Frantic. The family dinner approaches. I help my mother in the kitchen. There is bread to be baked. She hasn’t let it rise enough though. The dough is runny and won’t hold its shape. I try to say something but she insists that there’s not enough time. She pours out three loaves that run into each other. She uses slices of bell peppers to try and make them hold their shape but it doesn’t work. It smells of yeast, just like it should, but the dough runs over the sides of the baking pans.
Closing the lid on this laptop for the long weekend. Off to Philadelphia with my dad and brother for some NCAA lacrosse tournament action. (Call it a pilgrimage.) Going through my final checklist to make sure that I get myself good and packed. Don’t want to forget the sunscreen like last year.
It’ll be a good trip for a lot of reasons. I need the break.
currently playing: Cardinal “Bodyslide (Crystal Method remix)”
HoL-ish underground (but probably more Moria than Navidson). Myself and two others. One is behind me the entire time; I feel his (her?) presence but (s)he is invisible, always an over-the-shoulder glance away and side-stepping even that. The other is a wizened elder. We’ve stumbled into this underground labyrinth, tome open, exploring. I’d had no idea that the book on my shelf all these years was the secret to navigating the halls beneath. Cryptic phrases, not always complete, and in a long dead language that I don’t understand. The old man does. He explains that each page holds a riddle buried in anagrams or other text puzzles. Some of the pages we need to find the clue by spelling out new phrases from the first letters of each word that begin each line on the page. Other times the clues lie in deciphering the missing words. Several times the old man draws lines on the pages, boxing in (or out) specific sections. Or highlighting them. It seems like desecration but we navigate deeper in the maze than anyone else before us, some unseen threat looming ever larger.
Completed draft two of my novel this evening. This round of revisions brings us to 340 pages and 80,625 words. Respectable. Smoothed out some edges, touched up the prose, rounded out some dialogue… All the stuff you’d expect from revisions. I’d say it’s time for another read of my own but I need reader feedback first. (Doesn’t even need to be all that detailed…)
Anyhoo - - seems another couple weeks off of the project for “space” seems in order. But it feels like this one might really work.
currently playing: Broken Social Scene “Pacific Theme”
The Wrangled Method
(Last Played is in the last 7 days; Limit to 10 songs selected by most often played.)
- Psykosonik “The Breathing Room” (191)
- The Postal Service “Such Great Heights (John Tejada Remix)” (187)
- Psykosonik “Secret Life” (177)
- Depeche Mode “Everything Counts (Live)” (171)
- Atomica “Delorian” (154)
- Interpol “Leif Erikson” (151)
- The Smiths “Pretty Girls Make Graves” (151)
- Psykosonik “Unlearn” (148)
- The Smiths “What Difference Does It Make?” (147)
- Spylab “This Utopia” (147)
* Inspired by Pete’s Wrangle Challenge.
currently playing: Faith No More “Evidence”
currently playing: Interpol & Carlos D “Public Pervert (Carlos D Remix)”
Comic book shop in a mall, clearly constructed in the 1980s; garish and wild and cheaply constructed. There for a limited edition hand drawn, signed first run Mega-Tokyo; pencils and ink. Background: video testimonial by a Howard Stern look-a-like; in one scene he’s all long hair and leather jacket and then he’s at the bottom of a well, all short hair and looking more like Danny Howells. Haggling over the price of the comic; here to claim it as rightfully mine. No discounts, they reply. Caught them: what about the kid before me? (He’d been given three things for free.) The owners explain that it’s the kid’s history, it’s that the kid was returning something, it’s that they were making good to a long-time client (the kid). The owners look like a latter-day Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They know they’re caught but they’ll make a best evasive effort just the same.
26-04-1986.com: Flash heavy site but full of beautiful (if utterly haunting) images taken in [tag]Chernobyl[/tag] to comemmorate the event. There are some images of [tag]derelict[/tag] [tag]military equipment[/tag] that give me surprisingly more shivers than the images of the empty radioactive orphanage. (At least I assume it’s an orphanage.)
Previously on F_D: 20 Years of Chernobyl
