project 365 #176: tripped out wildflowers

project 365 #176: tripped out wildflowers
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday SUCKED. This is Monday's picture which was blurry & boring so I tweaked it into a sort of mid 60s album cover thingie. Monday was okay as far as I recall. I was tired. I went to work. I ate polenta and mushrooms for dinner and read most of The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks which reminded me that Iain M. Banks is one of the best writers around. Wait, was that the night that I watched that hilarious Harpies show on the Sci Fi channel? That was brilliantly awful. I mean really bad. I mean so atrocious it was fantastic.

But yesterday was Tuesday, which, as I may have mentioned, SUCKED, went like this:
1. Car insurance cancelled out of the blue, rendering me afraid to drive.
2. Turns out I hadn't paid my car insurance in several months because, well, I'm a dysfunctional idiot and I sort of forgot.
3. Had to borrow S' car and drive out to Arden and give the insurance people THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS. Rendering me broke as hell.
3a. Good thing I hadn't gotten around to buying the new tires that money was earmarked for.
4. Now my car is legal again but still totally unsafe what with the bald damn tires and all.

project 365 #132: gas station at night

project 365 #132: gas station at night
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

I went out for a couple of drinks with my friend J last night at Broadways and there was a huge rainbow over Town Mountain. That was nice, although the pictures of it, which can be seen here, sadly aren't so great. Ah well. Then I came home, stopping first at the liquor store where I spent vast amounts of money on vodka and rum, thus ensuring that my moving crew will be a very happy moving crew (if N and I don't drink it all before next week, which is a disheartening possibility, alas) and picked up beaucoups de boxes. Those boxes are now all over the house and I'm packing and tossing books. I think I can live without Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh (in 90% of Ngaio Marsh books, btw, the murderer is a sex starved spinster. Yet another reason why celibacy is just so BAD for one.) but I need Dorothy Sayers and Marjorie Allingham. And Steven Brust and of course Tim Powers but not Sean Russell or Robert Heinlein, although I am saving Podkayne of Mars, god help me.

The books are filthy and I'm covered with grunge and that weird crud that gets all over books. What IS that stuff? No, wait, it's possible I don't want to know.

The Holidays Are, In Fact, Totally Over

I finally feel normal again; the holidays have left and it's back to the grindstone, return to the salt mines and/or whatever the hell that big spinning wheel thing is that Conan had to push for 20 years. Or something like that. I mean, I worked last week and the week before, but I didn't WORK work, if you get my drift. It all seemed fragile and inconsequential somehow, and then this weekend I took all the holiday decorations down and bingo: back to normal. Or what passes for normal around here, which is, I grant you, not all that goddamn normal.

In Little, Big (this is my one, my all time, my ultra favorite book, which I think we have covered about a squillion times in this blog) there's a passage about how holidays exist in a self contained time frame, essentially out there on their own. There's a lot of truth to that theory: Christmases and New Years seem to follow one upon the other without an intervening year, but the minute the holiday spell is over they seem impossibly distant. I mean New Years Eve occurred on a complete different planet, I think, but I remember the second week of December just fine. I couldn't remember it last week, when I was still in holiday mode, but now it's coming in loud and clear.

I like the idea that time can be chopped up into pieces: discrete portions of time that relate to each other but not to the surrounding time. Like a photo with only part in focus - ideally, holidays make you focus on the center while the rest just slides away for a while. Of course, if the center will not hold that's a problem and things fall apart (HA! Check out those high school reading list references! And my son claims people never use their education.)which is possibly what happened this year. But time - years, decades - have passed since Christmas and I've forgotten all the stress and I think next year, when I will do exactly the same things, will be better.

My Friends

Three days, 10 hours, 2 minutes and 6 seconds. 34 cigarettes not smoked, saving $6.84. Life saved: 2 hours, 50 minutes.

My cigarettes were my evil friends who helped me get through the rough times by doing bad things. You know, the best kind of friends. The kind of friends who, as the T-shirt says, can't bail you out of jail because they're in the cell next door. Now I'm sad and lonely without them. And boring. I'm getting boring and less cool already, I can tell. I know it's boring you. And I don't even promise to make it - it's entirely possible that I'll be back smoking like the proverbial chimney by tomorrow night. I keep thinking I can't make it even one more minute so we'll see.

We'll see.

Meanwhile, so that this blog isn't all just one of those horrible quit smoking do gooder blogs, here is a nifty link to a variety of funky free images, always handy.

