strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
« May 2003 | Main | July 2003 »
Jun 27 03: for your reference
In case anybody ever needs to link to any of these posts—you know, like to hold it up as a shining example of brilliance, or whatever—now you can. In keeping with permalink protocol, I’ve linked the post time at the end of each article to the proper URL.
shout oh-yes!
American readers: our hour of delivery is at hand. The national do not call registry is now accepting phone numbers. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen: get yourself on a national listing of people who do not want, and are not to receive, telemarketing calls.
Some caveats of note: some organizations (political groups, charities, and polling organizations, for example) are exempt from this rule. There are other loopholes as well. Expect the most weaselly of the telespammers to just change their speeches: “Hi, we’re taking a survey. If you could save $4.95 a month on your long-distance service, would you be interested in that FASCINATING AND TERRIBLY EXCITING OPPORTUNITY?” But I’m sure we’ll be able to hunt them down and kill them.
Get yourself on the list by August 31 and you’ll start noticing a drop-off in calls by October 1. Can we hear the angels singing songs of sweet freedom?
Yes, yes we can.
mucking about
I’m twiddling some settings and things on the blog. If things look weird off and on over the next little while, that’s why.
my homosexual agenda: a review
The last 36 hours have been unusually queer ‘round these parts. Not weird, mind you: just very gay. Wednesday night, for instance, Paul and I went to see “Take Me Out,” the Tony-winning play about baseball and gay men and straight men and truth-telling. It’s warm, it’s brainy, it’s very funny, and a good time was had by all. In the interest of full disclosure, I am obliged to admit that the shower scenes weren’t entirely a bad thing either.
And then yesterday, because it was the first sunny day of summer (!), I went to the beach. What’s the point of being a footloose freelance guy if you can’t drop everything for a day and catch some rays? It took some doing, though: I started the day at swim practice, and from there dashed down to Penn Station to catch the 9:04 train out to Sayville, Long Island, and from there jumped into the $3 van that took you to the ferry dock, and from there took the 11:30 boat to the Pines, on Fire Island. For those of you unfamiliar with Fire Island Pines, it’s sort of like Chelsea with sand: a tiny, tony beach town with expensive vacation homes and lots and lots of homos. And then I paid exorbitant sums for groceries at the little store—it galled me, but I still hadn’t eaten anything—and then I walked out onto the beach and felt all cares melt away for a few hours. The Pines was weirdly deserted. Maybe it was because the sunny days had come upon us so suddenly that nobody had been prepared to get out there; maybe it was because this weekend is Pride and so people weren’t planning to use their rentals. But that was fine. I walked east until the sprawl of million-dollar bungalows gave way to the mile or two of dunes that separate us from them. The haze in the air made the line between sea and sky indistinct. Blue melted into blue melted into blue. The waves were cold: delicious and refreshing for about 90 seconds, and then suddenly oh my god I’m freezing and you were scrambling for dry land. I had a book, but didn’t read; I had paper, but didn’t write. Birds rose up behind the dune fence and hovered and dropped back into the grass. It was heaven. And then I caught the 4 o’clock ferry home. I spent more time in transit than on the beach, but it was still so, so worth it.
Once back in the city, I went to a party thrown by Bob’s fiancée Whitney and discovered that while I’d been away from civilization the Supreme Court had invalidated the Texas sodomy law. And, by extension, everybody else’s as well. I don’t expect to be in Texas any time soon—but it’s a huge relief not to be a criminal anymore. God knows you don’t want to deal with the Texas judicial system if you can help it.
In other news: shortly after the Texas decision was announced, Strom Thurmond keeled over dead. Coincidence? I wonder.
Jun 24 03: blog of note
As I promised a little while back: let me now sing the praises of Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Her blog, Making Light, is everything a blog should be: well-written, funny, moving, drawing from personal experience and noteworthy internet ephemera alike. (Note to self: try to make this blog adhere to these criteria as well, as soon as possible.) She, like her husband Patrick, is an editor (of SF) at Tor Books and lives in Brooklyn. We’ve never met.
