"There are 51,746 words in the file."


Too bad the novel isn't done yet.

It's been a tough week for me, and I wish I were someone else, anyone else.

When I differ with people I feel wrong. Maybe not in a "right or wrong" sense, but more like the way I think isn't the right one. I see everyone around me handling things, doing things, relating to people and happy and content with their lives or willing to do something to fix them, and I despair. If I were a good person when adversity struck I'd pull myself up and do something about it. Instead, I get depressed and give up.

There's only so many things you can give up before there's nothing left.

Maybe I could do or be lots of things. Maybe I have talent or skills, but I don't have the necessary emotional strength to pursue anything. I quit easily, gladly, and wish I were better. It's been a rough week and everyone I've looked at and everything I've seen just reinforces how out of it I am. I don't fit in well with anyone or anything, have nothing but ego and pride.

I just lost my ring. I'd been playing with it and had it loose on my finger when I tossed something across the room and it flew off. I feel naked, though not particularly vulnerable.

A cool thing about dreams is how someone is "introduced" as being my best friend. A total stranger shows up in my dreams, sometimes, but in the dream he or she is my friend or lover or whatever and I never question it. I think that's neat, and consider it meaningful, like there's one part of our brain that stores associations and another that perceives things and this is proof that they can get crossed up.

In the dream, for some reason, I had a test of determining what was wrong with the garage. I had three flares to use to find out the problem. I punctured a soda bottle and it spun on the floor, spraying the empty walls with water to protect against setting fire to the garage. The first flare burned on the floor and the second I had trouble figuring out how to get in my mouth (!) to heat up a tooth or something (!) to fix the roof. I went in the backyard and there were several ladders because construction was going on and used one of them and the final flare to see that there was only a sheet of plywood for the roof. No joists or framing of any kind. (another roof dream)

I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving, or holiday, or Thursday or whatever.

Eat lots of turkey, or rice, or corn (candy and otherwise), or whatever.

Look around you in wonder, and be grateful.

Russ

My site (the one you're visiting) sucks.

George Carlin points out that the word "blind" is much hotter, sexier, and meaningful than "visually impaired," which has no spirit, life, or excitement at all. PC may have some value for self-esteem, but it sure takes all the flavor and intensity out of language.

We're pretty clever now and it looks like we know everything. This identity theft stuff can be handled by buying and using shredders. When I was growing up we had an incinerator in the back yard.

Someone used my credit card a few years ago to buy some large woman's clothing. The credit card people called it fraud, which isn't nearly as dramatic.

I am really sleepy.

My host is real slow.

The other night I was driving home and glanced in the car next to mine where there was a man smoking a pipe. I don't think I've seen more than one or two guys in the last ten years doing that. Whatever happened to pipe smoking?

Cigars are, or lately were, popular, but pipe-smoking seems to have fallen completely out of favor. That's odd since I remember pipes smelling better than cigars and the sight of some guy, pipe in his mouth and usually wearing a hat and fiddling with something, is part of my experience.

Vittorio, my ex's late brother, suggested that we smoke pipes, back when I was married and we were building model railroads for his son (and ourselves). It was Vittorio's goal to become one of those guys who could keep a pipe lit for hours, and we gave it a shot for a few months.

I think I'd like to see people smoking pipes again.

I've been wrong all these years.

For quite some time now, as long as I can remember, I've been thinking that I'm lazy. I don't honestly know if I'm less apt to get off my ass and do something than other people, but many people seem to get more accomplished than I do. Then again, I run circles around others, so maybe I'm in the middle or at least the bottom third.

The thing is, though, that it's hard to overcome laziness (or inertia, if you're more comfortable with physics). There are even laws about it, so it appears that this tendency of my body to stay at rest is something that's already pretty well documented.

I can get up and move when I want or need to, of course. Perhaps it will be painful, but it can be done. My comfort in not doing so isn't because I'm lazy, however.

I don't need to overcome laziness, I just need to become industrious!

Oh, now I've done it.

So, last night I was out writing with a friend and hammering away on my AlphaSmart. Some of the keys have become a little sticky, but no big deal (and you can probably already see where this is headed).

To make things better I pulled off all the keys and cleaned the crap out. I wish the problem, now, is that I simply replaced them in the wrong places, but I've managed to make the Z and the G worse than any key was originally. They stick down, once pressed, instead of the earlier problem when other keys required more force than I cared to apply.

So now I get to use those keys once. Then, they stay pressed down and rapidly fill up lines and lines with the letter until I turn the damn thing off, pry the key back up, turn it on and doing a lot of backspacing.

Yes, I have a laptop, but the battery sucks.

Many people have a lot to say, and they say it well.

I was thinking, during the recent fires, about how interested I am in the doings of homo sapiens and how I think they're, somehow, important. I guess I have a vested interest in their survival, but I'm not convinced that makes us all that important. The fact that we can pass on news about each other doesn't make that news important, not outside our own selfish interests.

The world will get along just fine, whether or not I get a job. That scares me.

More importantly, I need to cut my hair. Again.

I think I'll go out and try writing today. I wish my laptop lasted longer on battery, but I wish for a lot of things.

Woo Hoo!

Thunder rippling across the southland! Big thunder, impressive thunder, and big, fat raindrops! We don't get many summer thundershowers in LA, and even fewer of them in November, so I'm jazzed. This is weather that's doing something!

I think it's a good day be inside and would only be better if I were making a big pot o' chili.

