Category: Writing

but everything is going great

 

 

 

yah, that blog post heading is a line from one of my songs.

the line before it is: Sure, the world is sliding into a pit. That’s from “The Evening News” which I wrote in Montréal and is generally considered to be one of my finest tunes (the guy I took the music course from and Paul both agree).

Suzanne dropped by yesterday with a sunflower in one hand (currently brightening the kitchen) and a beige lace tablecloth (now on Granny’s dining room table) in the other and she picked up the camera set from her dead friend Richard since I couldn’t sell it on Craigslist … and so it doesn’t matter when she shows up she brings a little happiness.

I’m still thinking about Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. I think the jumping spiders are just about the cutest animated critters I’ve ever seen. I just loved that movie.

Buster seems completely healed up. When I think how much blood was on him when he showed up on the 8th it seems miraculous.

My mood isn’t bad but I don’t really feel like moving. Practiced yesterday, sent some words to mOm (which reminds me, 6012 words on part II). Watched Sharpe’s Rifles (the first Sharpe) yesterday; Jeff dl’d a simple wonderful copy. The music though is gross. Electric guitar and French horn need a lighter hand than either of the men credited with the music could supply.

I’m supposed to get Alex on Friday.

Candles up for Jessica’s (Katie’s best friend’s) dad, who’s languishing at RCH with MRSA and he can’t get his heart operated on until he throws the infection, minimum two weeks. Katie’s liable to burst into tears at the thought; he’s been a kindly hardworking lovely human for more than half her life and she’s terrified he’ll die.

Thinking about Foreshore Restaurant for Brekky.

 

sundry various miscellany potpourri

Jeff very kindly got me a copy of ‘Road Food’, Misha Collins’ show about regional US cuisine. Really enjoyed the first episode. Jeff is no fan of Vietnamese cuisine, but I am; watching the show start with Pho for breakfast (when I used to have it after I got off midnights all the time at the 24 hour place (name keeps changing) on Kingsway) was MOST enjoyable, I could practically smell it through the screen. His former castmates have started a new ‘Winchester property’, it airs for the first time this month.

We watched ‘Catherine called Birdy’ and enjoyed it mightily. The closing credits are absolutely delightful, and everything beforehand was very well done; a perfect star vehicle for the inimitable Bella Ramsey (previously from Game of Thrones and Worst Witch.) I find it amusing that if I’d known Lena Dunham was behind it I probably would have given it a miss, but many of the writing and interpersonal lapses of her past incarnations are not seen here. A woman’s allowed to get smarter. I won’t infest my site with it, but if you care, google Lena Dunham controversy and be prepared to wonder if she has any friends who don’t share their drugs with her. I mean, I could easily say a hundred controversial things before breakfast but she acted like she literally didn’t understand what she was being called on half the time, and dissolved into tears at charges of racism.

Please note that if you’re a settler accused of racism, it’s probably true! Screaming about it doesn’t help. Sit with it and stay off social media until you can represent yourself as a person capable of self-improvement. Not saying I am that person. I have moved my views somewhat but I’m in the post-wallow stage of antiracism (sample of wallow: ah me! hoW CoudL I haveKN OWN … my PAreNTS did their best – there were only two people of colour in my entire grade school, blah blah blah yes I’m 63 and white in Canada, of course I bathed in racism and ableism erryday) in which I feel a brisk disdain for white crybabies and prefer deeds to words on the subject.

There are 50K Beavis and Butthead fanfics on AO3. Jest reviewing my life choices over here.

5278 words on Part II.

For Trotsky Tuesday, please enjoy the famous combination of anarchist ideals like free love and nudity plus scientific excellence embodied in this wikipedia article about ´Élisée Reclus.

