in progress

i'm up to 2,541 words. only 147,459 to go! give or take. the words are showing up so far, so i'm pleased enough. writing in the morning before going off to work has been working out well.

i'm rearranging the home office up here a bit. moving filing cabinets, a table, creating an area of work. i'm not sure if i'm improving anything yet, but i'm trying things out. some cleaning is necessary. it looks like my last day in the (not-home) office could be thursday the 3rd. conceivably earlier, conceivably later.

i'm reading brecht short stories. they're nasty, brutish, and short. last night kara and i watched cache, a recent french thriller, which was compelling and frustrating. i do recommend it.

cat, bird

i snapped eliot a few minutes ago; he's quite camera shy and this is one of the best pictures of him i've been able to get. he's pretty shaggy; he has an appointment to get shaved this coming friday.

a day or two ago kara took this picture of a bird among birds fighting over the figs in the tree in our backyard. i like it. i don't know what sort of bird it is.

current word count: 1,457. not so bad for two days. can't get cocky though; got to keep it up.

words on the page

writing again. prose, not poems. the novel. shannon, dallas, helen, jimmy, and the rest of the crew. it's been a hiatus but now it's over. i've written some 560 words today and i'll write a few more. i'll be shooting for at least 500 a day, every day.

all right then. let's get this going on.

oh, and we turned over the keys to our old house yesterday. bye, pretty house.

nothing like a congenital anomaly

pretty pink picture, no? that there image above is consistent with gastroschisis, which i believe i have mentioned here before, some weeks or months back. gastroschisis, of course, is a congenital fissure in the abdominal wall, usually accompanied by protrusion of the viscera. guts hanging out. fun!

the image below is of a nasopharyngeal teratoma. another sort of congenital anomaly. i transcribed a report today of a surgical excision of a sacrococcygeal teratoma. wilder than the usual fare, such as chest pain, gastroenteritis, minor lacerations, appendicitis, cholecystitis. that stuff's everyday. teratomas sure are weird. a teratoma is a tumor consisting of different types of tissue, sometimes including skin, hair, and muscle. sometimes they have teeth! maybe it's akin to an unformed twin? take a gander at this:
as if i needed more reasons not to have children! what if we had one and it looked like this?! sheesh! too many things to worry about on that front. so i'll just not.

becoming even more remote

so it looks like my days of going to work are just about behind me. that's right, kids, i've been authorized to work from home! one of the bennies of employment as a transcriptionist. i recently decided i wanted to not go into the office any more, and i talked to the bosslady about it and she immediately said sure! go home! get the heck outta here! and i mean now! (that's verbatim.)

i bought a router yesterday, which is some kind of computer hardware. i will be reimbursed. my boss will place a work order for the office technogeeks to futz with my computer there, ready it for remote use, and then i'm gone! probably within a week, then.

i do hope the heat breaks soon, because we gots no a/c here, and it's especially warm upstairs in the office. i shall assemble an army of fans if need be. (and, unfortunately, i don't mean admirers.)

i'm interested; crime's interesting

oh, and i suppose this qualifies. a little b&e, i think, should qualify. this occurred at the old house, where we are not currently living but where we, until yesterday, still had some stuff.

kara's bicycle was stolen. a pane in the basement window was smashed and the window forced open. there was feces in the toilet and someone might have taken a shower.

a couple of pairs of scissors were moved. in the kitchen, the ironing-board door thing was nailed shut. in a built-in dresser in the attic there were two blankets, which were not ours. one of the blankets had weird stains.

there were hard-candy wrappers and pieces of duct tape scattered in the attic. the frame of the screen from an attic window was taken out and the screen itself was sliced out. in the larger, walk-in attic closet, there were two bottles of urine-colored liquid and what looked to be a rope made of duct tape.
officer long was nonplussed, as were we. he said it was one of the strangest burglaries he had seen (though he was young). he picked up some of the duct tape pieces with gloved hands. he wondered aloud if perhaps someone had been abducted and held in our house, because some of the pieces of duct tape had hair on them. he bagged one of the bottles and the strange duct tape rope.

the crime (as lance armstrong would say) was not about the bike, which was the only thing taken. my thinking is, it was some person who is a little funny in the head. got a thing for duct tape, a sort of obsessive-compulsive thing. likes hard candies. doesn't like screens.

maybe i just don't want to think about someone being kidnapped and held in our old house?