Today at Making Light, two food-related entries: on making one’s own liqueurs, and on Mormon cuisine. I keep going back and forth, though, on whether the latter will be of more or less interest to non-Americans. Americans are at least passing familiar with the anthropology of Jell-o, so the shock value is lessened, but you have to grok Jell-o at least a little bit or you won’t fully appreciate the horror. Readers abroad, parlez-vous Jell-o?
And finally, make sure you read the comments sections. As TNH points out, her readers “are the best thing about this weblog. If you’re not reading the comments, you’re missing half the fun.”
What are you waiting for? Go read!
arrrr!
Okay, I was prepared to be all cynical about it, but after seeing the trailer now I definitely want to see the movie.
Jun 23 03: time / table / time
36 hours ago, Clarion West had not yet begun. 4 minutes ago, I had never heard of it. Both of these have changed.
Where will I be in a month? In six months? What will I have written? Where will I be next year?
Questions.
roamers’ holiday
Mac-based websurfers rejoice! For today Safari 1.0 is given unto us. Open-source, really really fast rendering, and standards-compliant in ways that most other browsers would consider an urban legend.
Praise and gratitude to Dave Hyatt and his team. Go get beers, y’all.
Jun 22 03: review: Finding Nemo
Yes, yes, yes. Finding Nemo is yet another pitch-perfect Pixar movie, this one about the adventures of Marlin, a single-dad clownfish crossing the ocean to find his son, Nemo, who has been abducted by a dentist from Sydney and popped into a fishtank. Albert Brooks is great as the menschy, anxiety-prone Marlin. However, the movie really belongs to Ellen DeGeneres, who steals the show as Dory, Marlin’s bright blue companion. Dory has short-term memory issues, a gag which could rapidly burn itself out, but the script manages to keep finding new ways to surprise you with it. DeGeneres’s goofy, dithery stage persona is perfect for the role.
Because this is a Pixar movie, it should go without saying that the visuals are beyond reproach, but I’ll say it anyway: the visuals are beyond reproach. Their computer-animated undersea landscape sways beneath currents you can almost feel; the light plays down from above like…well, just like light shining down through water. Each bird and fish and turtle is expressive and minutely detailed—check out the way the ragged feathers fluff out on the pelicans. (Don’t miss the closing credits, and not only because they let you go back and look at the sets again.) Because this is a Pixar movie, there are dozens of brilliant little throwaway gags that go by at a hundred miles an hour. And because it is a Pixar movie, it manages to deliver all kinds of hilarity and still touch you deeply with poignant moments that hit you when you least expect them. Don’t let the kids’-movie packaging fool you; this is a movie for everybody.
And finally, I would like to applaud the creators’ apparent passion for oceanography and marine biology. Right from the beginning, the movie is full of little touches that make this clear, from asides about how clownfish survive in their anemone homes to the schoolmaster’s excellent little songs. There’s so much good science in here. (Okay, the bit where our intrepid heroes dive down into the benthic zone isn’t part of that. They’d never survive the cold or the pressure long enough to meet that fabulous anglerfish. But still: it’s such a great sequence that I don’t care.)
Paul and I need see it again. For starters, everyone was laughing so hard throughout the movie that we felt like we kept missing chunks of dialogue. Even if that weren’t the case, it’s worth seeing twice on a big screen—so I strongly recommend that you see it at least once.
Jun 21 03: etymology; ornithology
I don’t know what the official connection is, if any, between the words raven and ravenous. But at the moment I feel like putting forward a theory: Ravenous is the feeling that one is hungry enough to hop about in the grass by the side of the motorway, nibbling on small-to-midsized roadkill and making harsh croaking noises at people who disapprove.
Just a thought. Paul and I are off to the movies now. Digital fish! Wheeee! And also popcorn, god willing.
there and back again
Okay, it’s really really late but here’s the short version: yes, I pretty much had to go. So I did. And stood in a line half an avenue-block long with hundreds of other New Yorkers—moms and dads and kids and random geeks in bunny slippers or pointed hats or Griffindor scarves—until 2:30 in the morning. Clusters of club kids and other nocturnals drifted past the line: “Dude, you’re doing this for Harry Potter?” Inside the store were a couple of beautiful owls from a local nature center. Their handlers looked amused. Actually, so did we all: good humor was the order of the evening. What were we doing there? We were having a fabulous time. I love this town.