I’ve gotten to the stage in the pandemic where I’ve now imagined all my friends and relatives dying of COVID (except Onty Mary because she just WON’T, THAT’S WHY! I DON’T HAVE TO EXPLAIN THAT TO ANYONE) or sequelae and gone to their funerals in my mind. Somehow I get to arrange all those funerals too so I get things how I want them. As you know I enjoy funerals and memorial services and do like a good one. Anyway, if I sound like I’ve been randomly crying throughout the day, here’s what made me cry.

A newborn calf with really bad respiration after a tough birth, dying in its owner’s arms. A Ukrainian woman making a video for her boyfriend on the front and her apartment takes a direct hit while she’s making it. Dozens of Canadian disabled people on twitter begging for food because they have nothing in their house for Thanksgiving. Not being able to do Thanksgiving with the family. Being too lazy to cut olives for pizza. Wondering if this phone call to my mOm will be the last one. Being glad that my daughter trusts me enough to talk to me about important stuff. Being terrified to lose this housing situation. (This place is literally 50% cheaper than any even close to equivalent housing situation in all of the lower Mainland.) Being so tired that I forgot my evening meds. Every time I go to the grocery store now, I cry. I cry about the abundance of food that’s going to disappear into the maw of climate change. I cry every time I put something like coffee or almonds or chocolate in the cart. Not much, I’m not sobbing, but I’m leaking.

The pandemic is dragging us all through a slow motion mass casualty event. We’ve been abandoned by politicians but the wise expect that. What we never expected was neoliberalism is such an indelible feature in our world that it has made the people we thought we could trust – the public health authorities and epidemiologists – into villainous murderers.

During and after the Great Mortality (as the black death was known at the time) people became much more selfish, lonely, profligate, violent and distractable (by contemporary accounts, anyway, as I read in Tuchman’s ‘The Distant Mirror’.)

It’s all happening again now, and I’m in the middle of it with everyone else. These moments of sadness are because it’s easy for me to feel sad. Many beautiful things are dying, but we must rush on regardless and be adults and hide our grief.

who was in the yard

I could hear stuff getting moved around but I can’t tell whose yard the noise was really in. Half expecting to see Paul’s canoe gone when the daylight arrives.

Jeff got sammiches for supper, they were nommy. Turns out that the corned beef on rye being terrible was just that one time, it was fabulous last night.

Particulates still moderately crappy today.

Heard from Mike; he’s hoping to get some shit done and drop by later today. I’m hoping  it’s nice enough to drink beer and eat burgers on the back deck.

No sign of Buster. Jeff keeps checking up on him and he’ll probably end up at the vet.

I’m semi-participating in Jeff’s SG-1 rewatch. I keep singing to myself while doing it (I wrote A LOT OF FILK SONGS FOR THAT FANDOM Y’ALL) but not aloud, Jeff does not favour me bursting into song while I’m sitting right next to him.

5217 words on Part II, got my guitar and mandolin and ukulele practice in as well. Got the tablecloth down on the living room table again, thanks Suzanne for pitching it in the wash.

Kerch Strait Bridge blowed up (in part) the day after Putin’s birthday – I thought it was the day of, but no, so I’m issuing a correction, mOm. Constructed in 2016 after the First Ukraine War as the dirty-colonial-resource-extraction-megaproject-thumbprint of the New Russian Empire, (V Putin Proprietor), the bridge was the longest in Europe, a technical triumph and a hated symbol throughout Ukraine of Russia’s aggression.

Fixing it is going to be interesting; the Russians didn’t have anyone shooting at them during the construction the first time but they will not have any such assurance as they try to reconstruct, and they have to, because they can’t pull cherries and grain and other stolen agricultural products out of the countryside if they don’t.  (Crimean agriculture despite everything had a bumper crop this year.) Anyway, expect more stuff to blow up. The Russians have got one lane (with crazy amounts of security) on the car side going, or will soon, but the rail line is apparently going to be tougher.

Ukrainian authorities are openly mocking the Russians on social media…. it’s savage and entirely deserved. An example of press coverage. Obviously someone knew about this destruction way in advance if they planned a stamp.

working working working

Completely revised Part I of Totally Boned over the last two days; 151 words added after all the many words I deleted as being a) too precious b) not germane c) funny but in the wrong place d) guaranteed to annoy readers, however happy they made me.

