Butterflies

I had the boys at the playground yesterday (their usual one, the closest one where so many of their peers play), and B1 ran into his Best Girl (a lot of girls really like B1, because he's very sweet and earnest and cute, but Best Girl loves him most of all, is always writing him valentines and what-not). Anyway, she saw him and called him over to the swing with her, and she said "How do you like my new sundress, [B1]?" and he swung on his own swing beside her (they were swinging in tandem) and he said "It looks like it might attract butterflies." -- he said it in the most earnest way possible. It was so adorable. She ate that up with a spoon! They then played a bunch of Tag, Hide-N-Seek, and some intense Rock, Paper, Scissors.

The funny thing for me was the last time we were at the playground, a butterfly landed on me (which they do sometimes, go figure), and I told B1 that sometimes if I wore certain-colored shirts, butterflies seemed to land on them. So, I imagine B1 just processed that and delivered that picture-perfect line without it even being a line* -- he just logically deduced that her lavender, pink, and baby blue sundress was colorful enough to attract butterflies, and told her so. Super-cute!

*Disclaimer: Lest the Gender Police haul me in, I don't endorse or believe in delivering lines, but in that sense of saying just the right thing at the right moment, B1 completely had it, ergo me terming it as a "line" in this context.

LOST and Found

Judging from what I read about the LOST finale, I'm so glad I stopped watching it after the first 1.5 seasons -- I felt the cop-outtery of it back then, the sense of the writers making it up as they went along and yanking the viewers. Plus, in a situation like the setup, it seemed pretty clear that everybody was dead and didn't know it, yet, right? Anyway, I'm sure a lot of people will be peeved at the ending, which couldn't help but dissatisfy, since the show depending on spackling mystery atop enigma atop intrigue atop paradox -- all to keep the advertising dollars rolling in as people waded through it. I lost LOST long ago and don't feel any sense of loss for it, either.

I wonder what effect it'll have on television programming in the future, if any? It's the kind of gag a television writer can only really get away with once, without it being too derivative. In a weird way, the land where anything can happen is almost the same as the land where nothing happens. Part of what makes the uncanny great is when it happens in a setting where you know something totally shouldn't be happening, where it can't be happening -- the "super" in the supernatural.

Had to laugh with GAWKER on this (since it's a complaint I've made a few times)...

We learned nothing from two-and-a-half hours of slow-motion bullshittery backed with a syrupy soundtrack.

So, the show made its money, did its job. On to the next distraction, whatever that may be! Maybe a television show about a television show, and the actors and writers who make it?!

Speaking of that, "So You Think You Can Dance?" starts this week! My favorite "reality" show! Apparently they're bringing back winning dancers from the previous seasons to pair up with the contestants this year (I think that's the case, anyway), so that should be fun. Love seeing dancers get their proper due on a prime-time show. Go, dancers!

Whew

Over 9000 words written this weekend, trying to wrap up the screenplay. I still think the story's trending more toward Action/Suspense/Thriller than out-and-out Horror, but what can I do? It'll be what it'll be. Still have a little over a week to iron it all out.

Soccerday

Yesterday was a beautiful day, weatherwise. Well, it was foggy late into the morning, but the temperatures were nice, and it became sunny and was gorgeous and mild. Very nice.

Exene stayed behind with B2 (both of them are sick -- Exene more so, with some kind of tonsillitis thing going on; B2 just has a bit of bronchitis), while I took B1 to his soccer game. His team lost (1-2), which is a rarity for his team. He was fine with it -- he doesn't care. Afterwards, there was a tailgating party hosted by one of the parents, but B1 wasn't interested in that, was more interested in walking on the rocks on the lakeshore, so we did that. It was fun to explore that with him -- I could tell he really enjoyed that. I tried to teach him how to skip stones, and we watched schools of fish. A soccer girl his age hung around in the distance, watching us. She was this quiet tomboy, hopping back and forth on the stones above and behind us, but she was fascinated by our activities on the shore, our talking and stone-skipping, judging from her reaction. I don't think B1 even saw her. Then a group of boys ran up to B1 and said "Hey, I know that guy" to B1 (he didn't know who the other boys were, but those kids all went to his school), and then the tomboy disappeared, while the boys got into adventures on the rocks. If she hadn't been wearing a soccer uniform, I'd have thought she was a ghost! I don't think the AYSO supports ghosts, however.