Jeez, this thing is a doorstop.
Jun 20 03: bibliophilia
Given that I’m flirting with wandering down to Books of Wonder in about 15 minutes, I guess I know where this gentleman is coming from. On the other hand, I don’t think I would steal books from monks. Even five-hundred-year-old priceless ones. Secret passage or no secret passage. I have friends who hang out with way older books than those.
I might go visit them, though. That would be cool. (Thanks to Erika for the link.)
paging Trinny and Susannah
Another thought on The Matrix Reloaded: Neo’s cassock coat is seriously cool. I covet it. I think I’d look really good in it. I told Paul this during the film, but I’m not sure he was convinced. He may not even have been listening, come to think of it. He was bouncing up and down like a giddy seven-year-old with this big goofy smile on his face, watching the eight-story craziness loom above us all. Worth the price of admission right there.Jun 19 03: bigger = better
Huh. Who knew? This evening we discovered that The Matrix Reloaded is in fact way more fun the second time around. As long, mind you, as the second time you see it you see it on an IMAX screen.
It’s true. Sari and Bob and Cesar and I took Paul to see it at the IMAX place up near Lincoln Center. Trinity, eight stories high! Neo’s size-of-several-automobiles sunglasses! Big explosions gone even bigger! Bad skin like the surface of the moon!
The whole bad skin thing is something many of us remarked on as we left the theater: most of the cast has got it. With Larry Fishburne, this came as no shock, but yow: acne pockmarks, liver spots, little scars, ingrown hairs, the whole thing. Aren’t these folks movie stars? In the end, we put forward a couple of theories:
- You’re supposed to notice. There are no dermatologists in Zion. Life is, like, hard, you know?
- You’re not supposed to notice, and we wouldn’t have if their heads hadn’t been eighty feet high.
You can also play games like “Spot the Smiths who aren’t actually Hugo Weaving,” most notably during the Fight of a Thousand Smiths. There are lots of them. I also found myself studying the reflections in people’s sunglasses, where I often found things like studio lights. Much easier to do when it’s all really really big. You should go. Fun fun fun.
furthermob
Dammit, I was right! They were in the furniture department at Macy’s! We tried the cookware section first, because it was down one floor instead of up eight. And in the end there wasn’t time to try both places. The ‘express’ elevators weren’t cooperating.
I’m still gutted that I missed it. But I’m going to do what I can to be in on #3, let me tell you.
Jun 17 03: mob; sob
To begin: NYC has recently witnessed the birth of the Mob Project, a weird sort of DaDa-performance-art thing. A whole bunch of strangers descend on a previously-selected location, hang about for ten minutes, and then disperse. MOB#1 was covered on NPR’s The Next Big Thing a couple nights back (that’s a 7-minute Real Audio stream). This evening, MOB#2 was unleashed. Here’s the set of instructions that were sent around the web. Read them, they’re fascinating.
I love this idea: as the inventor says, it’s kind of like NYC scene-ism reduced to its barest essence—a bunch of people who get together to be somewhere random because everybody else is going to be there too. It strikes me as a fountain of Surrealist energy and joy and all kinds of things that this cranky-ass town desperately needs.
I wasn’t there. We got off to a great start, but then the phone rang, and my shoelace broke, and I couldn’t find my keys, and the subway gods forsook me and left us standing on the platform for 7 crucial minutes. When we got to the Blarney Stone on 32nd, the crucial staging area back by the jukebox—the place where about 1/4 of the mob got its marching orders—it was empty. Not just empty, deserted. It was like hearing a noise in an empty room down the hall, and opening its door and not being able to tell what had fallen. The air was thick with this palpable “you just missed them” feeling.
