bye ought seven

so i'm totally blazing my way through this auster book. it's enigmatic and interesting. i like his page-by-page writing quite a lot, and he's keeping the mystery at the forefront, though i have an idea regarding where he might be going with it. i'm hoping i'm wrong; i don't want to have guessed correctly. the book is only about 140 pages long and i'm on page 120 or so (yeah - a quick read); i hope i'm surprised. i should finish it today or tomorrow.

it struck me that during each of the last few januaries i have been influenced by the writing of paul auster. (i checked the historical document that is this blog. would i have noticed the pattern without it? doubtful. BLUE FANCIES is finally proving useful!) strange? if i get an auster hankering, we must be in the neighborhood of january. i'm just a wee bit premature this year.

and i finished the carl sagan book a few days ago. i think it was friday. i didn't write about it much here while i was reading it, not as i did with the stripper book, though it was no less enlightening and enriching. dr sagan was quite a brilliant and kindly fellow. i highly recommend the book (varieties of scientific experience), which touches on evolution, creationism, nuclear holocaust, god, life on other planets, extinction, etc, etc, etc. i should read more of him. anyone out there read pale blue dot?

anyway. it's new year's eve. how about that? the end of 2007. i'm going to work in a little bit, but i have tomorrow off. it turns out kara doesn't get new year's day off this year. i would prefer to spend the day with her tomorrow than not, but it's not as if her working tomorrow puts much of a damper on tonight's festivities. i think last year we turned in by 10. i got some mini bottles of faux champagne and i'll drink one tonight and one tomorrow morning (with orange juice - yummy mimosa) (she'll probably drink both of hers tonight), and that'll pretty much be that. just another day, what? ah, the arbitrariness of the western calendar.

oh, and i finished a draft of my story yesterday, finally, though i'm not sure i'm satisfied with it. i'll bring a hard copy to work today and make some notes, but i'm already starting to think about the next one, which i believe i might start writing as early as this weekend. i took too long with this last one, too many breaks, and it resulted in a fairly scattered piece. in my opinion. but i'll give it a read anyway, and include it in my collection of stories about this circle of characters.

here's to more and better writing in 2008. and a new job for kara, one that satisfies. and splendid good health for all of us, including sniffly-nosed yellow.

total bender

i have a problem. i have a weakness for products like the bender ball and the total gym. i want them! i know chuck norris is beyond ridiculous and it's not as if i want to be like him or i like any of his movies or tv shows. (no offense, chuck - don't come kick my ass!) and it's not like i don't want to work out in a legitimate sort of way (or is it? maybe it is) - maybe it's that i haven't found the type of exercise that agrees with me. i used to work out all the time, ages ago, in north carolina, and i was a member of gold's gym and worked out several times a week. now time feels like a factor, though that's kind of silly for me to say because i waste so much time here on the internet and in front of the television. maybe a total gym would work for me, though? (of course, it might very well be a total piece of crap equipment - no offense, chuck - don't kick my ass!) i could store it upstairs here and work out in the comfort of my home. (we have a treadmill and a weight set in the garage, which adds to the nuttiness of these desires, though it's very chilly in the garage this time of year.) perhaps someone needs to sit me down and give me a good talking to. or else i might buy me a bender ball.

3 toys

i returned to the lucky dog outfitters yesterday for some of these and it's hard to walk out of that place without some toys for the dogs. i like the store a lot but it's dangerous there. so far, of these three, we've only given them this yellow monkey/man thing (we're hoarding the others for now), and they seem to really like it. they tugged it back and forth and carried it around the house and chewed off its left ear. i also got a rubber ball, perhaps made out of boots or tires, with a rope threaded through it. they do like rope. and there's a tough ring with squeakers inside it. the yellow monkey/man has a squeaker or two in him as well.

(kara says i must love the dogs if i keep getting them toys, but really i'm just trying to keep them occupied so they won't bug me. though often the toys are pretty cool.)

i also got a little bag of treats for the cats, because it doesn't seem fair to only give the dogs presents, but they're not going for it. yellow (the cat, not the monkey/man) doesn't like wet food. he doesn't even like catnip! he's a freak. eliot likes catnip just fine and he eats wet food and most of the treats i give him, but these treats i got yesterday neither of them care for. oh well.