After that, I took B1 to McD's for a bit to eat, and then we took the bus home. I took a lot of photographs. I'm glad the city hasn't replaced all the massive stones on the lakeshore (like it did further south). The stones are wonderful, they really make the shore fun.

Going home, I watched the original "The Vanishing" -- a quietly creepy European (Dutch, I think) flick that might qualify as a horror movie, but in a very real-world kind of way, nothing supernatural.

I wrote over 4000 words yesterday, working on the screenplay for the deadline (looming, now). Today I'm going to try to get the rest of it done.

Double Down

I had one of those KFC Double Down meatwiches after work today. Had to be done! Once. I joked years ago when the Atkins Diet was the rage that people needed to start making sandwiches using meatloaf for "bread" -- the Double Down is not unlike that, using two chicken breasts as the bread.

When Harry Met Andy

Andy Warhol using an Amiga computer to "paint" Debbie Harry.

I SHOULD be sleeping.

I'm awake for the moment. Up past my bedtime. Gonna be wiped tomorrow, for sure! I just watched a movie, am thinking about it a bit. Thinkin' about lotsa stuff. I love how quiet it gets -- there's just this kind of thrumming purr to the city right now, that nice urban hum. I like that. When we moved from the east side of the building to the west, I thought I'd miss the sunrises, but I really don't -- I like seeing the buildings at night; they're fun.

Decayed

Funny to think I'll have been at my current employer for ten (10) years at the start of next month. I remember when I reached the four-year point, thinking "Wow, I've never worked anywhere more than four years before..." -- and here I am, nearing the 10-year mark. I came into it a dewy-eyed 30-year-old with dreams of editorial grandeur (bahah -- yeah, right -- at the time I had no job, having left the other place I'd worked about six months before, so the Asylum served its purposes admirably, back in the day, although I remember thinking "This is the last 925 Grind job I'll ever have.") and will leave it a gimlet-eyed 40-year-old with far bigger dreams (and having seen all sorts of oddities and wonders at the Asylum -- all of which will be transformed and explored in fiction at a time of my choosing). Anyway, I definitely hope to get my 10-year pin before I flee the Asylum.

Led Zeppelin, "Ten Years Gone"

It's just funny to look back on the Year 2000, when I was 30. At age 30, I didn't write fiction seriously (sure, I did as a teen, and wrote my first "real" book at 29, but it doesn't hold a candle to the work I do now -- I've worked long and hard and have gotten better). I didn't have any children, yet (B1 appeared in 2002, B2 in 2005). Didn't yet own a home (did that in 2001). I got fully serious about my fiction-writing in February of 2002 (remember it vividly, writing in a journal -- I always kept journals -- something like "I can just keep going the rest of my life this way, without doing what I really want to do, without creating anything. Just existing." From that moment, I got very serious about my writing, and applied myself to the task). I was untested as a parent and as a father at 30, and found not only that I enjoyed it, but that I was actually good at it. I can't remember the exact point when I zeroed in on Exene as a major source of frustration and woe in my world -- I think it had to have been when the boys entered the picture, unfortunately. By 2004 or 2005, my teeth really began to gnash. 2005-2007 was when I started my first proper blogs, before burning out on them. It's weird to think of the period from 2002-2006 -- those are kind of Lost Years for me, because so much of that time was spent taking care of the kids and working. From 2001-05 we owned The Black House, and I had a daily 3-hour commute by train, which made my workday incredibly long -- although I wrote a huge amount of material on those long trainrides, made them work for me). I wrote a lot of review on Amazon in 2006 and 2007. And 2008, oh, my -- the Year Everything Changed. The Point of No Return. And 2009, the Limbo after that -- like the bomb detonates and then there's a pile of emotional rubble. And then it's quiet.

Anyway, it's 2010, now I'm 40, in a very different place than where I was. The same, and yet completely different. Like slipping out of the prison bars of my cell but still crunching around in the gravel on Alcatraz (barefoot, of course). But hopeful, more hopeful and less angry than I've ever been before -- and, oddly, peaceful. I should be very stressed, but I'm incredibly at ease, and I think it's because I'm doing what I want to do, instead of doing what I think I'm supposed to be doing, am trying to make myself happy instead of trying to make Exene happy (which was a fucking full-time job, without overtime pay).

I'll step out of the Asylum for something else -- ideally (god, yes) I can sell a screenplay and buy myself a year or three to write more. Long odds, but I'll try hard. Either way, if I find another Grind job that'll have me, it'll be only temporary, because I know what I want to do and where I belong. In a real way, I always knew, but I just didn't believe I had anything worthwhile to contribute, or was so busy trying to create worlds for Exene's amusement that I didn't have time to create my own. God, the wasted creativity of those years. Amazing, in truth. But I still have plenty of energy, am in my prime with plenty of time.