Paul and I played a hunch and walked briskly up to Macy’s. We had one shot and thought they might be in the kitchenwares section. They weren’t.
So we went home. I tried to maintain the sense of buoyancy/excitement/joy that I felt on the way down, but I couldn’t. And why? Because I’d missed out on a chance to stand in a crowd of strangers. I mean, how many times do you get that kind of opportunity?
Anybody who knows how to get me on the mailing list for MOB#3 is hereby invited to let me know.
Jun 16 03: flowers; harts
The wedding was lovely lovely lovely. Congratulations to…well, to John and Kathleen. I was going to say “to Mr. and Mrs. Hedlund,” but she has kept her own name, modern woman that she is. So is there a shorthand? She’s not “Mrs. Foley,” that would be her mother. “Ms. Hedlund?” I don’t think that’s it either. Kathleen, if you’re reading this, your input will be appreciated.
Okay, regardless. Many many old friends there, most notably Terry Horner (sans his charming husband) and John Lovejoy (avec his charming girlfriend). Had a spectacular time. We did a fairly heroic bar crawl through Collegetown on Friday and lived to tell the tale. The old haunts are rather seedier than they used to be. Either that or our standards have changed somewhat. The food served by Collegetown Bagels after last call is just as perfect, though. In particular those cheesecake brownies. Oh, bliss. I even got Hot Truck for lunch on Saturday. Yes, you can do that now. I know, it’s mindblowing but true. What more could one want?
Well, good weather, I guess. The Friday afternoon barbeque was cold, sometimes foggy, sometimes rainy. Picturesque in an Ithaca kind of way but it made for a damn clammy picnic. The wedding never got a proper blast of Ithaca-in-June style “sunny and beautiful, the presence of God felt all about, flowers bloom in your heads” weather, but at least it was neither cold nor wet. And the bride and groom looked like two million bucks, collectively, and there were smiles all around. We wish them joy.
We got the good weather for the drive back. The highways were fairly smooth sailing, although judging by the evidence I’d say the deer are particularly clueless this year. Or particularly slow. The roadkill index was appalling.
Jun 12 03: on the road, again
Tomorrow we pile into a car and go to Ithaca for the weekend. Again. We were there last weekend as well. Last time, it was…well, it was basically because Heather made me. This is the Heather with whom I stayed a while in Sydney last November. She was in Ithaca for Cornell reunion weekend and demanded I meet her for a drink. And (as anyone who knows Heather will attest) when Heather makes up her mind it’s very hard to contradict her wishes. Although somehow César managed to do it. Because he’s, you know, César.
This weekend we’re going up for the wedding of Kathleen and John, two of the people I love most in the world. And it’s about damn time too.
one
In heavy rotation on the car stereo tomorrow will be Annie Lennox: Bare, which was released yesterday and is already firmly embedded in my head. Recommended.two
I tend to avoid political debates. I’m more of a “let’s talk about something that doesn’t make us angry” kind of guy: at the first sign of conflict my brain tends to go directly into Hide Under the Couch mode. As a result, I tend just to lurk in the discussions that spiral off of Patrick Nielsen-Hayden’s brainy and thought-provoking blog Electrolite. But the caliber of debate and analysis and rational thought and good humor that goes on there makes me wish I were secure enough in my own opinions to do so. Recommended.His wife Theresa’s blog is also quite fine, for very different reasons, but I’ll leave that review for some near-future posting, I think. Wouldn’t want to seem too toadyish.
three
Reason to love the Internet number 32,356: 20Q.net, an experiment in artificial intelligence. Recommended.Jun 9 03: news
So. Erika, my beloved and most favorite cousin, broke unto me a little piece of news. She’s leaving. Back to California for Erika. To which I say:
What about all the great times you had here? The search for housing? The search for employment? The bad job? The underwhelming winter? The next search for housing? The next bad job? The protracted and painful breakup with your boyfriend? The next search for housing? The finding of the fabulous studio apartment in the West Village which cost more than you could rationally pay? The overwhelming winter? The sudden loss of the studio apartment? The yet another search for housing? The couch-surfing? The finding-and-then-immediate-loss of the perfect gigantic East Village loft? The more couch-surfing? The return of the East Village loft? The yet another bad job? The horrifying income-tax discovery? The announcement that you were about to lose your East Village loft a second time?
