Month: November 2019

happy granny

So, *grandson* for a couple of hours. First out of the gate I ask him to empty out the dishwasher, which he does by removing items one at a time and handing them to me. I don’t have to bend & he keeps up a running commentary which I won’t attempt to summarize.

Then he abuses Edith, my Aria mandolin. He makes some very interesting noises and keeps it up for quite a while without destroying the instrument. Then he wants Chelyabinsk videos, Pompeii, world’s greatest volcano disasters. Then I show him Stella the wonder dog learning to talk.

Which he loves. Then he very seriously tells me about his accident. I gently listen while he tells me that he dropped a pick into Edith. I help him get it out. Then I ask him if I can cut his fingernails because mah gob! ‘skustin’! I get nine out of ten and then teach him to use an emery board. Then he wants a pinball game and he only just turned five but he got 3 tube shots in two successive games on Xenon

and honestly all I want to do is call my fOlks and tell them because they will be thrilled. Xenon is a Meaningful Game for a lot of reasons and watching him dance in his chair along with the game music and telling him it was written by a woman makes me happy.

The Lambs of Little Bleating Lane, 1.1

The sky, when it shrugs off its habitual shawl of fog and low cloud, is blue. It flickers sometimes. A low, static cloud of dense dark grey settles over the town every few days, but I don’t like to divide the passage of time into days.

People say: I’m going to sleep now, and then they lie down and wink out of existence. That’s how I imagine it. I haven’t slept yet. I haven’t caught anyone disappearing, and yet they do.

I believe it’s been a long time, yet there are signs that not much time has passed, and since I don’t sleep it’s hard to tell. I’ve been awake long enough to know that I’m the only one who stays awake all the time. I watch the others sleep to make sure that they don’t disappear when they’re asleep. I try to read but I can’t keep the words steady in my mind long enough to take any nourishment from them. Mostly I stand at the window. Someone is playing in the yard. I see her clearly but only for a moment, and she’s horrified at how I look and her face shows it and I run away to the bathroom to brush my hair and run right through a woman. The sunlight that the child was playing in is gone. The woman is gone. I’m alone but when I move to the master bedroom I can see breath rising from the bed.

I didn’t know I could see that. I’m so fascinated that I watch, watch, watch, each little puff and I’m filled with grateful wonder that my eyes can bring me this. I bring my hand up to cover my eyes, to check if this is real or my mind is filling in some blanks, and then I wish I hadn’t. The scene has changed and I’m sitting on the ground in the open; the house has burned down and I was too busy looking at something else to notice. It bothers me that I missed the fire but on the other hand maybe people died and I’ll have company.

It doesn’t seem that way. I get the sky all the time but that doesn’t last. Workers walk through me and I let them pour concrete through me, thinking perhaps I’ll finally stop having to look at anything but my imagination.

That must have been a mood

apparently as a writing exercise WHICH I HAVE NO MEMORY OF I decided to invent a bunch of curses based on the word ‘taint’

 

Kick him in the taint with a Mexican boot! (trival boots – the supah pointy ones)

Kick his taint into his gargle zone! <—— bad villain, bad bad villain

Strain his taint through his teeth with a good swift kick!

Torque his taint to 1500 ft lbs!

OR

Torque his taint to 1500 Newton-metres. <——- SI is full o yuks is it not?

May centipedes roam freely on his taint! <—— I like this one

I shall freeze-dry his taint and use it for tea <——– to be said by someone with a very calm air

Cut his taint in two and make curtains for his asshole! <—- what is WRONG with me?

May frost dancers carve his taint with their toe-rakes! <—– it’s coming back to me now, I have a vague recollection of going to the internet to find out what those prong things on the front of ice skates are called

Throw his taint to the feral cats / raccoons / coyotes / crows / ravens / eagles / vultures.

one of those days

 

50153 HOTM

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on the way home yesterday as mentioned I left a box of biscotti on Peggy’s stoop. One of their tenants picked it up and put it on their kitchen table and so Peggy and Tom came back from their errands and thought why is there a box with Jeff Rivett’s name on it? and they called me. I played along for a brief while pretending I HAD NO IDEA where THAT BOX CAME FROM. Tom said they were the best ever, but he lies. The best biscotti I ever made were the hazelnut apricot biscotti I made while at the café but we do the best we can whether we have a pizza oven or not. He ate those, so he should know better.

Have a baby capybara (above shown is a beardy)

I like hummingbirds.

