit class. We really do have some amazing queer crime writers out there currently and some pretty amazing ones in the past. I was thinking about writing about queer crime and its giants, but as a queer crime writer myself the possibilities for giving offense are simply too great for me to even attempt such a thing. I also haven’t read every queer or queer-oriented crime novel, either, so it would hardly be definitive, like Michael Bronski’s Pulp Friction. Besides, I’m hardly an academic; that kind of writing isn’t really my style. I admire it, wish it was a voice and style I could slip into comfortably, but it’s really not.

I would, at some point, like to engage in scholarship. Maybe after I retire. Maybe I could take an on-line class on literature and/or one on writing essays. So many potentialities, so many possibilities…kind of nice.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader and one never knows; I may be back later.