Category: Writing

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

I’m having a reasonably productive day, although I’m not working on the up front projects.

Paul’s picking me up. Hopefully I’ll see Peggy and possibly Sue while I’m down there.

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.

this graphic makes me happy and I don’t even ‘hate’ Christmas — hating other people’s festivals — even bloated Molochian horrors which impoverish those in foreign climes to global detriment while spewing plastic from one end of the planet to the other — is bigoted.

Then on the 9th, Dorothy Dunnett Day Party.

Eventually my birthday and Katie’s.

Heard from Mike last night, he’s still in Denver. He’s basically poking along on his last sinew and his last nerve, which is very challenging for him as you can imagine.

 

is the title of my next fanfic. Don’t worry, he’s not perving on the chickens.

beautiful day yesterday, I got out in it a couple of times.

Ordered out Indian food for supper but I don’t think I’m ordering from there again. It was nommy but the order was screwed up. Sigh.

and we went to Robert Burnaby Park and replicated the walk I had with Paul the other week, except there weren’t people filming at Dinosaur Rock so we got to go there. It was wonderful to see the lad; he’d been acting out but settled down as soon as he could run around and be a kid for a change.

plugging away on HOTM 48975

Katie called last night and I realized I didn’t have whatever on board to make it unless it was JUST going to be bacon and eggs, so we reset to Katie’s place next week.

I’ve had a very rough couple of days regarding feeling like everything I write and play is CRRRRRRRAP but this is a Known Bug, so que l’on continue as Lucien Bouchard remarked when they cut off his leg for flesh eating disease.

Fortunately going out on a sunny day and having a very amusing time at the Fish Place (there were many children – one of the babbies screamed so loud while the server was close to her that she literally forgot our drink orders and came back to ask us for them and Jeff and I were giggling and wincing at the same time) fixed me up so that I’m no longer feeling like a battalion of tatterdemalion scallions in a galleon.

I try and I try not to, but mocking Catholics on twitter is kinda part of my brand.

What is my brand?

 

lol

Took Jeff to lunch – I was thinkin’ burritos but we had to pass Cockney Kings Fish and Chips to get there and reader, we turned left at fish. I had the halibut salad – six oz of fresh halibut grilled not one nanosecond longer than necessary over a bed of fresh greens, and Jeff had halibut and chips but reserved one piece and the cole slaw and some of the chips for a second meal, which was downright thrifty of him since I would have gone through those two pieces of fried fish like that darned Tasmanian Devil.

I’ve been editing — mostly — today, but added some clarification to the chapter ‘bathroom break’ so that’s pushed the word count up a bit.

Paul was in a glider crash last weekend. He’s got a yellow bruise on his left sphenoid bone but was otherwise not injured, and at no point lost consciousness or was concussed. The pilot was not injured at all, apparently. The aircraft’s a write-off, and it was a club plane, so insured, but club insurance will suffer. That’s as much as I wish to recount.

However, that news pales, as far as Paul was concerned in telling me, with Tina, one of Janice’s cats, needing to be euthanized in consequence of cancer last week. Paul was openly distraught and saying that he had no idea how attached he’d grown to her (he lives in Seattle half the week, so I’m not entirely sure how this could have come as a surprise – hominids get used to the people and things and critters they live with, after all) and that he could have been better behaved toward her. Now I’m the ex, and I be crabby in some respects, but honestly that seems like a prompt from the universe to get on the phone and talk to people you miss, and make plans to seem them as you haven’t for a while. Whether Paul will see it that way remains to be seen.

Me? I have been calling my friends since I heard about that.

I am mad at Jared Padalecki and it’s time he went to rehab. Punching employees of your own bar while hosed? Fucksticks.

SO MANY SKULLS lots and lots of skull masks

There were at LEAST 10 teenagers, mostly girls, who came out for candy, and I GAVE IT TO THEM. The people who bitch about teenagers begging for candy are fucking dolts, and I reject them. Who else is going to tell me that they love my hat?

We have left over candy. Jeff is quietly urging me to keep hiding it.

Same thing we do everyday; seek coffee, try to write.

 

Shopping this morning. I completely spaced when the place opens so we stooged about in the car for 15 minutes. I don’t have anything planned but I imagine Jeff would have preferred to be elsewhere.

My multiyear experiment in reducing my racist, sexist and thoughtless atheist remarks is not concluded, but declared a qualified success subject to frequent continuing ed, as will be evidenced by these pages, or so I wish to believe. It appears now that the real challenge is – despite my own rapid descent into debility – getting rid of ableist thinking and speech. Part of it is that English is full as an egg with ableist turns of phrase. The more I’m looking, and allowing myself to feel it, the more oppressive it is. I would like to be out from under it.

A town I wrote about as a residence for a character in a fanfic is on fire. Yup, Thousand Oaks, a suburb of LA 40 miles from downtown, is on fire. It is home to over a hundred thousand people.

Hollywood North may swell with the outflow. So many productions will be moving it will be kinda rude. Of course, then Netflix, staggering under MORE THAN 10 BILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT (I mean, think about it folks, some witless mofo in a 6 thousand dollar suit okayed a company that depends on electricity and someone else’s internet to even be possible to carry 10 billion with a b dollars of debt on what’s essentially a climate change bubble) will expire in the arms of Disney and after their efficient bean counters and diligent lawyers scythe through their to-film list there will be a little bit of shaking going on. So maybe Vancouver will benefit, but only for a bit. And filming got screwed up here a couple of summers back, the summer the sky was broken. Actually, it’s like 16 billion.

I mean. I’m pissed off, because I like Netflix, and I want Cheezies, and I can never eat them.again. Fortunately Jeff threw chocolate croissants in the cart so I’m okay for that.

No progress on HOTM. Much mental progress on other things, though – I’m working my way through to a conclusion to the latest chapter.

In the future, if our grandchildren read our blogs or anything, they’ll say DID THEY EVER FUCKING SHUT UP ABOUT FOOD

Sísele (pronounced SEESS e le) is the Halq’eméylem word for grandmother. The word for great grandparent is a compendium of consonants no English speaker could approach without months of practice. Heavy sigh. At least I can say I live in Burnaby – land between Stolo and Slaywat.

48515 words

 

some fool is winding his rice rocket up to 8500 and whipping up and down the side streets, it’s ridiculous at this hour

Dishwasher’s running; morning has come.

Rich people in the Vallejo fire aren’t telling their gardeners and housekeepers that they’ve evacuated. As a consequence poor people without transit are going to work and finding out they can’t get out.

 

FUCK RICH PEOPLE

We had a lovely walk, Jeff and I, at Fraser Foreshore Park. The weather is still absolutely stunning, which is really helping me feel a bit more cheerful, although I can’t say I’m super energetic.

Jeff very kindly took me to brekky. Feeling better today although scarcely ‘motivated.’ I’ve made an appt for the doc to get my meds renewed. They seem to be working – my body seems to have adapted and my bp is down quite a bit.

The Vallejo Fire is now under the Carquinez Bridge, which is going to need a thorough inspection because fire under concrete bridges as old as I am is bad bad news.

Buster gets the cone off and the stitches out in a little under a week.