almost done

my current story is about 8 pages long now; i think i should be able to finish a draft, at long last, today or tomorrow. i'm not sure how it's going to end yet, but that's all right. i'll probably go to the mandolin this morning, shortly, and read over what i've written so far, over coffee and bagel. it's verging on autobiographical, this story, stemming from the time when i was working at the bookstore north of seattle and a stripper acquaintance visited me a couple of times at work, after i'd visited her at work a couple of times. (i rather thought she wanted to date me, and that was kind of thrilling, as she had a fabulous body and fabulous tattoos and was a stripper, but in the end i asked kara to see pt anderson's magnolia with me and the rest is history.) the story is fiction, of course, but that event from the end of 1999/beginning of 2000 - the tail end, if you will, of that era of strip club visits - seems to have become the springboard for this story. i don't think there's anything wrong with that. i'll be glad to see the back of this story, though, and move on to the next one. another 2 or 3 pages and i should have it.

i don't yet know what the next one will be.

kara and i are talking about hitting such a club here in tacoma, and of course there are some in seattle worth visiting. so there could be a resurgence, though not really a resurgence, because we'll probably only go to maybe 3 places total (1 here and 2 in seattle) and not make a habit of it. and who knows if this will really even happen? a couple of days ago i was actually feeling kinda strippered-out, pooped of the whole scene, after reading that book and thinking about the topic ad nauseam, but then a friend of mine a couple of days ago went to those 2 places in seattle with her husband and she says she had quite a time. quite a time indeed. she talks about making a habit of it and i remember well that desire. so my interest is again rekindled. kindled (at least) a 3rd time.

anyway. who knows? we have no specific plans for anything as of this moment. kara has lots of schoolwork to do over the coming week and a half, so it won't be immediately. but we have a week off work together in the middle of january, and depending on other circumstances, maybe we'll manage a trip to seattle during that period of time. lots of unknowns here.

but the main point is, this story is probably almost finally done. so i'm glad.

on stephen's day in the morning

well we made it through another christmas. it went well. the weather was clear, rainy, and snowy. we gave the dogs a plaid stuffed bear and they eviscerated it swiftly, coating the wood floor with clouds of fluff. we had a fire in the woodstove and opened gifts from each other, my parents in maryland, my sister and brother-in-law in ohio, my aunt and uncle in north carolina; thank you all. we ate chicken and potatoes and stuffing and beans. and cole slaw. and pie and ice cream. and starting today i'm counting calories! next year kara wants to be pagan and celebrate on the solstice rather than on christmas, and i'm down with that. it don't make me no nevermind; it's not as if we reveled yesterday in the birth of christ. we just had the day off from work and gave each other presents.

christmas eve eve

i have to work today. and tomorrow. and then again on wednesday and thursday. kara and i only get the actual holidays off, christmas day and new year's day, but i guess that's what comes from working in healthcare. people are hospitalized as i write this, and they are being seen by doctors and nurses and physician's assistants, perhaps even undergoing surgeries, and the reports dictated about those encounters have to be typed up. am i wrong? but my sister and brother-in-law are educators so they get a week and more off. they've already been with my parents in maryland for a few days, already celebrating the holiday. but i'm not bitter.

i'm getting old - i changed out the two jane's addiction cds for a lucinda williams and a dwight yoakam. poor dwight yoakam - we saw him perform in the benaroya hall in seattle just 3 or 4 years ago, and now he's playing the emerald queen casino. i feel bad; i like dwight.

on friday evening kara and i went back to the six olives, ostensibly a martini bar. the proprietress, eve, knows her scotch and kara likes her scotch. and by the time we got there, before 4:30, it seemed eve had already downed a few. she spent virtually the whole evening with us, giving us scotch samples and explaining the regions and whatnot. she was energetic in expressing her feelings about liquor sales reps who don't know their liquor, who want to hide the taste of their liquor with mixers, and who steal her drink ideas. and she had her load on, big time.

kara likes the lowlands and the isles, the peaty taste with serious bite. i'm more of a highlands man, and enjoy a smoother drink. so it goes. we had a good time, and some good scotch. eve left us alone after a while and we had a little something to eat.

should i go for a master's in library science? this idea has been in the back of my mind for 10 years or so. i might do a little research into it.

