Saturday in the Lost Apartment, although I suppose it’s Championship Saturday. I’ll have the games on for background noise but I don’t care about their outcomes. If they’re good games, I’ll watch; if not, I can just check in periodically while I do other things. I still need to put things away from yesterday’s Costco run, and some other touching up around here today, while organizing and pulling all my notes together for my new project, which I intend to commit to entirely tomorrow morning once I rise. Sparky let me sleep late this morning like the little darling he is, even cuddling with me the last few hours before I got up. I feel good and rested this morning. Paul is seeing his trainer today, and will inevitably (like always) spend a few more hours at the gym on the bike. I am looking to get back to the gym myself, probably after Mardi Gras. I feel terrific. My doctor agreed with me that I probably had been experiencing the colitis for several years before it finally got so bad this past spring, and was why I experienced so much fatigue. There’s also a possibility that I have “pernicious anemia” (I love the name. Pernicious–such a fun word!), an opportunistic autoimmune situation that sometimes tags along with colitis and causes Vitamin B-12 deficiency…which can affect memory and fatigue, and would require me to get a monthly shot. Yay.
I also have to get labs drawn again this coming Friday–the same day my next Skyrizi injection arrives in the mail.
We started watching Heated Rivalry last night, and I will have thoughts on it once we’ve finished. (And…it’s another one of those newsletter essays that will play into my series about masculinity.) I also caught up on the news last night after unloading the car and heating a pizza up for dinner. I am debating whether or not to watch The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, since I detest most of the cast and don’t enjoy watching it anymore. It’s not even a fun hate-watch anymore. I also started my reread of The Postman Always Rings Twice, which is so marvelous and nasty and, above all else, working class, that I see why it bothered people so much when it was originally published in the 1930s. It’s also hella racist, which I didn’t remember–which also explains the casting of Lana Turner in the film; no one would ever mistake her for Hispanic/Latino like Cora in the book. I am also very glad that I am rereading it, because it has that edge of nastiness that noir needs, and isn’t currently present in the first three chapters of Chlorine, and while roaming the aisles at Costco yesterday I was thinking about how to rewrite it. My main character is not a hero, and I have to remember that why I write him. That’s a significant mind shift for me when I write, really.
In football news, Tulane won their conference championship last night and are going to the play-offs for the first time in school history, but reports they were hiring LSU’s Brian Baker proved untrue as it was announced Baker would be staying on in Baton Rouge. LSU football is all over the news still down here, indicating a statewide level of excitement for the new coach that wasn’t there for Brian Kelly, ever, other than after that overtime win over Alabama his first year…but that excitement died down very quickly. Ironic that his best season was his first, rebuilding year, isn’t it? I think part of the excitement is joy at being rid of Kelly, frankly. I was willing to give him a chance, but he never really delivered.
At least he broke the streak of losing season openers that has plagued the Tigers this entire decade, and he did beat Alabama in a thriller in 2022. And he signed Jayden Daniels. Three good things out of almost four seasons.
And on that note, I am heading to my chair to read some more of Postman before getting cleaned up and getting to work on the apartment. I am also going to make chicken chili today, and some chicken salad for Paul. A very big day for me! It’s also gray and chilly and supposed to rain all day, too–an excellent day for reading under a blanket with the television on. I may watch an episode of The American Revolution, which I am really enjoying; it’s so nice to see our history without all the myths and legends that sprang up about it after the second world war.
So have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in on you again tomorrow morning, deal?
Thursday last morning in the office this week blog. I get to go in a little later because I have to stay until five tonight; and of course tomorrow morning I have PT at the ungodly hour of seven a.m. Gah. But it’s okay, really. I slept super well last night–probably the best night’s sleep of the week–and I finally got my keyboard for the iPad yesterday: huzzah! It works beautifully, too…which is the last excuse I had for not getting any writing done (or as much as I would like). Now I have a functional laptop and a functional iPad for writing anywhere in the house, which is kind of fun. I can get my iPad in the morning and write in bed if I want, or I can take the laptop up there, or…so many plethoras of options, and NO MORE EXCUSES.
Oh, I’ll still make excuses, of course, to get out of doing the day’s writing. And I did do some yesterday–I wrote about seven hundred or so words on “Passenger to Franklin” (an Agatha Christie title homage that really pleases me far more than it probably should)–but very little of anything else other than watching Part II of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reunion (Kyle Richards remains a disgusting piece of shit bitch who doesn’t need to be on my television screen anymore). I then spent the rest of the evening watching the news (or clips from the news) and despairing further about the future of the country and grateful again that I am old. It’s about the only benefit to being old, really, and not having children: the future isn’t really my problem, but at the same time, I also don’t want the adults of the future to have to deal with a destroyed and/or increasingly hostile and damaged planet, either, because I am not a monster. Sometimes I think I worry about the future more than people who actually do have kids, or are young.
I watched a really interesting conversation between Rachel Maddow and Nicolle Wallace last night–and they were both right: the Republican Party of today wants to eliminate our democracy and set up an authoritarian state where they are always in charge and they can get rid of everyone they don’t like. Sound familiar? See Berlin, 1933. It’s scary to contemplate, and even scarier to realize The Handmaid’s Tale was actually very prescient. I became worried about authoritarianism coming to the US during the Reagan years and what followed, when the Republican party became convinced that they had a divine right and mandate to always be in power. As I watched people get subsumed by Fox Propaganda in the 1990s (when the character assassination of Hilary Clinton truly began), I saw it for what it was: definitely not a news organization, and it’s partisan nature had everything to do with the rollback on rules about what is and isn’t news…during the Reagan administration. It’s astonishing how little people think about the recent past, or even try to put the present in the context of the recent past.
