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Today, our values are under attack. This is February 2nd, Groundhog Day, the day when all TRUE AMERICANS gather around their televisions to watch the movie Groundhog Day, starring THE SAINTED Bill Murray.
Instead, the LIBERAL MEDIA has chosen to air the Superbowl today. This is a WAR ON GROUNDHOG DAY.
CAPSLOCKETY OUTRAGE.
This is a thing that still exists in my dining room. When I made this gingerbread house over a month ago, my brother was making his own gingerbread house. His was the gingerprison known as “Santatraz,” while mine was the safehouse set up by three of the escaped inmates: a cylops and a walrusman who were the victim of experiments, and a permanently scarred soul who survived an endless conflict known only as “The War.”
The unfortunate truth about the safehouse’s south-facing bay window is that it’s also the mouth of the cannibalistic safehouse. No one mows the lawn on that side of the house and comes back alive…
I just synced my RSS feed to Goodreads, and learned that Goodreads doesn’t support WordPress’s aside format, which I’ve been using for the better part of a year in order to microblog primarily on my own site rather than on other social media (which I should also be doing, but…).
When I started the microblog, I read that in the past, users of the aside format would put an infinity symbol at the bottom of the post containing the permalink. I might have to start doing something like that as my first line. If Goodreads is turning the first line into a default title, it’s possible that other RSS readers are doing something similar.
I tend to make these poems spontaneously, and find meaning after the fact. To me, this is about imagination, which is absolutely a space beneath sight.
The Grammarly browser extension now has a feature that detects tone, or at least attempts to, in much the same, fumbling way that the Grammarly software attempts to do anything.
It labeled a flat-out rant I’d written as having an “appreciative” tone.
It also labeled a draft of my blog post on 2019 as “accusatory.” Take that, 2019!
Developing film
Soapmaking
Printmaking
This list is the intersection of:
Art forms that sound awesome and
Art forms that have caustic chemicals and
Art forms that I will not try due to anxiety.
Until I started listening to Blur again, I’d forgotten the feeling of the impending end of an entire century.
I’ve been struck by how many Blur songs use the word century, or reference its ending. In “For Tomorrow,” “he’s a 20th century boy.” In “Country House,” the city-dweller is “caught up in the century’s anxieties.” And of course, in “End of a Century,” “we kiss with dry lips when we say good night… end of a century, it’s nothing special.”
Time ends, flips inside out. We fall off a cliff and into a different world than the one we’ve known, even though it’s exactly the same, changing by events rather than by numbers. I lived almost the first half of my life in a different millenium.
Oh my God, you walked 10 minutes to the store? That’s 20 minutes round trip! Do you also pull your toenails off for fun, you maniac?
Oh my God, weight loss. I must go to the gym and burn all the calories.
My mom got me a new Fitbit for Christmas, and there is now a thing called a Sleep Score. I got a grade of 72 for a little under 6 hours of sleep last night.
I would like to be graded on a more punishing scale than this. Less bell curve, more bladed pendulum swinging from the ceiling.
Also, I read an article awhile ago that claimed 6 hours of sleep is just as bad as none. I forget what the logic was and what research it drew upon–it might have been mostly about cognitive function. But 6 hours of sleep is most certainly not as bad as none because the extent to which I feel like shit still matters.
The other day I wrote about how I ended up with a love triangle in Stars Fall Out–something that surprised me (but shouldn’t have) and made me suspicious, as I’m not typically one for romantic storylines.
There’s also another love triangle, and that’s me two-timing Stars Fall Out with its sequel, Bitter Machines.
And there’s a third one, which is me making a love triangle diagram instead of working on either book.
And a fourth one, in which I’m in a relationship with a human being and run away to my office to do all of the above.
Apparently, if you have a secret marriage and an emotional affair, relationship math dictates that you will end up with a love triangle. This came about organically with Stars Fall Out after I developed a couple of the characters more, so I think it deserves its place in the story.
But I’ve been wrestling with resolving it in a non-melodramatic way that deepens the already-existing conflict and doesn’t hijack the rest of the story, kill my ending, or kill my characters, who already have future book storylines.
I’m less confident in this excerpt than in most of the other excerpts I’ve posted. Apparently, it’s tough to write a balanced, reasonable jealous rage.
But he didn’t stop. He hauled himself through streets the color of winter’s muddy death at the hands of a vicious spring, and he came to The House by the Sea Inn.
It loomed up at the top of the hill, a fortification against everything he needed to know and didn’t want to know. His heart thudded in his chest from the exertion of the hills, and only grew heavier, faster like the chugging of machinery.
No one had told him this was where the floppy-haired glass merchant was staying, but he’d pieced it together. The last job of the Rill Ryonin bakery had been a king’s ransom of rolls. They had been sent here, and Tyatavar had been the one to make that delivery.
And after that, hours after that, they’d leaned together against the wall of the locksmith’s shop, their faces lit by firelight that could never touch them.
He had been there with her there in the thick of things, where a son-in-law should be.
This culture devalues sleep to the extent that admitting you slept well is actually met with hostility.
It’s more socially acceptable to say “God, I’m so tired today” than it is to say, “I have plenty of energy,” which will always earn you a dirty look.
If you say “Good morning” without sounding as though you’re about to take a bath with a toaster, then, well, you’re a perky fucker, aren’t you?
Eating well and exercising never get reactions like this.