we were kind of hoping csi people would swarm the place, lifting prints and tweezing fibers and grilling suspects, like on tv. but officer long says tacoma forensics doesn't work weekends. ain't that a kick in the head?

we came home and took showers and ate salad and watched two episodes of "24," season one, disk four. lots of fans were pointed at us. it was hot. and i didn't sleep so well. weird dreams.

and because what would this blog be without a movie reference, i'll spill that the title of this post was spoken by this gentleman, playing a housepainter, in this gem of a film.

another saturday

read the last 15 or so pages of "saturday" this morning. (and it's saturday today!) it was rather good. there was a very enjoyable and explicit neurosurgery scene toward the end. with that bit i was enraptured. yeah, fun. the two things that made me flinch were (1) when he was spreading wide the skin on his scalp to expose the depressed skull fracture and (2) when the brain was exposed and he tapped it with his finger.

sometimes the book seemed a little overfull, too much going on, but i suppose it wasn't unreasonable. it's the best mcewan i've read, the first one, actually, that didn't end up irritating me. so that's a good review.

it was 97 degrees here yesterday. it should be roughly that again today. yick. i know we've had it nicer here in the pacific northwest than other parts of the nation, but for me this is too hot. the cats are lolling like mental patients on the floor. the dogs' tongues are out and dripping, also like those of mental patients. hm.

quoting

from page 128-129:

This is the kind of question Henry liked to put to himself when he was a schoolboy: what are the chances of this particular fish, from that shoal, off that continental shelf ending up in the pages, no, on this page of this copy of the Daily Mirror? Something just short of infinity to one. Similarly, the grains of sand on a beach, arranged just so. The random ordering of the world, the unimaginable odds against any particular condition, still please him. Even as a child, and especially after Aberfan, he never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.

yes! this is a ruminative novel. i do admire that. i am reminded of what i like about philip roth. i enjoy following the trains of thought, the weaving of the narrative with both the character's history and the history of the world. i enjoy the rhetoric.

perhaps at the heart of my personal literary impotence is the fear that i have nothing to say.

shoes and then some

look at our pretty new shoes. the blue ones are mine. i've had them for a couple weeks. i wear them around the house and on weekends. not to work. kara just got hers a few days ago. it surprised me a little when she got them because of her intense aversion to most things plastic. she's not totally fond of them but i think they're growing on her. not literally. they're strangely comfortable.

i am reading "saturday" and enjoying it mightily. the writing is good. i have been iffy on mcewan before, but thus far i like this one. here's a passage i read yesterday (from page 68 of my paperback anchor books edition) that struck me:

No one's been in the kitchen since he left it. On the table are his cup, Theo's empty mineral water bottle and, beside it, the remote control. It's still faintly surprising, this rigid fidelity of objects, sometimes reassuring, sometimes sinister.

this totally rang true for me. i think of this, when i put something down, a blanket, a shoe, and return the next day to find it in exactly the same place. why should this be a surprise? i don't actually expect it to move on its own. all the same, it does strike me sometimes as disconcerting, sad, lonely.

of course the emotions are considerably deeper when i consider (forgive me my macabre thought processes) bodies in the hospital morgue, which i sometimes still do, even though it's been over a year since i had a job that (very occasionally) took me there. the bodies remain there on their gurneys, cold and quiet and still, until someone comes to move them. it is sad, and a little creepy.

speaking of cold, quiet, and still, thanks for asking, as far as my own writing goes, i am woefully impotent, involved in inertia and debate.

on the one hand i am enamored with the romantic notion of producing a slender volume of poems. (it does not help that the daughter of the main character in "saturday" is expecting the imminent publication of her first such volume.) i picture myself with a slight, but brilliant, sheaf. how elegant!

on the other hand the equally romantic notion of immersing myself deep within the layered construction of a 200,000-word novel also compels me.

in the meantime, obviously, i am accomplishing nothing. it's true that fiction comes easier for me. sentences and paragraphs emerge more readily than do stanzas. when i sit down to write a poem i feel i'm forcing it, and that of course does not work. still, i feel i am on the cusp of writing. golly by gosh, how lame does that sound? what's more pathetic than a would-be anything? be this as it may, pretty words and lyrical phrases swim in my head. i have lists. i am also awash with first names that are for whatever reason pregnant in my eyes (sorry) with portent and character.