Let alone thinking about the older history, which no one knows1. Then again, I am from a part of the country that proudly claims hatred and bigotry as their heritage, so maybe knowing history might not help as much as I would like to believe.
Heavy heaving sigh.
Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.
I’m doing a panel for a Sisters in Crime chapter on-line event this weekend, do tune in to any or all of the antics this weekend. It’s called Murderous March, and it’s being put on by the Upper Hudson Sisters chapter, and you can register to view the panels here. My panel is at 2:30 eastern, it’s called “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night,” and is being moderated by the wonderful Richie Narvaez. My co-panelists are the amazing Carol Pouliot, Edwin Hill, Tina Bellegarde, and M. E. Browning. It should be a pretty good time, I think.
And on that note, I think I’ll head into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I’ll probably be back later.
Thursday and the last day in the office for the week. I am very tired this morning. I slept well but could easily sleep for another few hours or so (interesting that I went from almost non-stop anxiety about insomnia to anxiety about sleeping too much, isn’t it?), but as I slowly and groggily get going this morning, the coffee is definitely hitting the way it is supposed to. Tomorrow morning I have a doctor’s appointment and PT, as well as whatever errands I can get run before the parades start tomorrow night. Gah. I can’t believe it is already parade season, and I didn’t get nearly as much done as I would have liked in the meantime. I did work some more on the story yesterday night after I got home from work and the errands (I picked up the mail) and settled in for a relaxing evening.
For some reason I watched the season premiere of Vanderpump Rules, which is now picking up with the fallout from last season’s “Scandoval,” and I don’t know about continuing to watch. I had stopped watching the show years ago–years before Stassi and Kristen were fired for being racists, and long before Jax met and married that bizarre woman. I came back briefly for the scandal, and watching the aftermath I am just not feeling it, and probably won’t watch more. I do sometimes question my fandom of these reality shows, which generally feature terrible people being terrible, all for the sake of entertainment. I had never really watched The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City before–I had intended to, but then Jen Shah was arrested for massive scale fraud and remained on the show, and that was a bit too much for me (likewise, I stopped watching New Jersey when the Giudices went to jail, and I remain conflicted about Beverly Hills with fraud-adjacent Erica Girardi unapologetically remaing as a member of the cast and even getting, apparently, a redemption arc this season; which I vehemently oppose); I did start watching this most recent season at the urging of friends and yes, I was missing reality drama by not watching; I doubt that I will go back and watch the old seasons, which is something I never really do; why go back and watch old drama that doesn’t matter anymore? Reality shows like these are really like the old prime-time soaps; you can start watching at any time and just jump into the show without having to go back and watch the back stories–which you could never do with the daytime soaps but you could with the night-time.
Well, what do you know? I never finished this before leaving the house this morning so I find myself trying to finish this over my lunch break–and even my lunch is later today than usual, so yeah–been a day. But I feel good, tomorrow morning I have appointments and PT and so forth; before coming home to do work-at-home duties for the rest of the day. I’ve also kind of lost the train of thought I was riffing on before leaving the house this morning, and checking out what I’ve already written here didn’t return me to that particular mindset, so who knows where this is going to wind up going? I hope I have the energy after making groceries on the way home from work today to finish working on my story so I don’t have to worry about that over the weekend. I don’t know how my parade attendance will go this weekend; Paul’s got a lot of work to do and going out there by myself–which I can handle, and have done before–just isn’t as much fun as when I am with Paul, even if we barely speak while we’re out there. And I am not sure how much my stamina is going to hold up, either. We shall see, I suppose.
It’s also supposed to rain all day Saturday and Sunday, which will put a damper on the weekend anyway.
I did also watch the season finale of Percy Jackson and the Olympians last night, and I have to say I really do enjoy the series much more than I did the films. I did read the books a very long time ago–Rick Riordan’s series are the best fantasy novels for kids bar none, fuck all the way off, TERF Queen–so I don’t remember a lot of it, but I thought the series really adapted the books well, and I also appreciated that the cast went with kids rather than teens (or actors in their twenties acting as teens); which made the story make a lot more sense than it would with them in their mid-to-late teens. It’s also such a great concept; I really envy Riordan that idea, seriously. I used to want to do something similar–I still want to write a young adult novel set during the Trojan War–and I’ve had other ideas involving mythology and gods and goddesses, but nothing has ever come to fruition. The best idea I had I am not sure is usable, honestly, but every so often I remember it and think oh, if only…
Ah, well. As it is, I won’t have time to write everything I want to before I die anyway, so there are some things I will never get around to–and as long as it’s taking me to write this damned short story, I may not even wind up writing the things I do think I’ll have the time to get to, of course.
And on that note, I am going to bring this to a close. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later. You never know, and sorry for being so late today.
It’s Thursday morning and it’s not as cold as it’s been; it’s barely below fifty degrees, which feels like a heat wave after the last few days. I didn’t sleep deeply last night, but I do feel rested today. I suspect I will hit a wall this afternoon and crash really hard, too. I have to get up early tomorrow for PT before my work-at-home duties, and after that I am hoping to dive headfirst into some writing. Parades are literally around the corner, and that’s going to be ridiculously stressful for me…although it may be interesting to see how my new meds affect parade stress. This weekend is more of the Bold Strokes Book-a-thon, which means I won’t have as much free time as I ordinarily would, either. But I’ve been feeling very clear-headed these days, which is lovely after all that time with my brain clouded and clenched into a fist of anxiety. I’m still not as much on the writing horse as I want to be and need to be, but I am hopeful this weekend I’ll kick back into gear.
