The RedMolly Picayune-Democrat

So if someone is mean and rude to you online...

...and for political reasons, you can't respond to them in kind at the original location, is it just a complete violation of all that's holy to snark at them on your blog?

I'm sure it is, but should I do it anyway?

Calling all writers

Have you turned triumph into tragedy? Are you thankful for the bad times? Are you enough of a sucker to pay $299 to have your 5-10 page "life story" published in an anthology edited by two no-name reprobates with extensive experience in the motivational speaking and nude modeling fields?

Then the Thank God I... project might be right for you!

Submit (with a proper form of payment--i.e., PayPal) your tale of woe coming in the evening and joy coming in the morning today, and your story could be included in one of these 127 (!) volumes of Deathless Prose with such titles as:

• Thank God For Accidents
• Thank God My Wife/Husband Left Me
• Thank God I Was Raped (this gets the WTF?! award)
• That God I Was Incested (this was narrowly edged out for the WTF?! award, but receives the Audacity in Adding -Ed to a Noun to Verbify It award)
• Thank God I Don't Have Orgasms (or else what, you might blaspheme in the heat of the moment?)
• Thank God I Was/Am a Prescription Drug Addict
• Thank God I Was Burned
• Thank God My Baby Died (OMG, I could barely even type that)
• The capper: Thank God I Died (written, one assumes, with the help of a channeler and/or ouija board)
• And 118 more!

But despite the seeming comprehensiveness of this list, I think they missed a few...

• Thank Gawd My Parents Are/Were Cousins
• Thank God I'm A Pimp
• Thank God I Lack Bladder/Bowel Control
• Thank God I Was Castrated
• Thank God I Have Lice
• Thank God I'm In Gitmo

So don't delay... put pen to paper (and funds to PayPal) today! Thanks to the inimitable gin-swilling Miss Snark for pointing out this worthwhile project.

The Song #7 phenomenon

I hate when people say "I don't believe in [aliens, psychics, angelic visitations, immuno-crystal-thought therapy], but this particular [kidnapping of my Aunt Rhonda by Little Gray Men, prediction that I will meet the man of my dreams while in the hospital recovering from West Nile virus, apparition of a heavenly figure hovering above my Weber grill, miraculous recovery from anal fistulae whilst being massaged with chunks of energized amethyst] really has something to it."

But anyway. I don't believe in numerology, but my personal discovery of the Song #7 Phenomenon has something to it.

The seventh song on an album is Always Good, and it is quite frequently the Best Damn Song on the Record.

Cases in point:

• "And It Rained All Night" is the 7th song on The Eraser (Thom Yorke, duh).
• "Chicago" is the 7th song (if you don't count the weird little sub-one-minute snippets) on Illinoise.
• 7th song on The White Album? "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."
• 7th song on Sigur Ros' Ágætis Byrjun: "Viðrar vel til loftárása." (And you can't tell me that song doesn't ROCK the freakin' HOUSE. If I ever have a band, I'm TOTALLY going to make up lyrics in an unknown language.)
• On the Pixies' Doolittle: "Monkey Gone to Heaven." Verily, if the devil is six, then God is seven. And this song is also seven.

So you see, this truism holds true. And therefore numerology is true. And since numerology predicts (through the mysterious forces of Psychic Knowledge!) angelic visitations and the like, then psychics, angelic visitations and the whole shootin' match are also true.

Phooey. There goes my rationo-skeptic view of the universe. Gotta go burn a sheep on an altar and read the future in the cracks on its scapulae now. Whee! (I'll let you know if anything big is happening in the next week.)

A Rhys-ism

Int.--Newman kitchen--Morning.
Rhys enters the kitchen, clad in underpants. His hand is jammed down his waistband.

MAMA: Hey, pants-digger.
RHYS: Why'd you call me "pants-digger?"
MAMA: 'Cause you're digging around in your pants.
RHYS: No, I'm not! I'm just lookin' for bugs.

And the reason you're not getting a photo of this (other than that I didn't take one, and it's a little gross): I checked out my stats tracker yesterday and discovered that a disturbingly large number of hits on this post were coming from Google image searches for "sh!rtless boy$" (txtspk to try to confound those rotten perverts). Ugh. So I edited that post to remove the word "sh!rtless" and am hoping to prevent this disgusting problem in future.

What I shoulda done is replaced the picture of sh!rtless Fisher with one of sh!rtless Jack Black (which is what the original post was referring to anyway). Hah. That'd serve 'em right. Since they all probably look like sh!rtless Jack Black anyway...

Trying to find a balance; trying to build a balance

...as Slug, of Atmosphere, would say.

You may have noticed (or not) the relative paucity, both quantitative and qualitative, of posts on this blog lately. Sadly, this is not because I'm saving up for some grand denouement, some piece de resistance, some other inappropriately accentless French phrase. Nope... more like I just don't know what to do with my (blog) . (As Jack White, of the White Stripes, would say in paraphrase.)

I kinda would like to talk about writing more. But I doubt anyone really cares that much. Or politics. But I have nothing especially innovative to say on the subject, and I tend to lapse into rants. Or food/wine, but I would sort of like to hold on to that and mayhap turn it into a paying gig (at least paying in food/wine). Or music, but I'm already sort of embarrassed at my lack of progress in learning to play my bass (31st birthday present. Wanna hear "Debaser" by the Pixies? No? How 'bout "Braineaters" by the Misfits? At this point, as performed by me, they both sound pretty damn much the same.).