among those names is "swati." i knew a girl named swati in high school, had a bit of a crush on her, i'm not ashamed to say, 17 years after the fact. her twin sister was archana. the gupta sisters. i wonder where they are now. swati or archana gupta, wootton high school class of 1989, where are you?

appropos of nothing (or not - you judge), mr mcewan teaches me a new word on page 74: anosognosia. i like this word; mcewan defines it more broadly as a lack of awareness of one's own condition. please, consider this paragraph appropos of nothing.

by the bye, this post is dedicated to jay. jay's name was chosen from those who sent in the correct answer to my quiz last week. actually, it wasn't really a quiz, just a question, and jay was the only one who responded at all. still, i believe his answer is correct. way to go jay! this one's for you.

saturday

i suppose i don't have to keep this under my hat any more. kara got a new job. she's very excited and so i'm very excited. suffice to say that her work will be, for the first time in 3 years, interesting and possibly challenging. she might get a little raise too, and that can't be bad. this coming week she's half-time at the old job and half-time training in the new. very hot stuff.

i did finish reading "complications" by atul gawande. it was a very conversational look at the fallibility of medical science. how doctors daily make critical decisions in the face of not-enough-information and exhaustion and lots more. there were plenty of interesting case histories and i enjoyed it. highly recommended.

now back to fiction, but still medical. yesterday i picked up "saturday" by ian mcewan. i'm only 20 or pages into it now, but already i like it. the main character is a neurosurgeon so there's all this groovy medical language to excite me. it's ostensibly one of those post-9/11 novels, and we'll see how that goes.

maybe "24" disk two will arrive today. kara works this evening and tomorrow evening, so we wouldn't be able to watch it until monday, probably. yesterday evening we watched a couple episodes of "firefly," which has very good dialogue.

status post cheerios and froot loops

so yesterday we just got 24.1.3. the third disk. without the second disk, needless to say, the third disk is entirely useless to us. might as well forget the whole thing. i do hope disk two arrives today.

it's friday on star island. the last full day. the week does go by fast there. everyone's clean from their biweekly shower (tuesdays and thursdays). it's banquet night; people will get dressed up. the teenagers (if they're like teenagers when i was a teenager, which is a mystery in itself) will be up all night, talking, sharing, hooking up, drinking, and then decamp at about 4am tomorrow to east rock to watch the sunrise. i wonder if they'll sing the beatles song as it rises, as we did?

tomorrow morning, after breakfast, the boat takes them back to the mainland. used to be portsmouth, nh, now apparently it's a different port town. things do change. they will chant, "we will come back! we will come back!" jennifer will go back to ohio (and rick will be back too, from the silk road, in another couple of days) and mom and dad will go back to maryland. and lives will go back to the way they were.

so no one recognizes the painting of the naked people on the rug by the mirror? disappointing.

24.1.1

we got disk one of day one last weekend from netflix and were hooked! we watched all four episodes lickety split! and now disks two and three are en route and could arrive today! today! whee! a very exciting television program.

exciting too that there are four or maybe even five more days (seasons) waiting for us! (i don't know what season [day] they're on now.) we must maintain chronology!

i've secretly liked kiefer for a while (though not, of course, as much as donald) and am happy this seems to be a nice fit.

tard

so i recently rediscovered yellow mustard. it had been years since i'd eaten anything but dijon or dark. on a whim last week i bought some yellow. then i bought some rye bread. the sandwich i made for yesterday's lunch, of rye bread, yellow mustard, light miracle whip, low-fat provolone cheese, and low-fat turkey, was, oh man, so good. the best home-made sandwich i've had in months. what a find! i'm very much looking forward to today's lunch (i added some sliced olives!).

star island

star island is about ten miles from the maine/new hampshire coastline. during the summer it's a conference center for unitarians and congregationalists.

it is part of the isles of shoals and was featured in the anita shreve book "the weight of water" and the subsequent film starring sean penn and sarah polley about brutal murders that took place on a neighboring island in the 19th century.

these days, the conferences tend to be a week long, and since i was 6 or something (correct me?) my family took me there for a conference. i went there, one week a year, every year, up through high school, and, as i said, i worked there, living there all summer, the summers before and after senior year.

it's a beautiful place. sunsets, sunrises. as a kid i thought people were different there, kinder, more open, more forgiving, different from the way people are on the mainland, but that might just have been because of the intensity of the youth-group programs, especially the high-school age group, which is designed for emotional intensity and depth of connections.