I was tired after I made groceries in the cold after work yesterday, so once again spent most of the evening ensconced in my chair with Sparky sprawled across my lap. I watched this week’s dose of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, which was one of their most entertaining episodes in a very long time, and then Paul came down and we watched an episode of Lupin, which I am really enjoying, and now I kind of want to read about Arsené Lupin, too. Le sigh. So much to read and so little time.
Remember yesterday when I talked about how Tuesday I had kind of spiraled, despite the new medications? I just figured that sometimes it just might not be strong enough to do the trick or something. Anyway, so yesterday morning I didn’t have time to take my daily morning meds so I put them in a little plastic container and brought them to work with me. Around noon I went into my backpack and saw the little plastic container, and thought oh, I forgot to take them I’ll do that now but just as I swallowed them I saw another plastic container on my desk and realized I had taken the pills for the day already, but clearly had forgotten them in my bag on Tuesday…and it all clicked into place. So yes, I took a double dose of everything yesterday and I was in a great mood by the time I left the office to make groceries in Mid-city. But by the time I got home and unloaded the car and put everything away while also being out in the cold? Ugh, exhausting. I did finish folding a load of laundry and started doing another load I’ll have to finish tonight–along with the dishes; I want to clean the kitchen as much as possible so I don’t have to do any of it tomorrow or over the weekend. I also will have to swing by the postal service on the way home tonight, but that’s my only errand so I should be home relatively early and thus able to get those other chores done, possibly some reading, and even some writing in addition to quality kitty time. I’ve become quite attached to Sparky since he came home with us a few months ago. My arms and legs and chest and back are covered in scabs thanks to his Freddy Kruger-like claws, but that’s fine. I used to call Skittle Satan’s Kitty for much the same reason. I do love that he likes to sit on my shoulders, which is very cute. It’s also kind of fun to wonder what kind of havoc he hath wrought in the apartment every day when I come home–and it’s getting better every day. I think maybe that has more to do with me being better about leaving things out on counters and surfaces instead of him learning anything–he really doesn’t–but I’ll take it. The apartment is also slowly starting to come back together, too.
Last year was a bit of a whirlwind. Lots of ups and downs and a lot of brain frying, to be completely honest. It’s difficult sometimes to remember when you’re going through tough times that–hard as it is to see while you’re dealing with it–that eventually you’ll see what you learned from it. Sometimes I do need to be hit in the head with a sledgehammer, but eventually I do see it. What does 2024 hold in store for me? I don’t know. I don’t even want to hazard a guess!
And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I’ll see you again later.
Yesterday afternoon’s doctor visit went fairly well, all thing considered–I certainly feel much better after that visit than I ever felt after visiting my former primary care physician, who should lose his license (more on that later at another time, but I will share that story at some point not to shame my former physician but as an example of precisely why we have to advocate for ourselves with medical professionals)–and I have to say I am in a good place about everything medical this morning. I don’t have gout (yay!), but rather have psoriatic arthritis in my toe, which isn’t great–but it’s not so painful that I need medication for it. I just know that the toe joint hurts whenever I bend it. Better that than gout, right? And my blood sugar is high, but not quite pre-diabetic, so I do need to cut back on rich and fattening foods (which I should do anyway) and increase my exercise (well, once the arm is healed I will be all over that, thank you very much). On Halloween I have an early fitting at the dentist’s–meaning the day when the soft food diet becomes history and a bitter memory is nigh, and eventually the surgery will be here and then it’ll be recovery time.
Nothing like spending the holidays recovering from a surgery.
I spent some more time with The Dead Zone last night, and got through the part where Johnny’s psychic gift is actually exposed to the world at last, even as he is still recovering and going through horribly expensive surgeries (King was also ahead of the curve in that he was writing about how medical bills can bankrupt people long before it was in the public discourse). This was when he touched his physical therapist and saw that her house was on fire; it was witnessed by several people at the hospital and of course, someone leaks it to the press and reporters descend on his hospital. I am really enjoying this book this time around–I always do–but the days when I could just pick up an old favorite and revisit it are in the past; now I always think about the others in the piles and on the bookshelves that I’ve not gotten to quite yet. I also saw yesterday that rereading books was yet another example of anxiety functioning; drawing comfort from the familiar–you know how the book is going to end already, so the anxiety that comes from not knowing how it will end–which makes me read faster and unable to put a book down–is absent and you can just enjoy it. This is precisely why Paul and I used to always rewatch the rebroadcast of LSU football games on Sunday–so we could actually watch the game without the stress of worrying about the outcome; and there were often things we’d missed in the heat of the moment.
I also watched another episode of Moonlighting, which I am enjoying very much the second time around. It’s held up pretty well, outside of the occasional misogyny; and there’s a lot less of that than you’d think, given it was the 1980’s and misogyny was still rampant everywhere (not that it’s ever stopped, but shockingly things are better now than they were forty years ago). The chemistry between young Bruce Willis and a gorgeous Cybill Shepherd was off the charts–even if her character was a bit over-the-top angry sometimes; it’s easy to see why Addison was a fan favorite, even though she came into the show as the bigger name and no one knew who Willis was. But the show was going for the rapid-fire dialogue of the great screwball romantic comedies of classic Hollywood–His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby, My Man Godfrey–that I absolutely have always loved.