The summer doldrums have hit, but hard. But I already blogged about the heat, at great length, and y'all already know it's freakin' hot, so I'll spare you anything else about it. Except this: 113 in Stockton yesterday. One hundred and freakin' thirteen degrees. And this: 103 in Portland yesterday. Yep, the city to which I plan to move to escape the heat. Well, thank heaven for CO2 emissions--looks like we'll have a jolly toasty planet soon no matter to which rain-lashed metropolis we try to escape.

Really, I would like to talk more about writing. And books. Would you read that? Would you care? Ought it to matter to me? It does matter, and I read and cherish every one of your comments, darlings.

And now, a gratuitous photo of Fisher:

's hot, um, yeah

Difficult to be articulate in 100-plus heat. Well, they say it's only 100 today, with loftier temp heights expected tomorrow, but you know how reliable "they" are.

Yes, it's another balmy freakin' summer day here in Stockton, California. Weird: there was a storm last night feat. thunder, lightning, etc. Sadly not weird: doesn't appear to have impacted today's hotness at all, though it was uncharacteristically humid earlier. Bleahhhhh. Rather than walk in the heat, I drove the BLT to Starbucks. Which is not quite three blocks away from my parents' house. Just doing my little part to contribute to global warming, that's right. (N.B.: I would've suffered through the walk anyway if I wouldn't have had to carry a very large, very black computer bag on my back. Do you still love me, Al Gore?)

This is the strange thing about Stockton: I am always expecting to run into people from  high school at any moment here. And I never do. I always feel like my hair needs to be minimally well-groomed, my clothing clean and at least vaguely flattering, etc... yet on the one occasion I did run into someone I knew well back in the day, I was grossly overdressed for the occasion (and she spent the next two hours telling me how terrible everyone from high school looks now; I can only assume the next time she ran into a high school buddy, she includes me in her litany of Wow, She's Gone Downhill). Where are you, friends and nemeses of yesteryear?

The Portland trip was a series of stories, starting with "my parents need a GPS system" and ending with me calling the desk clerk at the Jupiter Hotel and shrieking "THIS IS BULLSHIT!" into his unsuspecting ear. But I will tell them another time, since right now there are two people playing with a quarter at the table next to me (for "playing," read "throwing it on the floor apparently for the sheer joy of the noise") and I am having trouble hearing myself think, let alone composing complete sentences.

And now there is a corporate-approved, foamy-yet-brainfreezy coffee Frappuccino with an extra shot of espresso calling my name...

Back to Junction on Friday. Sixteen hours in the car with the comedy team of Newman and Newman performing their patented variety of carseat-bound pratfalls in the back seat.

Why is this girl excited?

And also this boy?

Because the new Thom Yorke solo album The eraser. just became officially iTunes-available today. And they are downloading it as we speak, um, er, post. And then they will listen to it on their trip to Portland, Santa Cruz and Stockton, for which they are leaving at 6 'n tha mornin' tomorrow.

That is why. That is all.

The joy of revision

So, somehow, from my first draft to my third draft, this is what happened to the mysterious sorceress' abode:

First Draft

It was a cold room, the crumbling stones of the walls seemingly untouched by the heat of the brazier. Milos fidgeted on the wooden stool, hooking and unhooking his ankles around its rungs. He rested his elbow briefly atop a stack of books, but jerked it back at the thought of their delicate pages crumbling. He strained his eyes to see as far back as he could into the shadows that cloaked the room’s corners.

The flayed hide of some unknown beast was tacked out on a table against the opposite wall. He squinted at it, trying to decide what sort of animal it could have been. Its skin was both scaly and hairy, its limbs long in proportion to its body. Something about it seemed bizarrely wrong; scrutinizing it again, he realized it had six legs. He turned away, feeling a little sick, and tried to find something more mundane on which to rest his eyes.

 

Current Draft

The room was small but not unpleasant. A rug of plaited and green-dyed straw covered the pitted floorboards, and framed engravings illustrating the monuments of the Old Empire hung in neat rows on the walls. The fat-bellied woodstove, unused at this time of year, stood open with a spray of dried herbs and flowers resting on its grate. A flowered curtain divided a sleeping alcove from the rest of the room; it was pushed back just far enough that he could see the heaps of embroidered cushions littering the netting-draped bed.

 

Vive le difference... also, watch for an exciting announcement probably later on today.

--- of the Day

Adjectives:
Joycean.
Sybaritic.

News:
Trying to decide if I should or shouldn't tell my friend something I know that is very terrible and that I wish I did not know.

Quote:
"I would say the world's in terrible shape, but I'm afraid the world would say, 'Look who's talking!' " -Mama Cass

Mood:
Fragile with a chance of tearstorms.

Flavor:
Dentyne Fire cinnamon gum, which is not nearly as good as Orbit cinnamon gum (which they are apparently no longer making, damn them)

Song:
"Close Edge," Mos Def ("... Don't push me
'Cuz I'm close - to the streets,
to the beats, the bitches, the niggaz,
the women, the children, the workers,
the killers, the addicts, the dealers
the quiet, the livest, the realest
- And that's close" )

Recipe for disaster!

Well, no. Not at all, really.

But "Recipe for Shrimp and Fresh Corn Risotto" just lacked that punch, I thought.

'Tis below the fold, along with some exciting news about staying up 'til sunrise...