21

i probably shouldn't post this photo, in case i ever decide to run for office or anything, but so be it. i toss caution windward. this is me at age 21, a solid 15 years ago. i was kinda pretty, no? i suppose i had my moments. but don't know that anyone who knows me now would recognize this girl here as me.

i've been going through old photos this week (we have boxes filled with envelopes filled with photos, mostly unlabeled), scanning them onto the computer, desiring some sort of organization, looking at lots of images of skinnier alexes, all clavicles and jawlines and cheekbones. perhaps i was too skinny then, but now i've gone the other way. i look at my apartments in rockville, md, and carrboro, nc - not great apartments by any standard, but i look at the stuff i had on the walls and remember what was important then. what my life was like - not better than now, not hardly, just different. i was lonely and sad and confused for much of my 20s, actually. i wasn't connected to anything and i didn't know what i wanted. now, at least, i'm connected; i'm not lonely.

there are a lot more photos, mostly from age 22 to 25 or so, that i want to scan. one good thing about those photos of the old me: they drive me to eat a bit better and get down to a bona fide exercise regimen.

ahem. anyway. in other news, the writing has been going fairly well this week, actually. i'm just as surprised as you are.

and i took fountains of wayne and kris delmhorst out of my cd player this week after very long tenures (they're so good), in favor of two jane's addiction cds. i haven't listened to them in a long long time, but "classic girl," "been caught stealing," and "jane says" remain favorite songs of mine from that distant era.

yes - i've definitely been living through my 20s again in the last couple of weeks - thinking of strip clubs, revisiting these photos, listening to this music.

wednesday

i've been up for about an hour, messing around, paying bills, weeding through my spammy emails, procrastinating writing. but it's time to get at it. after i go and get a bowl of cereal. readingwise, i'm staying with nonfiction but moving from the world of strippers to that of science/religion with carl sagan (after whom we named one of our dearly departed dogs). christmas is just under a week away, though it feels like it should be over and done with already. the packages i sent east have reportedly reached their destination. there's actually a thing or two i'd like to get for kara yet, but i have friday for that. okay. cereal, then writing, then work.

this struck me

... when i read it this morning on page 156 of bare by elisabeth eaves (seal press, 2002, 2004, isbn 1-58005-121-9):

... Brian was not your usual customer. The most obvious difference between him and his peers was that he kept his hands either planted in his pockets or visible on the windowsill while watching the show. He was an admirer, and that's all he was. He preferred to think of his visits in sensual rather than sexual terms. He wanted to stare at women, but he saw himself as a nice guy, which meant he couldn't just ogle strangers on the street. So he went where he could gaze guilt-free. At the Lusty he could stare without invading personal space or causing offense - quite the reverse, they would be offended if he didn't look at them! He smiled and stared, stared and smiled, hands often on the edge of the window to display his innocence. They got paid, and he was sure that at least some of them, some of the time, had fun, too. It was a win-win situation. His strange behavior stood out, and the women started calling him "Nice Guy Bri." It came to the point where several of them even spoke to him, offering little bits of small talk and flirtation through the glass.

... is he fooling himself? and would i be fooling myself if i thought of myself in nearly precisely the same way when i visited such illicit places? tell the truth.

graduated dags

due to circumstances at least partly beyond our control, dagmar was unable to attend his graduation from puppy school last week. but he did graduate, and here are his credentials. we got them (it) in the mail yesterday. now he and steve are both perfect dogs. ha! not really. steve sometimes still doesn't come when we call her, as she's easily distracted, but dagmar usually does, so if we call dagmar, steve tends to follow. i kinda think steve's cuter, with her coloring and the daintiness of her little head, but dagmar tends to mind better. he might be the brighter dog. they're still eating the floor; we can't quite get them to stop doing that. and there's a patch on the wall in the living room that dagmar likes to chew on sometimes too. hm. and they still chase the cats. so they're hardly perfect. but he's a very enthusiastic kisser; he seems to go into a trance once his tongue gets into my ear. interesting little boy.

in the next few weeks we'll be scheduling both of them for the big snip.

early on 12 12

i had a couple of interesting dreams last night. at 11:30, after about 2 hours of sleep, i woke after a dream about a tsunami. i was on the beach and i saw the wave coming. i turned my back on the wave and saw a building, and knew the wave would be throwing me splat against that building in a matter of seconds. i woke up and peed. then at 1:30 i woke up after dreaming about tom hanks. i was behind a bar, where i wasn't working, and trying to find a glass that wasn't broken or dirty so i could pour him the drink he wanted. he was a bit impatient. then i woke up again at about 4 because eliot was being a nudge, and here i am. there was a lot more to both dreams but i didn't write them down at the time, unfortunately, and they're pretty much gone now.

recently i read this new yorker article about icu care (and shared it with my fellow [can i say "fellow" if all but 2 of them are women?] transcriptionists) and this one about diary writing (though mostly diary writing by famous folks), which made me think of my blogging and also of reading pepys, which my dad has read or at least has been reading. there's a lot of pepys.