This-and-that

Mild and pleasant day today. Foot still hurts. Blah!

I got B1 an old Waterworks game -- got the 1970s version I played as a kid. It's the card came you play where you're supposed to complete a length of pipe. He LOVES it. But I knew he would. We played like five times last night (by his request). Very cute to see him enjoying that so much. I forget what made me think he'd love it -- something he saw, was fascinated by. My Dwarvish boy, fascinated by pipes! If he doesn't end up a doctor, he's sure to be an engineer or maybe an architect. Something like that. He's so sweet and smart and serious and sensitive.

I'm going to write the new screenplay in the next few days. I only have two weeks to get it done, but it should be only about 12,000 words, judging from how long the original one took, and I should be able to get that done, although I'm going to have to work hard on it. Time is running out! I'm determined to make the deadline, however. If I lose the competition, I'm gonna be peevish. We'll see.

Little Big Head

Okay, this blog title and concept cracks me up.

Eureka!

I figured out a solution to the screenplay problem, a way to spin the story off in a new (and very nasty) way. Muahah! It was a synthesis of two ideas I had, and the fusion of them alloys into something new and horrific! Or should I say "terrific?" Baha!

Whew. Glad my brain woke up today, as I was really stuck. But I got it. I have 15 days to get it done.

Tired

I'm worn out today. Not enough sleep, just tired. One of the pillars for me, definitely.

It's gorgeous out today -- cool and wonderfully sunny. Just very pleasant. Hopefully the summer will be nice.

Sent a query out to a literary agent on a whim -- just a name I ran across, somebody who might be interested in one of my books. We'll see. Odds are long, as ever, but one has to try!

I had such a good horror screenplay idea yesterday, the whole thing just unfolded perfectly, but the concept has already been done, and so I have to figure some way of altering the setup enough that it can't be said to be derivative of the source material. People do this all the time (just compare, say, "The Matrix" with "Monsters, Inc." and you'll see).

Yawn. Too tired today. Lordy. I wasn't even up so late (10:30, maybe?) I woke up at 5:18, so I don't know why I'm so sleepy. Better not be fighting a cold or something.

Spacing Out

I am not agoraphobic, but years of city living has made me realize just how much I love urban living, and how much the suburbs skeeve me out. The four years of home ownership in Indiana (2001-05) were a very stressful time for me, but those silent nights, with only the coyotes crazy-yipping and the trains howling in the incredible dark (and silence) really creeped me out. The city feels much safer to me than the suburbs -- those endless developments, the big and lonely homes with their silence.

Years ago, as a teen in my high school library, before even being aware of my "city boy" sensibility, I remember being creeped out by this picture...

It's a shot of the German Wehrmacht invading Russia, crossing the endless steppe. And the expanse of it, that endless plain, well, it horrifies me on a very deep level. There are other shots in this series, that'll show this column of tanks just grinding across that plain, but the steppe is infinitely vaster than the tanks, and it's haunting, that nothingness. It's just too much, and too little. I remember training through Montana, seeing that, too -- I'd see this lone house with absolutely nothing around it (well, Nature, of course, but nothing else) and would wonder how people could live there without going batshit-crazy.

I've posted this before (maybe on another blog?) but Palmyra Atoll, a very remote little place in the South Pacific, a satellite photograph of it gave me the willies, too -- the inky dark of the Pacific Ocean, just a few feet from swallowing up this atoll once and for all...


I hyperlinked a kayak ride to that atoll in the above picture. I think they're approaching from the right-hand side, judging from the lay of the land, what little there is of it. Anyway, you can see this unfriendly little atoll, dark and mysterious, rain-soaked. I've put more than a few short stories out on lonely little islands like that.

I'm sure it's tied to an instinctive sociability that is inherent in human beings on some level, but that isolation is just very creepy. Give me something for my eyes to fix on -- mountains, forests, rolling hills. Don't give me featureless plains or thumbprints of fading land in a giant, endless ocean of unimaginable depths and dangers.

I've never felt in danger in the city. But living out in the countryside, I've felt that Gothic kind of dread, the sameness, the emptiness, the lifeless houses, and above all, the wasted space. It didn't help that the years at "The Black House" were filled with weirdness and uncanny things, of course, but still, it creeps me out.