Paul got home after I went to bed, and I was so dead to the world I couldn’t tell you when that was or what time, which is my way of saying I slept super well last night. We have a relatively light schedule at the office today so I should be able to catch up on all my work. Tomorrow I have an appointment at the pain management clinic–more surgery prep–but it’s also my work-at-home day, which means I made it through the week and to the weekend again. There’s also not an LSU game this weekend (it’s the pre-Alabama bye week) and I also looked at what games there are this weekend and yeah–nothing I particularly want to watch, so I should be productive this weekend, even if that means just reading.
I also watched the season premiere of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and doing some more thinking about my reality television viewing and why I am drawn to these shows about horrible people behaving badly. They used to be just a pleasurable, turn my mind off kind of entertainment; much as soaps used to be (and I watched plenty of those back in the day, which is a topic for another time as well) but something’s changed in the last few years, even before the pandemic, really; my mentality about these kinds of people has shifted in some ways that I can’t quite put my finger on. I mean, I know they’ve always been terrible people–even the ones I liked–but I guess before I was able to just see them being horrible to each other and it was entertaining in a weird, performative way–like how you can’t help but look at a car crash when you pass one. The 2016 election and all that followed in its wake made me realize that these are terrible people and that probably spills over into other parts of their lives as well–including things like politics and social justice.
And do I really want to spent my off-time encouraging and feeding into the machine that makes these terrible people famous? And what does it say about me that I watch these shows so I can sit in judgment on them and their behavior and feel morally superior to them? It’s one thing when they’re fictional characters designed specifically to prey on your emotions–judging Monica Quartermaine on General Hospital for bad choices is one thing because she’s fictional. Her trials and tribulations are scripted for maximum drama, nor do they matter outside of the context of the program…it’s not real. It’s an entirely different thing to watch Real Housewives of BeverlyHills and judge Erica Girardi (which I’ve done plenty of, believe you me) when her life and behavior actually have real life consequences. She’s a real person, and what we watch on television is some of her reality but not all of it; we only see what the producers want us to see as they shape her narrative and influence how she is viewed. “Blaming the edit” has become widely mocked–you can’t get a bad edit, really, if you haven’t said or done something that can be used to make you look bad, but the reality is anyone can cherry-pick anything to make someone look bad–Fox, Newsmax, and OANN made a fortune doing that very thing. Don’t get me wrong; I have judged her many times and found her wanting, but at the same time…there is that element of well, she put herself out there to be criticized and judged, but does that make it okay? Does she deserve it?
So sometimes, even as I judge and roll my eyes, I do feel a bit squicky about watching. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the lie that the shows are real. They remind me of professional wrestling before Vince McMahon outed the sport as entertainment with predetermined results (to avoid the federal regulations of actual competitive sport and escape culpability for steroid abuse); fans swore it was absolutely 100% real, when those who weren’t fans could clearly see it was not.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. May your Thursday be as marvelous as you are, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.
Pay the Bills Wednesday has rolled around again; and this is my first paycheck with my new raise, which is super cool. I guess we’ll soon see how much of a difference the raise will make, won’t we? And–a pretty nice one, to be honest. I paid all the bills already this morning and have a nice tidy sum left over. And I have more bills this time that I ordinarily would, so it’s going to be interesting. I also accidentally paid a bill that isn’t due until we get paid again–which puts me ahead for next time, too.
I slept decently last night, but something I suspected was going on with me turned out to be correct: I am not properly hydrated. I had to have blood drawn yesterday for my PrEP labs, and my blood was too thick. Thick blood which doesn’t want to come out into the tube means over-dehydration. I drank some glasses of water and we tried again hours later–to better success–but between the blood sugar ups and downs and now this it’s not any wonder I’ve been feeling tired and a definitive lack of energy lately. I suppose the morning coffee–caffeine is also dehydrating–doesn’t help much in that regard either. I need to stop and get Gatorade on the way home from the office tonight.
I wrote a chapter of the book last night–well, almost. It’s not quite finished, but I am pleased to admit that it is just as terrible as all the others I’ve done thus far. So hurray for consistency! But the story is starting to take shape, as I had hoped it would as I wrote, and as I move on (while still writing crap) I am revising and reconfiguring the opening of the book and so forth; editing in my head (which is worrisome since I no longer have any sort of memory to rely upon) as I go. I think I am going to do a big push this weekend and while Paul is gone to try to get as much of this finished as I can.
Sorry to be so brief today! But I don’t really have a whole lot to say today, which is an unusual occurrence for one Gregalicious, is it not? Somehow I am managing to get caught up on things, which is always a lovely and a good thing. Sometimes it feels like I am forever Sisyphus, pushing that heavy stone up the side of a mountain, only to have it come tumbling back down to the valley below once I manage to finally get up there. Some days I can look at those massive to-do lists and think to myself yes let’s do this and roll up my sleeves to dive in headfirst; other days I look at them and just want to curl up into a ball and hide from the rest of the world. But that doesn’t get things done, and doesn’t help with anything, either. On the way home tonight I am going to run a couple of errands, and then I am going to just curl up in my easy chair and read The Haunting of Hill House until it’s time for (what will inevitably be disappointing) third episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reunion, which I will need to digest fully before posting about.
So I am heading into the spice mines for now. Have a great Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.
I am, and can be, remarkably naïve when it comes to some things. I literally will believe almost everything I am told because my default is never to assume someone is lying (unless they’ve proven themselves to be a liar before), so I actually believed, all those years I was watching The Real World, that the show was “unscripted” and the cast had cameras and microphones on them 24/7.