Quitter. Go on. Go back to the land of rock-climbing and hot springs and amorous water-polo players with private planes. See if I miss you at all.
No, I’m fine. Just something in my eye.
Mazel Tov, sweetie. It was great while it lasted. I’ll miss you lots.
Jun 7 03: resistance; futility
Bob turned 34 on the Saturday we were in Vegas. So I took him to the Star Trek Experience. Yes, it was among the geekiest things I’ve ever done. Je ne regrette rien. Every out-of-work actor in town was there, improvising wildly beneath latex Klingon foreheads in the bar or as plucky Federation ensigns in the flight-simulator. There were strolling Ferengi and Borg, too. It had a big timeline of Federation history, with display cases of props and costumes and video monitors showing relevant clips from the various series. It had a big crazy immersive interactive walkthrough thing including a groovy ‘get beamed up onto the Enterprise’ moment and a ride in a shuttlecraft—simulated—where you got chased by Klingon birds of prey through a wormhole. Woo hoo! Needless to say, Bob and I had to keep our Ironic Detachment Field Generators cranked up to eleven the whole time. Heaven forbid we be as dorky as those folks over there in the t-shirts. But in the interest of fairness I must confess that my bubble nearly collapsed at the end of the ride in the shuttlecraft. We’d evaded the Klingons, gotten bounced around a lot, had saved the world, etc. etc….and Captain Picard radioed us and made a typically Captain Picard speech about how each of us contained the seeds of our future, of his present, blah blah…and I nearly wept. I was this close. All verklempt, I was. Eeep.
The immersive Experience dumped you out in, of all places, the gift shop. Actually there were two gift shops. The first one sold the predictable t-shirts, hats, glassware, keychains, prosthetic ear-tips, teddy Borg, teddy Klingons, Klingon Empire baseball jerseys, neckties, books, DVDs, 7 of 9 wristwatches (RESISTANCE IS FUTILE on the band), baby apparel, bumper stickers, Klingon-language instructional materials, radios, command jackets, mouse pads, action figures, card games, chess sets…et cetera. The other one sold the ‘special limited edition’ stuff: photos signed by the stars, or high-quality replicas of props, or swarovsky-crystal-encrusted handbags in the form of the Federation inisgnia, all for hundreds to thousands of dollars. If you really, really need a life-size vinyl replica of Alice Krige as the Borg Queen, ths is where you need to go. Of course I bought something. But I didn’t buy nearly as much as Bob, so there.
We did not go into the bar. We knew better than to drink with Klingons, thank you. On a variety of levels. But man, that was fun.
notes on vegas
With this renewed vigor under the hood, I was inspired to keep some records of the grand anthropological expedition that was John’s bachelor bash. Aren’t you lucky. Various observations follow, in no particular order.
- The cheaper restaurants along the strip are noteworthy for a few things, and here are two: $4.99 breakfasts, served all day; and alarming agèd ex-showgirl waitresses who have changed neither hairdo nor make-up since their last performance waaay back in 1963. Breathtaking.
- Regional Foods You can get foods here that you can’t get on the East Coast. I don’t just mean brands of potato chip that you’ve never heard of. I mean variant flavors of familiar global-behemoth products. We went into a pharmacy on our first morning in town—because it had the only ATM we could find that didn’t charge a fee of $3.00 or more to access your own damn money—and on the shelves were Guacamole Doritos. Sounds like a great idea, but when you see them you understand why they haven’t gone national. They look like Mildew Doritos. Crispy triangles of fried corn meal, powdered with a horrible green-grey dust. Eeeeeew. I couldn’t bring myself to try any, even in the name of Science. On the other hand, I would have cheerfully tucked into a package of Dulce de Leche M&Ms, if only I could find them. At present they are only available in heavily Latino markets, like the Southwest. (But not New York City? Hello?) I had it on fair authority that Vegas would have them. They’ve even got a gi-normous M&Ms Memorabilia Store on the strip! Four stories of M&Msiana! But not a Dulce de Leche M&M noplace. Fie. If you know how to get me some, drop me a line. You may be my new best friend.