I have also revised what I have of Part II in preparation for some serious work next month (November is the WRITY MONTH).

Tremendously bad dizzy spell yesterday morning at sunup. I spun, I collapsed on the john, I almost threw up, and 45 minutes later I was fine. Better this morning.

Finally mailed letter to Mary.

NOBODY has said a word to me about the poem I posted, but at least the people who read fanfic are still communicating with me. I got a kudo for the story about the camboy and the weed store owner this morning…. It’s very cute, and very sex positive, and it has the single funniest text message exchange I’ve ever written in it, and I’ve turned out a few.

If you’re here early in the morning I’ll be adding more to this post after I do some drug taking (prescribed) and laundry manipulation (mountainous, I have to get the rugs out of the dryer). Great, I’m out of some Metformin, back to the pharmacy I guess.

OKAY that’s all settled.

Buster just came in COVERED IN BLOOD. I closed the cat door and Jeff is dealing with his wounds in the upstairs bathroom. Jeff will make the determination whether he’s going to the vet or not this morning.

I was supposed to see Alex yesterday and it didn’t happen. Heavy sigh. Happy 8th birthday, kiddo.

 

 

New Poem Little Seed

You are a little seed. There are millions like you.
You were made to sprout in a mind
unthinking being sprouted; that’s
For other minds to bend. Upwards where upwards
Is defined by gravity, that mundane unknown.

I can hear people laughing in my basement.

I want that to be in the scrapings of trace nutrients
I give you, that you are so loved, and all around me
Are ancestors who can still laugh, and will never cease
Weeping this river of love. Salt water kills plants they say
But there are those that grow in brackish water.
There’s no guarantee
That you will be one of those, little seed.
I too was once a little seed, and I commit you to this world.

New Poem – the Terrible Game

I am angry at you, Waffle
I flense your mother
I plunge my hand into the chest of your father
I cause rocks to be dropped on your siblings by rocs
I dismember your shop tools as if they were your children and eat them
Well know that I am displeased, Waffle

For your dictionary is foul, and your sloth is benthic

How is it, Waffle? that your dictionary looks like this
Ordinary words
Little, ordinary words in English
Escape your notice
‘Yep’ is not allowed.
‘Zoot’, as in zoot suit, is not allowed
I can understand that words with ‘s’ and ‘er’ and ‘ed’
Might be passed by, but then YOU ARE NOT CONSISTENT
About how the rules are applied
And I hate you
With that festering hatred that consumes cognition like oxygen
With a scary pH
Like a tailing pond, and I boil you in my mind in that very pond.

 

I refer to this game.

This poem is dedicated to my Onty Mary.

Time to do some shopping

I’m in a decent mood, finally, after all the damned EMOTIONS I’ve been having had forced themselves into poetry. I’m not saying it makes the poem better, but I sure wept hard writing it. Absolutely tip top night of sleep though!

I think I asked Jeff if we could shop today and if that’s going to happen I need to get up, take my pills and get dressed, because we usually leave for that about now.

New Poem – The Sad Enterprise

Yes;
I was wanting to talk to you about the sad enterprise
of writing poetry.

How downcast one is, seeing all the parts for it
enlimpened by advertising
et all the new Malaprops. one toes English
hoping it staggers to its feet once more
as with the pugilists of old, one drunken wager from renown
one butterfly from glory
one stolen kiss in a library doorway closer
to a skald’s dearest wish

A bard gets tired, in a world eating new words
faster than it can understand the effects
of the old ones
neogollyism newspikke and an endless
scrolling déluge of porn, puppies and punditry
it only seems so bad because there’s so much of it
but indeed, it is bad, because there is so much of it

I do not need to search for topics. The particular
presents itself, most insistently sometimes
‘RESPECTFULLY, I AM BEAUTIFUL.”
disrespectfully, I have the attention span of a house fly
and a variable crock of enthusiasms and illnesses
I LOOKED AT YOU AND YOU WERE BEAUTIFUL
But I ain’t writin’ a poem about that.