Then The Real World came to New Orleans–to my neighborhood, in fact–and the “gay one” got a job bar-backing at Oz (one of my favorite gay bars; and autocorrect tried to turn that into “barebacking”, which is an entirely different thing), and it wasn’t long before I realized that The Real World wasn’t, actually, “real.” I saw them any number of times walking from one destination to another to film, the camera crews not filming and just walking behind the cast; I actually watched them set up a scene in Oz and go through several takes, and so yeah, the luster and magic was gone for me. I think I may have watched another season or two after New Orleans, but reality television had also changed dramatically from when the first season of that show aired (and yes, I am aware that PBS’ An American Family was the first real reality-type show) and by the time I stopped watching that it wasn’t about kids learning to get along and learning from each other’s differences as it was about getting wasted, hooking up, and fighting.
You know, the formula Bravo quickly adapted to in Season Two of The Real Housewives of Orange County.
Viewers want conflict.
I never watched the Real Housewives shows, but usually on Sundays when it wasn’t football season Paul would come downstairs and fall asleep on the couch while I would either read or edit in my easy chair. I’d turn on the television for background noise, and it was just easiest to always park the channel on Bravo because they’d marathon something–originally Law & Order, then The West Wing or Inside the Actor’s Studio, which were fun for an occasional distraction but not enough of one to take my interest away from what I was doing. But Bravo changed, and those marathons eventually became one of the Real Housewives shows. I winced a bit, but again, background noise I didn’t need to pay attention to–it all seemed so exploitative and, well, awful–that I couldn’t see myself ever watching regularly. So I began to slowly recognize who they were–all the gossip site pop-ups and so forth on social media also covered them extensively–and even know something about them. I didn’t want to ever become a regular viewer, didn’t think I ever would.
And yet…
I originally tuned into TheReal Housewives of Beverly Hills to see Kim Richards, whom I remembered as a child star when I was a kid–from Nanny and the Professor to Escape to Witch Mountain to Tuff Turf–and was interested to see how she turned out, what happened to her…and just like a soap opera back in the day, I was soon tuning in every week. Some other friends turned out to be big fans of both Orange County and New York, so I started watching New York so we could talk about it (my antipathy to Orange County would be a subject for another essay at some other point), and there was no turning back after that.
I still primarily only watch New York and Beverly Hills with any regularity (although Atlanta is always a favorite), and there have been times when I’ve thrown up my hands in disgust with what was actually going on with the season and stopped watching (I stopped watching Beverly Hills during the “let’s out Denise Richards as bi!” bullshit, for example, and never did finish the season); but I am still absolutely fascinated by the concept behind these shows. Is any of it for real? How much is set up and scripted? It becomes very easy to get sucked into the shows–they are highly addictive; they remind me a lot of soaps as they are very high on petty drama and melodrama, feuds and fights and arguments–and how much of what we see is actually not audience manipulation on the part of production, the network, and the editors. (Women often claim to have “gotten a bad edit”–which always makes me think about The Real World–that show really started everything) I find myself getting emotionally sucked into the petty dramas too–which often spill out into the social media world and the endless blogs that dedicate themselves to reporting on these shows–and there are times when I think, well done, production! I would have never guessed you could ever show me a side of this horrible woman that would make me sympathetic to her.
Because while the women may manipulate and scheme and plan and script things, the primary people being manipulated by production are the audience and the line between reality and “reality” often gets so blurred that it’s hard to tell what is real and what isn’t.
Take, for example, this current rollercoaster of a season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Before the season started airing there was gossip flying around the Internet about their Aspen trip and a meltdown by a supporting cast member in her second year officially on the show–Kathy Hilton, older sister of OG cast member Kyle Richards–that supposedly went “really dark”…only for the season to start airing and the behavior of other members of the cast (Lisa Rinna, Diana Jenkins, Erica Girardi) being far worse than any of the rumors floated about Kathy’s “meltdown.”
Again, a subject for another time, perhaps once the reunion episodes have aired.
Anyway, I had always thought that a Real Housewives type show, set and filmed in New Orleans, would make the excellent backdrop for a crime story, particularly because of those blurred lines between reality and “reality”…so I used it for one of those e-novellas back in the day. After they were taken off the market, I kept thinking about how I wasted the background of a reality show on a story no one can access anymore and so that original story eventually morphed into Scotty VIII, Royal Street Reveillon.
I fished the last olive out of my almost empty glass and popped it into my mouth. I glanced at my watch as I chewed it, and moaned after swallowing. “There’s nothing like a good martini,” I said, glancing around the bar and getting our server’s attention.
“Do we have time for another?” My nephew Taylor finished the rest of his sazerac and looked at me hopefully.
“I take it you liked it.” I replied, not even trying to hide my smile. “But no time for another unless we want to be late.”
This was Taylor’s first time at the Sazerac Bar. He’d turned twenty-one just a few weeks before Thanksgiving, and since we were going to a party at the Joy Theater, I thought I’d treat him to a sazerac in the bar where they were invented. I personally don’t care for the drink—give me gin or vodka any day of the week—but everyone in New Orleans is required to try a sazerac at least once.
And now I could rest easy, having done not only my civic duty but treated Taylor to a New Orleans rite of passage.
I’d also wanted him to see the Roosevelt Hotel’s Christmas decorations. The Roosevelt was one of the grand old hotels of the city, and their lobby decorations are truly spectacular. Since we were going to a party at the Joy Theater—a mere block or so from the hotel, I thought, why not kill two birds with one stone? This was Taylor’s second Christmas with us, and I wanted to do it right. We’d already done Celebration in the Oaks at City Park, and I’d loved seeing the beautifully decorated ancient live oak trees through a newbie’s eyes.
I know it’s corny, but I love Christmas.