And, here is a book review: WILHELMINA BAIRD TOTALLY ROCKS! Unfortunately, like so many other authors I suddenly discover and fall madly in love with, she's not exactly prolific (drat. Drat drat drat drat.) and I just read the three Crashcourse books. SF Reviews says it isn't a masterpiece, and I beg to differ. Okay, it's more of a pulp fiction, fastpaced masterpiece than, say, As I Lay Dying or something, but shit, come ON. It's WAY more fun to read, goes faster and you don't have to deal with some annoyingly over serious reader's guide in the back. And also the main character has TWO boyfriends and all three of them are fairly happy together for the most part, even though in the course of the three books one boyfriend dies and is replaced with another, vastly better boyfriend, and all I have to say is that this situation sounds eminently satisfactory to me. Hubris, I know, since considering that I can't even seem to get ONE boyfriend I sort of have a lot of nerve suddenly demanding TWO but, well, what the hell. Might as well shoot for the moon. At any rate get & read the books. They're brilliant.

My Dream House

house on the lake
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

So I finally figured out where I want to live for the rest of my life and here it is, perched in the middle of a lake, or, well, okay, more like a pond, outside Black Mountain near Camp Rockmont. I went up there today on a work field trip to a quarry which was actually a very awesome way to spend a morning and on the way I saw this fabulous and wonderful thing. I begged my kind boss to stop and let me take a picture and she obliged while I salivated all over the road. I want to live here SO bad. I want to have geraniums in a window box under that window; I want a woodstove for the winters and I will be SET. I just really can't imagine a nicer place to be.

It's a lot like the Moomin's bathing hut, where Too Ticky lives in the wintertime, but a little bigger, so there'd be room for me and a dog. Alas no room for the kids, what a terrible pity - just me and a cat and a dog. And a fishing pole and a good book. Heaven on earth.

A Book Thing

This is going to be one of those posts where I talk about books, which posts I know are never very popular, but tough skivvies, people, because books are what I feel like discussing. So don't be fooled by the sunflower, which is just there to add, you know, a bit of visual interest and also because I am so deeply enamoured of that particular peachish shade of virtually orange where the pink and yellow start to melt together. All the sunflowers in my garden are blooming right now, which is a) awesome because it always is, yet b) sucks because I was hoping they would all bloom the first weekend in August when I have a bunch of people coming to my house and c) is downright peculiar, because in an effort to prolong the blooming season, I planted them all at different times over the course of about 4 weeks.

But. Wait. Books. A couple of weeks ago I was in the downtown library, rushing as always because I have this bad habit of parking in the illegal 15 minute loading zone out front and I grabbed a book at random off the shelf called The Chymical Wedding. I am prone to fits of alchemy and I even know what the hell a chymical wedding is, so I thought, okay, that looks cool. The downtown library, unlike the West Asheville library, is not organized by genre, which I applaud in general as being less ghettoizing, but it does mean that you really don't know what you're getting, whereas in the West Asheville library you can (and I do) just go straight to the fantasy/sf section and stand there glumly for a bit because you hate Anne McCaffrey. Anyhow I took The Chymical Wedding home and discovered. . . that I'd already read it. Of all the books in the library, and so on.

I barely remember it, and I don't know when I read it, but I know that I did. So because I have this Zen Therapist I decided that this odd finding of the book was Meaningful (it's kind of a Meaningful Book, if you know what I mean) and meant that I had to reread it. Which I am doing, and so far all it's doing is bugging the hell out of me, because what it seems to be, really, is a poor man's The Magus. Now The Magus blew my small mind and changed my life and generally freaked me out and radicalized me and sent me on a strange and lifelong path - I read it for the first time when I was about 17 and I've read it a bunch of times since. That may be because it's just way, way better than The Chymical Wedding which so far is about a poet whose wife had an affair which wigged him right out and sent him headlong into the country where he naturally has a friend who loaned him this faboo cottage (why don't I have friends with faboo cottages in the country, I ask you? And why is it that English poets always do?) where promptly he starts getting Green Man intimations and meets a strange gypsyish American babe and then there are flashbacks to 100 years ago and Tarot cards, because there are always Tarot cards and a sheila na gig on the church and so on and so forth and if I remember correctly there will be all kinds o' weird Corn God type bloody wickerish goings on in the next 300 pages or so. But then I am jaded. Still, I shall persevere.

In the middle of this book, because it's hard to stay deeply interested in it, I picked up a book I had gotten A for Christmas (also on a whim, just at Malaprops this time) and which she told me I had to read. The book is My Year of Meats, and you should go right out right now and read it. It isn't science fiction, relax, or rather don't, because it's not relaxing but instead intense and funny and incredible and will make you never want to eat meat again while you are cogitating on women's rights and the differences and similarities between the Japanese and the Americans and so on. I mean it is fucking brilliant. I mean it is great and not only is it all that but the author's note in the back is funny and cogent and made me think for a long time about the writing of novels, the intersections of fiction and meaning and politics and I am invigorated.