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Also, check out this new used dinosaur Ferrisaurus Sustutensis from BC. I’m going to get it as a tattoo, but in brighter colours (I kid, I kid)

 

The article is here.

brekky and IDDD

I’ll be making biscotti for International Dorothy Dunnett Day now. Jeff took me out to breakfast, happy sigh.

Much writing yesterday after seeing 15.4 Supernatural. This is the scene that kicked my ass, and if twitter was anything to go by…..a lot of other people tooooo.

Chuck, AKA GOD:

You have anything stronger? 

BECKY: 

We have cran-apple juice.

Chuck, AKA GOD:

Hmm.
I'm good.
[SIGHS.]
It's just, things are different now, Becky.
I mean, I used to be able to see Sam and Dean in my head, wherever they were, whatever they were doing.
It was all just there, ripe for the picking.
And now it's just gone.

BECKY:
Because you lost your prophet powers? 

Chuck, AKA GOD:

Yeah.
Something like that.

BECKY:
Then write about something else.

Chuck, AKA GOD:
But this it.
I mean, this is my favourite story.

BECKY:
Then write about them.


Chuck, AKA GOD:
I-I Okay.
I feel like we're going in circles now.

BECKY:
No, you're going in circles.
You're a writer, a writer who's not writing.
And when a writer's not writing, they feel sad, and they get lost.
And the writer asks themselves, "Why do I feel this way? Why am I so sad and lost?" And what does all this navel-gazing and hair-pulling amount to in the end? Procrastination, distraction.
Just one of a million ways the writer avoids doing the one thing that is all but guaranteed to make the writer feel better.
Which is ? Writing.

Chuck, AKA GOD:
But what if I can't? 

BECKY:
[SCOFFS.]
You can.
The only question is, will you? 

Chuck, AKA GOD:

[CHUCKLES.]
How'd you learn all this? 

BECKY:

I'm a writer, too, Chuck.

Chuck, AKA GOD:
Oh.
I mean, fanfic it's not really the same thing 

BECKY:

Writing's writing.

Chuck, AKA GOD:
Okay.

BECKY:

The self-sabotage, the doubts, the struggle against time.
So whenever I have a spare minute, I write.

Chuck, AKA GOD:

Yeah.


BECKY:

Yeah! Wait.


I didn't mean right now 

Chuck, AKA GOD:

Shh, shh, shh!

peggy fed me pumpkin pie

also Paul. She did not feed me Paul. Paul fed himself pie. Aw, shaddap, the sheep never moved.

The foregoing won’t make sense without context.

What kind of sheep never moves? A dead one.

“I saw a dead sheep walking up a hill.” mOm’s line in a letter to me and brO sent when they were in England the last time, and pOp wrote in the margins “I never saw it move.”

English does have a little bit of error correction. Thanks to our epistemological store of justified true beliefs, we do not wander across the sentence, “I saw a dead sheep walking up a hill,” and holler SANTA MARIA MIRACOLO while mashing our knees in prayer. No, we are more likely to query whether the word ‘while’ got lost on its way back from the liquor store, something the word ‘while’ is extremely prone to do if my past experience of it is any indication, and in so doing rendered the sentence ripe for pOp’s deadpan jape.

 

Loving Stumptown.

Osteofit was exhausting. My mood is improved. Paul got thanked a lot.

The new fanfic is up to 2500 words. I’m a thousand words into a near future sixer short story with a new protagonist, but I don’t know whether it’s one of the kids or not; they have neither name nor sex yet but a very distinct, uneasy personality and way of speaking, and I think I actually need to look at all the concepts I introduce in a thousand words and make it two because it’s not cunning dense, it’s just overwhelming dense. But there’s the seed of something just lovely in there, another action packed non commentary on

saw a Lynx in the park yesterday

and ate the world’s greasiest chinese food at Deer Lake Wonton Restaurant afterwards my guts are dying but honestly the hot and sour wasn’t bad but I’m never getting the chow mein again I got home and Buster licked my face for like, a minute.

Yes it was a lynx, black tufts on tail and ears. So pretty, so calm and dignified. No pictures. I ain’t swearin’ up and down that beige blob is a Lynx’s ass, it’s pointless. I have my memories.

I am about halfway through Nisi Shawl’s anthology New Suns, and I love it so far. Even the stories that don’t quite hit the narrative beats that I would be going for are well written and flavourful in how they manipulate the concept of the other.

When I write about sixers, I’m writing about people who have suffered terribly, and continue to suffer, under the burden of being a colonized people who in term were weaponized to kill, and in some cases to expunge from the galaxy, planetsful of sentient beings. They’ve managed to put together a damaged, weird echo of whatever they used to be like, but these days they are modeling themselves after humans because it’s all they have.