I am scraping blueberry pie filling from the counter
and that’s quite enough
i do prefer love over sinks
and the enthralment of learning and insight and connection
over the technic that gets us all here
whoosh
in the company of our peers
being the being that watches our species crash into an asteroid

I am saying this way is an old way, and it works for me
those beings who relent and strike the rock that is my forehead
then hoot with laughter as i bleed and swear
they are old beings and they do not have names
they don’t care about pretty moments
sing for your people, they yell, they babble and yell
trying to make themselves heard above my tinnitus

another field of verse – this body will lose this form
i remember holding you and thinking that these bones
inside these bones will be gone some day
you didn’t feel like a skeleton
no poem could contain my situation
and I was forced by my own breath into song

Other pens hover over those long bouts
of helpless, isolated weeping. it’s grim
and effortful and being uncomforted
is the whole point of it

I write poems about death because my friend died
there’s nothing complicated about that
it would be uncanny if I didn’t
poems are not edifices
they are tattoos
I’ve left a space here (pats chest)
for you, for when the word comes back
No.

walked with Paul, fed him lunch

Then walked to and from the pharmacy to get my booster for COVID. Everything went very smooth. Stopped at the Liquor store that’s just opened up the street from the pharmacy and got Fat Tug and drank THREE of them and enjoyed that so much I picked up a guitar and started practicing afterwards.

Weather has been wonderful, smoke from fires variable, lower today.

Slept exceedingly well, woke up this morning with my arm sore af, (no surprise there, almost everyone reports it, and it’s sore right up to the side of my neck) but I can also tell that this will lift over the course of the day. And I walked a whole bunch more, on concrete, yesterday, so my legs and ankles are whining.

That picture of Neptune, whoooooeee.

Jeff is taking me to IHOP this morning.

Look what arrived in my mailbox this mornin’ SQUEE > Book*hug preview.

Russian women are being comforted regarding overseas vacations that they can now no longer take their husbands on, since men 18-60 are subject to an international travel ban, with the deathless advice “Swap him for your granny”.

They can ATTEMPT to mobilize 300K new recruits but since the Russian military has already demonstrated that it doesn’t have enough UNIFORMS, RIFLES, FOOD, FUEL AND AMMO for the men it’s already putting in harm’s way in Ukraine, I don’t know what will happen. Russian client states are getting restless; Azerbaijan has already started a brush fire war against Armenia. 300 people dead already, both sides pointing fingers for the continuous breaking of the cease fire.

A couple of kudos overnight, 160 hits on the new story.

some accomplishments

Alex got picked up around noon; Katie drove me to the eye place and I picked up my new/old glasses (old Vogue frames, new lenses); walked home after picking up four veggie samosas at Baba Sweets; I fixed the broken glasses with Sugru. So I did get a fair amount of walking in yesterday and my ankles are telling me all about it this morning.

No comments on the new story on AO3 but 135 hits since I posted it yesterday, and it seems to have spawned interest in the other stories.

Started watching Gentleman Jack. Anne Lister was a piece of work.

Today: we shop at seven and I get a haircut at nine am. SO MUCH INTERACTION I’ll prob’ly come home and collapse, har har.

update

14522 final count on Landslide; I just posted it to AO3.

pOp fell and doesn’t want to go to hospital and I don’t blame him. Getting old sucks but he’s not alone in feeling that way. mOm’s going to try to take his bp with the new machine.

Mike’s been having a terrible terrible time with insomnia. He went on an apartment cleaning spree to try to feel a bit better in hopes he can sleep.