I love everything about it. I love decorating my apartment. I love picking out presents that are one hundred percent perfect for the person and carefully wrapping it up in beautiful paper, topped with a bow and twining ribbons around the box. I love picking out a tree, and the wonderful smell of pine that permeates everything inside once it’s delivered. I love getting the boxes of ornaments down from the storage closet and adorning the branches with them. I love tinsel and opening a new box of icicles for the branches. I love Christmas cookies and cakes and pies and turkey and celebrating and spending time with people I love.
I even love carols—although I do think that September is a bit early to start playing them unless the intent is to drive people to homicide by December.
While I kept the original backstories of the Grande Dames of New Orleans cast as I had in the original, I changed a lot because I didn’t want those few who had read the original to know the ending. I also wanted to do some fun things with the story, adding in another murder that was completely unconnected to the primary story as well as yet another deep personal dilemma for Scotty that doesn’t get resolved in this story, and trying to keep track of all the crazy things I had going on–as well as the complicated and complex backstories and threads of different subplots; I added another murder for the main story and I wanted to make it a bit more topical, so I added an element of “me too” to the story (in all honesty as I write the current one I wish I hadn’t done this because I can’t just drop it, either, like it never happened), and I found myself having fun with it. This was by far the most complicated and layered Scotty book since probably Mardi Gras Mambo, and this was one I felt very contented about when I turned it into the publisher. Even revisiting it now, as part of the prep for the current one, I kind of am proud of myself for it.
I also set it during Christmas season in New Orleans because I love New Orleans at Christmas-time. It’s one of the few times of the year where I don’t mind that it gets dark so fucking early–because New Orleans has put on her Christmas face and it’s absolutely delightful. One of the things I love most about this crazy city is how everyone here takes decorating so seriously–so seriously they decorate their houses and windows for everything. Jackson Square is stunning with the big red bows tied on the lampposts guarding the gates, as you can see in the gorgeous cover my publisher gave my book (and perhaps the thing about it that make me happiest the most is that one of the lamp’s light is out–just like it would be in real life) and the lights and…sighs happily.
I did think, for a time, about ending the series with this one, but I left the personal story hanging yet again which meant there would be another one–and I honestly don’t know what happened that it took me so long to get around to writing another one, but here we are.
Look at me, up and awake before seven in the morning on a Sunday! Who would have ever thought that would happen? I feel surprisingly awake and alert and rested this morning, given the early hour and all, but that’s okay. When you’re awake, you’re awake–so I figured I might as well get up and get a jump on the day. I will be going deep into the edits of A Streetcar Named Murder today. I ran the errands I needed to run yesterday, got some organizing and cleaning done around the house, and started the deep dive into the edits yesterday–most of the day was spent planning and figuring out things in the book that I didn’t have time to figure out when I was actually writing it (mistake mistake mistake; how do pantsers do this all the time?) and with my lesson firmly learned, am ready to get cracking on fixing the errors here and clearing up and tightening up the story. I want to be finished with it all before I leave on Thursday, because it will be very hard for me to finish it while I am in Kentucky. (And I’d rather spend whatever time I have free while I’m up there reading, frankly.) I’m getting a bit excited about the trip, if I may be so bold as to say so, which is a good thing; right now I am not even dreading all those hours in the car–I have Carol Goodman and Ruth Ware novels to listen to in the car–and while I do have to go into the office tomorrow, I work at home on Tuesday this week and can packed and ready to go that day so Thursday morning I can get up, have some coffee, and head out on the highway early.
There’s also some straightening and organizing I need to get done this morning–looking around the workspace is making me shudder right now–but it’s nice to feel rested and ready to go, honestly. I wonder what was so different about last night that I slept so much better? I’m not even going to check the Fitbit because I don’t necessarily trust its judgement and evaluation of my sleep, to be honest. I mean, it’s interesting to see how I feel vs. how it thinks I slept–but there are times when I wake up and feel rested and great but I supposedly slept poorly; and then mornings when I get up and feel groggy and tired and exhausted, it claims that I slept very well. I don’t know if I can trust it, and frankly, if it wasn’t part of the complicated system of trying to get cheaper health insurance through my job, I sure as hell wouldn’t wear it. Paul often buys me really nice watches as gifts and I never wear them–mainly because I am clumsy as fuck and inevitably break things that are nice–but the Fitbit…like I said, there’s this really complicated system of scoring points through a program that helps reduce the cost of my health insurance. I’m not entirely sure I understand it–I never really grasped it when it was explained eight or nine years ago–but I know I score points, earn a medal status (bronze, silver, gold) and if I get to silver, I don’t have any “out of paycheck” contributions to my health insurance, and registering my daily steps and how well I slept through the Fitbit scores fifty points per day. (The points also can be cashed in for gift cards; I always get Amazon to buy books, of course. Don’t @ me; the other options don’t really work for me.)
It looks to be a nice day outside my windows this morning, although it’s undoubtedly already incredibly hot outside. I’m hoping to manage to not go out into it much today–maybe taking out the trash or something–and I may be meeting a friend who’s in town for drinks later this evening (not too late, since I have to get up early in the morning), but other than that, I mostly plan to sit here at this desk and edit and revise and rewrite today. I also don’t know how long it’s going to take me to get this finished; I am hoping by focusing and working really hard and not allowing myself to get distracted I can power through and get this back to my publisher before I leave on Thursday.
One can always hope and dream at any rate.