- Hoover Dam It sounds kind of dull, but hey, it has been billed as the Eighth Wonder of the World. It’s the largest concrete structure on the face of the Earth. Its various architectural details—like its gift shop, the public restrooms, the flagpole-cum-memorial-to-the-builders, even the generator rooms—were all done in highest, most fabulous High Deco. Completed in 1935, you know. The giant generator room on the Nevada side had a massive terazzo floor with gorgeous stylized representations of graphic motifs from the local Native American peoples: Pueblo-Deco. I called one of my clients to confirm to her that indeed, the dam worked pretty much exactly as we had described it in the book we’d finished editing earlier in the week. She was relieved to hear it.
- Thank you, Cingular Wireless: my cell phone worked like a charm and I didn’t even incur roaming charges. Very odd to get calls from friends while I was standing atop Hoover Dam or on the casino floor at the Bellagio. Nobody ever believed me when I told them where I was. Cell phones also spell the demise of things like outrageous telephone bills at hotels, and make it really really easy to corral a buncha guys together when it’s time to meet somewheres (“Why aren’t you at the pool?” “I am at the pool. Where are you?” “We’re over by the other bar, the one nearer the swim-up blackjack table.” “Be right there. Order me something.”). What did we ever do without them?
I can’t believe I just said that.
- Vegas from a Distance is spread wide and low, endless flat swathes of subdivisions and minimalls clinging to the desert floor like lichen. At its heart is the bizarre, extravagantly bioluminescent fruiting body of the Strip, leaping hundreds of feet above anything else. A persistent brown haze hangs over the whole thing, the smog of countless cars in from LA or Reno or Phoenix, the exhaust of dozens of cheapo shuttle planes landing every hour just three blocks from the Tropicana. A few high clouds loiter overhead: they do nothing to lower the 106° temperature, but the shadow they cast streaks the smog, shafts of darkness descending from heaven directly to the Strip like the malediction of God.
- Cesar or Bob suggested at one point that God was bound to wipe the city off the face of the Earth. I don’t know. Maybe it’s still there because He feels we deserve it.
- City of Moths They’re in the hotel rooms. They’re in the casinos, in the streets, in the shafts of the glass-walled elevators. Tiny bewildered things, perpetually lost in a night where the moon is shining from everywhere at once.
- Important Survival Rule Maintain a minimum safe ironic distance at all times. Between the kitsch and the crowds, this may be all that saves you. Be an observer, even an involved observer—never a participant. Cultural anthropology is your friend.
- I seemed to be the sole homo for fifty miles. Various others suggested that it only seemed that way because we were staying at the wrong hotel. If nothing else, the poolside boy-watching was atrocious, or at least it paled in comparison to the girl-watching available to my cohorts. Not my bachelor party, so there was nothing to be done.
- Pre-dinner blackjack tutorials in Pete’s hotel room, with drinks. There is a strategy to learn, one refined by university types with big computers, and it works. But only if you can cram most-if-not-all of it into your head. Pete is John’s younger brother, who is also getting married this summer. It was his bachelor party, too.
- Poolside, 11AM Tubby midwesterners slowly frying in their deck chairs. Somewhere, another rather doughy ex-football player is getting another tattoo.
- Everyone wants to know the tally. On the first night, I played blackjack for 2 hours and ended up only $10 poorer than I started. At various points I was up by as much as $50. A victory in my book. On the second night I blew through $75 in, what, 20 minutes? 25? And pulled the rip-cord. A few of our crew had been watching over my shoulder, and assured me that I had played every hand correctly and that the cards I’d been dealt had simply been disastrous. Good: that’s what I thought, too. Not enough to get me back at the tables, though. As it turned out, only one of us had a good run that night. That was César, who was clearly born to Vegas. Did well for himself, he did.