Dogs up and down the street are howling at the rain and thunder but Minardi is behaving himself.

I've come to terms with never kissing anyone for the rest of my life and the novel is continuing. Things are not going at all badly. The roof is holding out the water and the electricity is still on.

It's a beautiful day and I have a lot of writing to do.

Minardi is shedding all over the place and putting my new dust buster through its paces. He's not sleeping on my bed anymore so that's keeping that room cleaner, but he still hounds me all the times for treats. I've never seen such a one-track mind. He pays me attention when I have, or will get, food for him, but has determined that I'm good for little else. Whatever happened to that "I wish I was the person my dog thinks I am" stuff?

I've remembered that I've been looking for Jim Carroll's "People Who Died" song for about twenty years now. Checked a couple places but no luck :( I'll probably forget I'm looking about it again before I find it.

It amazes me that I can do so much writing without telling a story. I think the only thing I'm doing now is perparing something for the editing phase. Then again, if no interesting story develops, I won't even want to edit it. I'm reminded of writing rule #1: If it doesn't interest the author, it won't interest the reader.

There was something I was planning on talking about here.

I don't think that was it, though.

Not doing so well on the writing today, but did catch up on other things. Got half my total done and hope to do the other half when I get done here.

Got another rejection and this one pissed me off. I think it's from the Univ of Georgia and I should know better than to expect anything from the South. I guess they have a different take on "experimental" than I do since they cited "inappropriate elements" as one of the reasons for turning it down. I think I handled the situation quite well, very matter-of-factly and not at all lurid. Nobody else has said that so it shouldn't be bothering me as much as it is.

I think that leaves just one more place to turn it down before it goes out to another six.

I'm afraid to follow up on my novel, but I'll do that, too, over the weekend.

I'm throwing away all my Dixie cups.

I wish I had a job. Or, at least, money. Iggy Pop is playing this weekend in Long Beach and I don't have the money for a ticket. No one is likely to ask me out, either. I never saw him. I wonder if you still gob him.

Mowed the lawn today with the electric mower. I have no idea if that's better, worse, or neutral as far as the environment goes, but it's quieter. The trouble is, I spend as much time worrying about and moving the cord as I do actually mowing.

I got to be laptop expert just now. The one we lent out, the girl says, doesn't work. After going through all the stuff with no success she called back and let me know "it works now." Turns out the outlet she was using didn't work. She was calling from the train on her way to San Diego for the weekend. I lurve trains, but not so much the new ones.

The picketeers at the markets are much pushier than they used to be. I don't feel as sorry for them as I usually do for people having contract problems.

I'm eager to begin working on my novel, but also afraid that I'll end up empty of ideas.

This happens to me a lot, with many things. The perfect ideal I have in my mind rarely is the same thing I get once I do something about it. Shoes don't shine as well as I think they should, dinners don't come out as planned, construction projects fail to be square and true, things like that.

Before I do my writing (or whatever), I haven't failed. After I start something, I can screw it up. One of the ways I handle this tendency -- and it's not a good one -- is to avoid starting. As long as I haven't tried to make my dreams real, they're still glorious and perfect.

I guess it's a fear of failure thing.

Anyway, so instead of writing to see what emerges, I put it off, keeping it in that "possibly wonderful" state as long as I can.

For most of the morning my motto would have been "why bother." Or, maybe, "who cares" but that sounds too confrontational (cuz whenever I say that somebody answers).

Didn't want to do any writing, anything. I prefer a painful life to an apathetic one.

But I wrote some, anyway. I'm behind all the jackrabbits, but I have no jealousy. There are two people already finished, and many more who are writing ten thousand words a day. If you're that prolific, I don't think NaNo is the thing for you. It still reminds me of the Seinfeld when Kramer beat up his Karate class. No challenge. Why are they doing this if not to show off?

Besides, I'm convinced their novels must suck major ass. Probably boring as hell, too.

Me? I'm going for quality. Not one mention of ninjas (yet).

What have I done now?

Saturday I think I overate or something. I had a troubled tummy all night, at one point even getting out of bed to sip on some broth and do a bit of reading (Elvis Lives!). After waking up about every forty-five minutes, I finally managed to get to sleep around four or so.

Then, Sunday, I didn't get out of bed until 10:30. Up for a bit and ended up napping on and off until about six in the evening. All day long I was alternately hot and cold.

Last night was pretty much the same thing. Went to bed about 10:30 and woke up about every hour until now (4:30). I think I've gotten enough sleep, so I'm fixing some coffee today and hope that I'll be back to normal tonight.

A good thing about being up early is that I can catch the people who try to rip the things out of the recycle bin in front of the house. I don't know why that bothers me so much.

Last night it rained and I wore an orange sweater. I take it that summer is over, and although the skies were crisp and blue today I nearly froze wearing my shorts. It didn't help that I was in the shade.

Actually, the "freezing" is an exagerration. I was cold and had goose pimples, though. If I were a girl I would have been pretty popular, what with my stiff nipples and all, but since I'm not everyone pretty much just ignored me.

I have a ton of candy left over from Halloween. When the rain came, and it showed up right after the sun set, all the kids in the street got hauled back into the cars that brought them to our neighborhood and hustled back to wherever it is they come from. Each year I see more and more teenagers who can't even be bothered with dressing up, which saddens me a little. I don't say anything, or even glare at them, but the holiday is eroding into "free candy day." One kid, dressed in dark pants with a leather jacket, at least joked about being "Men in Black," which made me laugh. At least he displayed some shame.