We watched Hacks last night, and the most recent episode of The Offer, although I’m not really sure why we continue to watch the latter. I noticed last night that there are any number of shows we’re in the middle of (Severance, Pieces of Her, Slow Horses) that we forgot we were watching and thus will need to pick up again–it wasn’t that we weren’t enjoying them, but rather that we inevitably ended up having our viewing disrupted by something for several days and when we had time to go back and get caught up on things, we forgot we were watching them (we also never finished Physical either). It is interesting–I thought about this while watching The Offer last night–how many shows we’ve seen lately that were set in the 1970’s (Minx, Candy, The Offer) as well as what a great job they are doing depicting the era. I remember saying during one episode of Candy, “living this kind of life was my biggest nightmare when I was a kid, and they are doing a great job of showing how bleak and ugly and dull suburban life was back then.”
I also have started up again with The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I’d stopped watching last season because I quickly grew tired of the Erika Jayne/Erica Girardi mess–I’d never particularly liked her very much, but at least she was somewhat entertaining–but given that the great wealth she has flaunted ever since she joined the cast was essentially stolen from settlements for victims of great and horrific tragedies and she was completely unrepentant and tried to play like she was the real victim, I no longer felt any desire to watch a sociopathic narcissist who has knowingly or unknowingly participated in embezzlement, fraud and God knows what else. I’d reached a point where I kept thinking someone just needs to slap the shit out of that fucking crooked bitch and felt that giving them eyeballs and a rating point on Hulu was endorsing the fact that Bravo was enabling her and giving her a platform to try to redeem herself in the public eye, which was shitty. Sure, innocent before proven guilty and all that–but The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills isn’t a court of law; and the fact they milked her potential criminality for ratings was disgusting and craven. I don’t love to hate her, I just fucking hate her. And the rest of the cast–outside the newer ones–are equally garbage. I stopped watching The Real Housewives of New York during its most recent season because I couldn’t watch the blatant racism being offered up as “entertainment.” Fuck you, Bravo, and fuck you, Andy Cohen. The Real Housewives shows have become a microcosm of everything that is wrong with American society and culture: there’s no accountability for anything. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: people are rewarded for being horrible.
It also makes me feel like I’ve always been incredibly naïve about the world, believing that being a good person means you’ll be rewarded and bad people will be punished for their wrong-doing, when the harsh reality is quite the opposite. I feel like I’ve been gaslit most of my life, frankly.
Which, of course, always comes back to me being a crime writer. I want to see justice being done. I want to see evil-doers punished and good people rewarded for their goodness. I want to write about a world where murderers and criminals are caught and punished, their victims avenged; not the real world where the wealthy can hire great lawyers and outspend the prosecution to get off, while so many innocent people who cannot afford great lawyers are convicted or talked into taking plea bargains every day and doing time while having committed no crime other than not being able to afford a great lawyer. (I’ve always wanted to write about a public defender–but who wants to read a book where the public defender loses every case?)
Heavy heaving sigh. And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader–I’ll check in with you again tomorrow morning.
Yesterday was…not a great day, really. I was physically tired, but not mentally tired, if that makes sense? The problem is that the physical tired makes it hard for the not-tired brain to focus on anything, and I get kind of punchy, which isn’t really the face I like to show to the world. But my day was okay for the most part. I think the tired primarily came about because of the early return of summer weather to New Orleans. Yes, I know to those of you who do not live here New Orleans always seems brutally hot all of the time, but there are degrees to New Orleans heat, and yes, it usually starts getting hotter in May and yes, the humidity usually is back in May. But it was ninety-five degrees on Wednesday; and even at the hottest part of the dog days of August it rarely gets to that. Usually it hovers somewhere between 88 and 93, but it’s the humidity that makes it so awful. Also, I’ve been more active this week than usual. I did Ellen’s book launch on Sunday evening, I had that ZOOM meeting on Wednesday night, and I had drinks with a friend in from out of town before the ZOOM meeting. So, that was a lot more of social interaction than I am accustomed to, and instead of going home from work Wednesday night (the way I usually do) and collapsing into my chair while going into a Youtube wormhole of some sort, I didn’t get to relax until after nine pm.
That is not my norm.
I stopped on the way home last night to get some things at the grocery store, and then spent some time doing some kitchen chores (since I had drinks with a friend before the ZOOM meeting, I had to move everything off the kitchen counters, shove it all in the laundry room, and then closed the doors so no one could see it; and the dishes in the sink had to be organized so nothing could be seen from the camera on the computer; I never realized having my work station in the kitchen would turn out to be so problematic, but I couldn’t have foreseen ZOOM in the summer of 2005 when we moved into the Lost Apartment, either) before collapsing into my easy chair to wait for Paul to get home.
So, there I was, minding my own business, watching first Superman and Lois before The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (I have tuned back in for this season, I have thoughts) and occasionally checking social media and my emails when…I got a notification on Twitter. I clicked to see this tweet from Katrina Niidas Holm:
GREG HERREN!!! You wrote a book so damn good, it got nominated twice! Congratulations, @scottynola! Hope you’ll remember us Pogues when…
(‘Pogues’ being an Outer Banks reference, a show she and her husband Chris–buy his Child Zero, available now and amazing–convinced me to watch with the result Paul and I fell in love with the show, too)
I literally had no idea what she was talking about and gave my usual intelligent response of wait what? at which point she linked to this year’s Anthony Award nominees. Bury Me in Shadows was nominated not only for Best Paperback/Ebook/Audio Original, but also for Best Children’s/Young Adult.
TWO NOMINATIONS FOR THE SAME BOOK IN DIFFERENT CATEGORIES.