- The strip at night beggars description. You’ll just have to see it for yourself someday. The MGM Grand, across the street from us, is the largest hotel in the world. Inside it has faboo deco casino areas, midnight-blue and gold; from the outside, after sunset, it is an irridescent beetle-green behemoth.
- Bachelorette parties everywhere. So as to embarrass John, we engineered a capella performances for two different groups, one song each. This was at an outstanding (and relatively cheap) Mexican place at the Mandalay Bay hotel. The performances sucked, frankly. Those margaritas had been gooood. The bachelorettes went all starry-eyed anyway, because such is John’s power over the ladies.
- Pandering to the aforementioned bachelorettes: beefcake revues seem to be the latest thing. The hotels that offer them go to great pains to stress how they are for women. (See above.) One of the shows featured a bunch of allegedly Australian hunks in their underwear—the guys on the video billboards were cute enough, but I just couldn’t get past the name: Thunder from Down Under. Really unfortunate, that.
- César and Bob both earned the title of Nickel Slot Ho. The one-armed bandit, she sings an irresistible song. Once under her hypnotic spell, you lose your money, your house, your children…five measly cents at a time. César, of course, managed to hit a jackpot so big that the machine wouldn’t give it to him in nickels: a big flashing light summoned a casino rep, who presented him with $62.50 in more portable denominations.
Oh, and we also went to the Star Trek thing.
gratitude
The Sensible Chicken has finally been written out from beginning to end. It’s all of seventeen lines long, but I consider even that to be a major triumph over the suffocating paralysis that had been. She had somehow morphed into The Horrifying Albatross over the last several months. On the day I left, I got a call from Peter-in-Oxford, who was actually in Durham for a conference. He dared me to just write the damn thing out as a sixteen-line poem if I couldn’t manage to get it out as a longer prose piece. And so on the plane out west, I did. Although, as I said, it’s actually seventeen lines. Still: having successfully demonstrated that yes, I can still write things (and fending off what Jonatha Brooke has called the ‘I Suck anti-muse’), I have been writing all the time. I actually want to write, out of the blue, again. This feels good. Praise be to the muses, sweet sisters all, and to their father, for their renewed companionship. Praise be to patient friends who believe in the writers they know even when they aren’t writing. Praise be to patient friends who kick us in the ass when we need it, on vectors inspiring and inspired.
checking in
Right. Another couple of weeks go by. If I were sure there were anyone out there reading this, I’d wonder if I was worrying my audience. The upside of this, of course, is that when I don’t post anything for two weeks it’s generally because I’ve been too busy to check in. Last weekend, I was in Vegas for John’s bachelor party. Oh yes. We stayed at the Tropicana, whose glory days have passed but whose rooms are plenty clean and suitably cheap. This weekend I’m in Ithaca—not for the John-Kathleen wedding, which is next week, but for Cornell Reunions. It’s not my reunion year. The only reason I’m here is because my friend Heather is in from Sydney and demanded that I meet her for a drink, which I have now done. Don’t know if I’ll make it back up the Hill at all this weekend. Paul and I are staying with Tom and Genevieve. The house is full of animals: two dogs and two cats in permanent residence, plus a pair of (very cute and fluffy) kittens being fostered for a week or two. Charming little fluffballs. Genevieve continues to be a drop-dead fabulous cook.
The week between the weekends featured a visit from an aunt and uncle, in from California; and then Mom arrived in Long Island for a week of ‘helping out the new parents,’ which you can read as ‘making goo-goo noises at my new granddaughter.’ I went out there on Thursday to see them all. Avery is doing fabulously. At last weigh-in she was 5 pounds 12 ounces, which sounds like not so much at all but is still a pound-and-a-half more than she weighed at birth, just five weeks ago. We are very proud of her. She’s beautiful and endlessly fascinating, which is no mean feat given that she doesn’t do much beyond eating and sleeping and making little creaky noises. Her actual due date is next weekend. I feel like we should throw her some sort of ‘supposed to be your birthday’ party.