lots of firsts there. first beer, first kiss, fist marijuana. my first real friends, people i kept in touch with through the year and looked forward to being with for that one week. i got my ear pierced there. first job.

living there all summer, those two summers, was fantastic. being on the inside in such a place, behind the scenes, knowing the workings. the first summer i worked as a dishwasher, not tremendously fun but completely worth it to have the island as my home for two months. the second summer i worked in the snack bar, which was social and thrilling. that was fun, a great summer.

at one point during that summer i cut my hand pretty good while slicing a bagel, and for a week or so i couldn't get it wet. so i switched to night crew for a week. night crew works from 10pm until 6am and all they really have to do is make hourly strolls around the island, looking for fires (almost the buildings are made of wood, and there have been significant fires) and people doing things they shouldn't be doing.

lots of ghost stories on that island. lots of ghosts. i was about as terrified as i've ever been on some of those strolls. still, incredible fun.

i haven't been to star island, through, since 1995 or 1996. my sister and our parents are going there today, for a week. i eagerly want to get kara over there; she's never been. next summer. 2007. of course, i've been saying that for the last few summers. 2006, we'll go. 2005, we'll go.

next year, though, it could work. i have stability in my job. kara is about to start a new job (within the same department) that is actually exciting to her. (congratulations, kara!) we need to plan it, but we can do that. neither of have had a week-long vacation in years and years. it would be great to take two weeks next summer and go to star and see family and maybe even my old college. maine is one of the few states kara hasn't visited yet.


kara went for a drink with a friend last evening and i stayed home and watched again a tremendously sad and beautiful movie called (what else?) "blue".

identification

anyone know the artist? i saw this on a cover of a book and rather like it.

the book is called "bathers, bodies, beauty: the visceral eye" and it's by linda nochlin.

any help on the name of the painter?

i know my readership is vast and someone will be able to fill me in. thanks.

south fourth

here's kara in the back yard of our old house, on south 4th street. can you see her? it's no longer our house but we still have the keys. and i have to mow this.

multicare, the hospital conglomerate that happens to employ both me and kara, bought this house from us last summer after much negotiation. as we didn't yet have our current house, part of the deal was that we would have a year to vacate the house.

we moved to this house (not on south 4th) in september and gradually moved things from the old place to the new place. the old house fell, as could be expected, into disrepair.

the time is coming, however, to give multicare the keys. the end of this month. and they want the lawn mowed. i can't argue with that, though sometimes i would like to. today i'm going to attack the front yard. yeah, i'll probably take more pictures.


in other news, i'm not terribly pleased about this. i wish folks would just wake up and realize what a freaking nonissue this is.

cursed

could our land be cursed?

i saw another dead thing in our front yard yesterday.

this crow ended up only a few feet from last week's squirrel. if it had met the same fate (i.e. the transformer) the charge wasn't enough to short out our house.

ken lay died too. not on our property, though.

status post "ultraviolet"

okay so we just watched "ultraviolet." wow. ow. ow and wow.

it was worse than i had imagined. it was worse than "aeon flux" (though the films are similar in a few ways). yes, milla's abs were featured in nearly every scene (funny were the scenes in which she'd zip to her throat her halfshirt as if chilly - put on a real shirt, milla!), and they're nice of course but not quite enough to carry an entire movie.

fichtner, yeah, was cute with his vampiric incisors, and so earnest and kind i wanted to give him a hug.

but sheesh. awful film. kara nearly fell asleep.

milla's titular character had crazy fighting skills and apparently built-in weaponry and her clothes changed color sometimes in a way that seemed significant but wasn't explained, though i'm not sure an explanation would have improved things.

as william hurt's character says in "the big chill," "sometimes you have to let art flow over you."

i wonder if it pains actors like fichtner to work alongside "actors" like milla. i'm talking actual pain. i mean, milla can't act at all. she's rotten as an actor. (though there's a film called "dummy" in which she was rather good.) like paul newman working with tom cruise in "color of money." or with bruce willis in "nobody's fool." oh, poor, put-upon paulie.

shouldn't he and bob redford make another film together right about now? and i don't mean "the sting 2."

incidentally, that's one of my all-time favorites, "nobody's fool" - no foolin. paul is terrific in that. and bruce actually isn't as bad in that as in most things - 1994 was a good year for bruce: "nobody's fool" and "pulp fiction" had his best performances i've seen.