I am still in shock this morning–a delighted shock, to be sure, but it’s still shock. It still hasn’t completely sunken in yet, either. It’s going to take me a hot minute to thank everyone who has tweeted or posted on Facebook their congratulations, as well as to congratulate the ridiculously amazing amount of friends that are also nominated in one of the categories–it really is, overall, a remarkable list with a lot of books nominated that I read and loved loved loved–but what a lovely chore to have, you know? And talk about turning your mood and your day around! So, this morning–needless to say I slept very well last night–I am sipping my coffee and riding the high a bit still. At some point I’ll need to make sure I thank everyone and congratulate everyone else nominated and get through my social media, but right now I am just sitting here at my desk feeling very proud and happy and content while I sip my coffee. Wow. I mean, wow.
I’ve not been in a very good place about my career lately, honestly–any number of things; the problems with getting myself to actually write, not feeling great about what I write when I do write, all the little doubts and insecurities that have built up over a lifetime of wanting to be a writer but getting little to no encouragement from anyone, really. It all kinds of builds up sometimes, and anything–no matter how small or inconsequential–will trigger it and send me spiraling down into the Pit of Despair. As I struggle with my schedule and all the things I need and want to get done, with a to-do list that seems to grow like the Hydra, with two new things to do replacing every single task that gets scratched off the list, this was precisely the right time to get this kind of reassurance from my community, my wonderful crime fiction world, and I’ll always be grateful for this. Bury Me in Shadows was a very hard book for me to write, emotionally; but digging deep into the issues I dealt with in the book–and that emotional difficulty–made it a better book, I think.
Wow. I mean, wow.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a wonderful Friday, Constant Reader.
I slept very well again last night, which was lovely–I’ve really been getting excellent sleep ever since The Power Came Back On, which is delightful–and I am looking ahead to this lovely weekend with great excitement and joy. The LSU game tomorrow is a night game, at undefeated Kentucky (when was the last time the teams played and KENTUCKY was the undefeated and ranked team of the two? Probably never), so I have tomorrow’s entirety free to get things done, run errands, go to the gym, and essentially do as I please until the game. I also am working at home today, and thus trying to find some horror to watch while I make the condom packs.
I started watching Friday the 13th Part II yesterday, and wasn’t far along into it before it started seeming familiar, like I’d seen it before–and I soon realized that I probably had, last year in October, so I switched it off in disappointment (not really; it was actually quite terrible) and switched over to the final episodes of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, which I had not been watching because I was sick to death of Erika Girardi using the show to try to gain sympathy for herself as one of her husband’s “victims.” But I had read a piece somewhere about the show being the “best thing on television right now”, and then I read a piece run recently in the Los Angeles Times, an interview with the three ‘outsiders’ on the show (Garcelle, Sutton, and Crystal) talking about the season and the filming of the lengthy finale, and I thought, swallow your disgust at the behavior of this criminal accomplice and watch. Interestingly enough, the cringe-aspect of watching I was experiencing before taking a break was now gone; and while I still felt a bit squeamish about watching–de facto condoning her behavior by giving them ratings, which will lead to her getting signed for another season, which is again a reward for her terrible behavior–I found myself actually enjoying watching again. I still loathe two members of the cast completely–looking at you, Kyle and Lisa Rinna, and will continue to hope to see them humbled, humiliated and (best case) let go–but I think I can watch again. The show, which the cast had been overly producing for quite some time, kind of had that rigid artifice stripped away from it with the Girardi criminal case; there really was no way they could escape the litigation or comment on the investigations of the growing scandal.
Or maybe I’m not in a really dark place anymore? There’s still something that seems wrong about watching this…but I can’t get to the bottom of it, frankly. I guess I’ll just keeping discussing it here until i get to the bottom of why it feels so wrong.
Who knows? I may never get to the bottom of it.
We got caught up on some of our shows last night–Only Murders in the Building, American Horror Story: Double Feature, and Archer–which was lovely and relaxing. I think it was the last episode of Archer ever; it ended with a tribute to Jessica Walter, and I can’t imagine having the show without her character, so it most likely was. Archer has never been as funny in its later seasons as it was in its earlier ones, alas; and while I appreciated the show’s attempts to keep it fresh by changing things up with seasons devoted to a theme–outer space, becoming a drug cartel, doing a noir Hollywood story–they never quite equalled the humor of the original seasons. Pity. I am also kind of intrigued by the second half of this AHS season; the alien stuff is very strange and weird, even by AHS standards, and I am not really sure where this is going, but it’s holding our interest. Only Murders continues to hold its charm; I had assumed it was rushing to a conclusion, only to have a twist at the end of the latest episode that ensure that no, indeed, the season is not finished quite yet. And we have our other shows to watch this weekend, as well as some movies–Everybody’s Talking About Jamie at the very top of the list, of course–and perhaps there are some other shows we can look into on the streaming services. (I really want to check out Stephen Amell’s new wrestling show on Showtime, Heels–which looks like it could be pretty good.)
So, I have some nice plans for the weekend–catching up on things, cleaning, organizing, writing, dropping off books to the library sale–and am really excited about possibly doing the writing part of the to-do list this weekend. I also want to fucking finally finish the book I am reading–which I am not going to name; my inability to stay focused and read lately has been really annoying and I no longer want to even hint at the possibility that I am not finishing the book because it isn’t good because it it very excellent; I may have to finish and then move on to short stories again. Short stories could also work very well for Halloween Horror Month; it never can hurt to dig into Stephen King or Shirley Jackson short stories, and of course Daphne du Maurier’s are often macabre and haunting. So, we shall see. I am going to try to finish the book I’m reading now, possibly reread The Haunting of Hill House, and if my reading focus remains fucked up, move on to short stories.
And on that note, tis time to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and will check in with you again tomorrow.
Queer and Loathing in America 