Sunday roundup

  • Paul’s in Seattle. He drove himself. There will be a family council (we hope) when he returns.
  • Typhoon Merbok is screwing up coastal Alaska
  • The gyrations involved in getting Trump squared up for his ‘day in court’ continue. His most recent legal beagle asked for three million dollars cash up front and as I said on Twitter, the lawyer is still going to get his ass cheated off his body.
  • Mass graves continue to be discovered in Eastern Ukraine. Putin and his wolf pack have a lot to answer for. India and China are pulling away from him, except insofar as whatever they can pick off what’s looking like a particularly unappetizing piece of global carrion.
  • 13368 words on Landslide, 4197 on Totally Boned
  • I’m incubating a couple of poems, more when I actually figure out why I want to use heavily charged and coded words and even more when I write them. I think one of them wants to be a very dry list of my mental health symptoms
  • Almost 600 Americans are still dying every day from COVID. It’s the second highest reported cause of death in the US this week. BC reported infections and rate of infections are currently dropping, and about 200 people a week are catching it, with a very low death rate. Whether we’ll ever get anything but nonsense and bluster out of BC for the mass disabling event that is COVID is an open question; Keith thinks it’s a possibility and as a family we’re thinking of all getting tested.
  • Alex comes today, still don’t know exactly when.
  • There is a memorial for Queen Elizabeth in Queen’s Park in New Westminster at 1 pm today. I will not be there, I merely note its existence
  • Twitter is full of Brits queuing to file past the Queen. Out of towners who don’t give a shit about the monarchy are also complaining about getting stuck in traffic and the idea of voluntarily driving around London the weekend before they plant the HRH is ludicrous to me.
  • Hungary’s getting subsidy money from the EU cut because they’re a bunch of anti abortion, anti gay, corrupt fuckwits. We’re talking billions of Euros. The poor of Hungary will hurt the most, as always.
  • QUIT FEEDING THE GODDAMNED BEARS North Vancouver I am looking at you; do you suppose the conservation officers ENJOY SHOOTING BEARS I can tell you to your face they don’t, ya collection of buhs.
  • To recap: Buh is the bih-bah word that substitutes for crazy. Crazy isn’t acceptable. Buh covers: disgusting (stop being a goddamned sex pest, I don’t want to see your penis or your ass, or hear about what you want to do to me while you drive by in your best friend’s car), dirty (please maintain basic hygiene), dangerous (please do not jump onto moving cars, please do not drive cars impaired, please do not aim your car at protesters or tourists), bothersome (please leash/muzzle your pet and don’t run air tools at 3 am, please do not pull the panic stop on Skytrain for no reason, please drink/toke/inject responsibly, please wear a mask), noisy (keep it under 65 dB f’Chrissakes), wilfully destructive (seems obvious) and violent (why are you knifing me).
  • ‘Confess Fletch’ with Jon Hamm is entertaining as hell, great script, laughed my ass off. Also sticks the landing in 90 – all action movies and comedies should try to get in at 90. I’ll give superhero movies an extra half for all the eyecandy bloody CGI

the little things

Yesterday morning quite early I got a call from Katie asking me if I had cleaned the counters at her place after Paul’s meal. I laughed and said no, but that I had told Keith *how much I appreciated* him being supportive of his sister and suggested that he’d been energized by this. She went ‘ah’ and that was a good feeling. Then I cleaned my own damn counters.

It’s too early to be thinking about breakfast and besides, we have no eggs for french toast. Maybe if Jeff wants some breakfast this morning we can go to Foreshore.

Can’t work on Totally Boned, don’t know why, worked on Landslide instead. 12987 words total on that so far. I finally came up with an ending. Since the threat is over some other threat must arise and be dealt with and then, SMOOCHES. Life is simple when you’re a romance writer.

I love my family. We are by no means the best people on earth but you’re all my people. Special shout out this morning to Unca Dave, who’s passed but whose bathroom installation LIVETH ON, Onty Mary for general stubbornness/agility of mind, Ryker for his goofulous smiles and SIL Lois for general awesomeness.