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In Memoriam

Frick, the cat featured parenthetically in the acid-jazz adventure My Cat's Girlfriend, was struck by a car and killed on the weekend.

His neck was broken but he was otherwise unmangled, so it likely that he did not suffer much. His tongue was lolling out, though, and his wide eyes had a look you would never mistake for alive. A tiny rivulet of blood ran out of his mouth.

When I placed the first spadeful of dirt on him it made the rest of his body quiver in reaction, which upset me because it looked for a fleeting second like Frick was still alive. In my disturbed dreams, he twitches and cries plaintively, begging us not to bury him alive. But in the desert of the real, Frick was as dead as they come before we planted him in the backyard. The burial is depicted here. His famous woolly girlfriend was interred alongside him, so that he may grind his pelvis into her lecherously in the afterlife.

There's a new policy at the old schoolhouse: cats remain indoors on weekends. The summer people just drive too damn fast.


The Chortle of my Scythe

We finally got one of those lawnmowers you can ride around on, just like Hank Hill. I just spent an hour plowing slowly but purposefully through the insanity of the schoolyard, trudging forward like the world's smallest and hottest zamboni, carving shrinking circles of green crew-cut around the firepit and Frick's grave.

Construction on our new fence has been temporarily halted, because I have run out of money to buy wood. So, we have half a yard bounded by stained-wood fence topped with copper, and half a yard bounded by rusty chainlink broken intermittantly by stained-wood fenceposts footed in concrete, forlorn in their uselessness. We got carried away at the tree farm, and busted our budget on saplings -- dozens of spruce, a handful of oak, a maple and some lilac bushes.

I like riding around my chortling little mower. I feel like I should put a quarter in to make it go. When people pass by on the street, I wave as if I were in a boat. When my wife waves from the balcony, I wave back like the Queen, flexing my hand back and forth instead of up and down. I am the only float in a short parade, spewing grass and dandelions and wild rhubarb in my wake.


Film Review Corner

Saw Tim Burton's Big Fish. It wasn't a very good movie.


Coming Soon

I have two stories in the works. I'm sorry I haven't posted them sooner, but I've been too harried to type much while I worked a triple-booked week and tried to make every client feel special. (Look for my Kellogg's Special K commercial in the coming weeks, featuring a silhouetted chick power-walking to Nancy Sinatra.)

The principle slow-down with the next story I'm going to post (A Cheeseburger in Paris) has been a lack of plot: while the setting is interesting and some of the characters are neat, nothing really very dramatic happened to me during that episode of life. I continue to fiddle with the text, however, and am confident that I can pull something readable out of it soon...likely by deleting most of what I've written so far and then creating some new connective tissue for the vignettes that remain.

After that will come a new novella called Spectra of Sin which details my moral corruption as a youth. Part I of this story is complete but I haven't yet gotten started on Part II -- but, seeing as Part I flowed out pretty easily, I don't anticipate any major obstacles (except finding the time to type it out, of course). This is, of course, the story I said I've never tell...which goes to show how full of shit I am, if nothing else. Once the idea of not telling that story was in my head, it was a fairly inevitable evolution to actually telling it.

I don't know what comes after that. My writing world is a directionless mess. I still haven't finished revising Two Moments of Invention yet, for crying out loud. Novel? Christ -- I'm lucky if I can rattle off the handful of paragraphs above without being interrupted eighty gazillion times. Fuck.