Because good fiction, boys and girls, like sunflowers, sometimes has this tendency to burst in your mind all at once despite the date it was planted. Good fiction, like The Magus, like My Year of Meats, has so much going on that it's going to take a while to simmer in the back of your brain. Which has all made me think about why I am so determined to write fiction even though I am old and have so far demonstrated no discernible staying power for the task. But maybe that will change, because I'm thinking now about those intersections of meaning and story, which are the cornerstones of good fiction, and really, you know, of good lives.

A Few Vague Unrelated Things

First, the Computer
My computer is fucking up all over the place and I'm scared. I was working a couple of hours ago (working on one thrice damned .jpg, pixel by fucking pixel, mind you) when my computer just suddenly completely shut itself off, blam, kaboom, no warning. And my cable internet has been erratic at best lately; it seems like I have to reboot the modem every single time I turn on the computer and sometimes it just goes off randomly in the middle of what I'm doing. During this cable internet down time, by the way, the lights on the modem flash madly, which worries me. Add to this the fact that in the last three weeks my printer AND my monitor both died and signs point to ominous. I'm scared. I need computer help. My computer is 3 years old and I know, that's 90 in human years (similar to dog years, computer years are set at a 30:1 ratio with human years) but I neeeeeeeed it to keep on working. Argh.

Some Random Notes On Photography and Dreams
My camera, as we know, is something of an obsession. I like to take it everywhere, but alas, this is just not possible, since it's big and bulky and not necessarily easy to carry without either a) looking like a complete touristic doofus or b) worrying the entire time that it's going to get scrunched or smushed or, gods forbid, stolen. Sometimes both a and b apply. So I don't always take it with me. Inevitably, when I don't have it, photogenic things happen all around me. Yesterday, for example, when on my way home from my mothers I got caught up in one of those oh so Asheville mountain microclimate events: to wit, there was a huge and very local thunderstorm over Biltmore Village and Biltmore Forest. The sky was utterly amazing and driving along Swannanoa River Road (wait, I don't think that's what it's called there, the portion of it on the other side of Biltmore Avenue that goes past all those concrete factories and trainyards and Victoria Road, the part that gets flooded when it rains) was even more amazing, since it was pouring sheets of rain behind the trains and over the woods that border the estate, but sunny and bright where I was, some 500 yards away. I love it when that happens. At any rate, this wishing for the camera thing must have struck deep into my subconscious, because that night I dreamt about constantly walking into places that were unbearably perfect to photograph: perfect shadows, great contrasts, amazing colors, remarkable circumstances - and, you guessed it, I didn't have the camera and it caused me much grief. Wailing and gnashing of teeth, as PG Wodehouse so famously said.

Book Review! Whee!
The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, by Alexander McCall Smith, are the literary equivalent of Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light (who I will not dignify with a link) and I find it wildly weird and offensive that they were shortlisted for the Booker.

Wait. Stop the presses. I based the above Booker information on a vaguely remembered blurb on the jacket of the first book. Googling reveals that in fact they were NOT shortlisted for the Booker prize. Doesn't look like they were long-listed either. So what were they? Well, let's google a little more. The jacket copy is: "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency received two Booker Judges' Special Recommendations and was voted one of the International Books of the Year and the Millennium by the Times Literary Supplement." Hmm. Interesting. WTF, exactly, is a Booker Judges' Special Recommendation? Googling that turns up. . . that book and that quote. Over and over again, repeated ad nauseum in every magazine and paper that reviewed it, which was a lot. Nothing else. No other book in the history of the world, apparently, has won this recommendation. Which could mean that these books are just, you know, uniquely incredible, or it could mean that Booker Judges' Special Recommendation means exactly NOTHING. Nada, zip, or possibly a couple of people who once served as Booker judges said something like "Well, yes, I do specially recommend that book - to the feebleminded." Ah advertising, PR and the endless marketing campaign. It never fails to surprise me, although not, probably, everyone else.

I wondered about this recommendation because frankly, the books SUCK. I know this because I read the first five. Why? So you won't have to! Also because my brother gave them to my mother to read during her hospitalization and I can't help myself: I'll read anything, especially when it's free for the borrowing. It is true that they have much in common with crack cocaine: you can't put them down, even when your better self is screaming Stop! Stop now!, you know how bad they are for you and they may leave some residual brain damage. I learned a lot from these books, I must say. For example, did you know that most everyone in Botswana is happy, particularly those who hew to traditional values? And that they express their values in simple sentences because, you know, they're natives and natives are so cute! Eeeurrgh. They remind me of those gruesome Jan Karon books. Warning: more Thomas Kinkade horriblity awaits you if you click that link, "gentle reader", within the Mitford books, which are not recommended for those with diabetes, since the sugar content is approximately that of a tanker truck full of coca cola syrup. The Ladies Detective Agency books are very similar, but with a creepy added overlay of colonialist paternalism. Bleck. I read them and now I wish I could scrub them off my brain.