and i'm still reading bare and it's still fascinating to me. it's a good book; ms eaves is intelligent and thoughtful. there are a lot of conflicting thoughts in my head about strip clubs and it's a bit weird to be thinking of them again so much after so many years. when i was a senior in college i did my sociology thesis on a small-town bar (that's the only kind of bar they had in the small town where my college was) but if i had it to do over again i'd do it on strip clubs. it's strange and confusing while also exhilarating, that world. i still want to know more about it, to understand it, if possible.

my job is still mostly good, though kara's increasingly frustrated with hers. she wants out bad and her hope is at a low. the management where she is seems to be floundering. the management where i am runs hot and cold and the interpersonal skills often leave a lot to be desired - though what can one expect from those in a job where you wear headphones all the time?

abigail w

change of gears - have i mentioned that my family and i knew abby washburn and her family when she was small? we went to the same church in rockvlle, maryland, if you can believe that. and now she's this talented and gorgeous musician and singer. i love her music. and i love her views on the idea of the global citizen. hey, check out this 2-1/2-minute video, okay? (and feel free to ignore the preceding advertisement - i'm sorry that's even there.)

i'm very impressed.

bare naked truth stripping

this is perhaps a hair premature, as i still have 15 or so pages of red badge yet to read, but i'm thinking of reading this here book bare next. a friend and i have been talking over the past several days about the concept of strip clubs, about voyeurism and men and women, looking, being looked at, and these are issues i've long had something of an obsession with. i have been reliving, in a sense, the chapter in my life in which i visited such places regularly - that chapter opened wide in april 1995. i've been rereading my journal from that period, and it was a heady time. i'm not altogether proud of the feelings thrust forth but neither am i thoroughly ashamed. they're real and i can't help that. for a number of years, while living in the dc area and then while living in north carolina, and even in seattle, i went to such places with some regularity. strippers have long populated my stories; and i think an element of that life is what version 3 of story 2 needs. (okay, so the writing's not going so well yet, but i'm still on it!) anyway. i haven't been to a strip club in maybe 6 or 7 years, and sometimes i still get the hankering to visit one again, though i'm not desperate or anything. maybe we'll at least go to the lusty lady in seattle sometime relatively soon. i know there are places in tacoma and the immediate environs, but i've been to none of them. (apparently right here in tacoma there are drive-through cafes where the baristas wear naught but lingerie, and that's certainly curious, and of course there's hooters, but hooters is, to me, far more disturbing than a strip club, as it purports to be a family restaurant; parents take their kids there and i do think there's something wrong with that.) bare has been on my shelf for a good while now, and i have been thinking it's time for me to read some nonfiction. i'd been thinking about picking up the recent carl sagan, but at present, given my recent train of thought, i'm leaning toward the stripper. so! when i finish the war novel today, i'll then read the first pages of bare and see where i am. any questions?

our good cars

we've had the mazda for about 18 months now (if you can believe that) and it has fewer than 3800 miles on it. but yesterday when kara took dagmar to school she noticed there were nails in the right rear tire. so she called me and i drove the hyundai to the doggie school and then followed her to sears. it was the first service the car has undergone, a tire replacement, save a single oil change a month or so ago. and the day before i had to get a new battery for the hyundai, so it's been a weekend of dealing with car issues. i do believe, however, that all's swell now. we hope.

rabbit rabbit

i finished reading what is the what relatively late last night (at about 10:30 - actually very late for me to be awake), while kara was snoring, and then i turned out the light. and i dreamt of dark-skinned human bodies bursting apart by bullets, disease, and postmortem decomposition. grisly dreams. i wonder if it's interesting that i didn't dream such things while i was reading the book, but only after i was finished. or perhaps it was just that i was reading it immediately prior to turning out the light. anyway, i survived the dreams and (spoiler alert!) valentino survived too. it's a remarkable book, terrifying and beautiful. for info regarding the lost boys and how to help, look here.

so much for keeping things light, huh? why do i do this to myself? and up next is the red badge of courage, which i've been wanting to read for a while. i'm sure it'll be chipper too.

and to continue in the vein of death and misery, it was one year ago tonight that our sweet rumble unexpectedly died. she was a good kid and i miss her. catwise, we still have her common-law brother, yellow, as well as little eliot (pictured), who arrived on the scene in 2002. he was cleaned and shaved yesterday and is obviously much happier for it. he's a fine little man. but yellow seems to have the perpetual sniffles, and often sneezes out copious mucus, which is fairly nasty, especially when he then slurps it back into himself.

but anyway. at the moment i feel good, in spite of everything. it might snow today, which might affect our plans to drive to seattle this evening. i think i'll do a bit of writing this morning and later i'll try to put those contacts in again (i feel rather the fool for having such troubles, a grown man such as myself).

rabbit rabbit.