Some Words

And now I am married. Unsurprisingly, this feels, in many ways, just like it did before. It’s just that now there is no big party to plan. There are, however, about two dozen things that need to be sorted out in the next four weeks or so, not the least of which is housing and all the writing that I have been working on.

My favorite theater just went under and that softens the blow of leaving Minneapolis. I also just found out that there is no sales tax in Oregon. That also helped soften the blow. I’m not going to lie.

To the several people with unanswered email in my inbox. I’m sorry. I’m about 100 messages behind right now. I’ll catch up… really. Very sorry to all the friends who I am once again acting like a stranger to. It’s a wedding. I underestimated how much time that took,

And the computer is back. I didn’t really have to pay much of anything to get it back. There’s a stain on the monitor now, where some of the coffee got into the LCD under the protective layer. Aside from that little annoyance, and the fact that I have now voided the hell out of my warranty, things return largely to normal.

And soon there will be reunion, with the big project on temporary hold. I hope to have it done next week, but I only give even odds.

Well… with the computer out of commission, I found myself unable to get much work done on the big project. That was frustrating, as this week was supposed to be the big push to finish it, I should have been able to do that by the end of the month.

So I wanted to be able to get something done on that front while I waited to get my computer back, and was busy grousing to myself that the other computer was the one with all the software licenses. This gave me a chance to use Google Docs. I’d never done so before, and I have to say that I’m pleasantly surprised. It’s not going to get me to abandon what I normally use, but it’s fine in the short term.

It also reminds me that I’m a little crazy for having a program just to do outlines. And despite that program, I’d let my outline of the text fall off in the past few chapters and I was flying blind. Without the main text though, I’m outlining the last eight chapters finally, which should speed things up if it is anything like when I was last working with an outline. Not my most efficient use of time, these past few weeks, if loosing my primary computer forces me to get cracking.

Also, as a PSA for the few people who read this in Minneapolis: (and some who may be coming into town for the wedding) Dreamhaven is moving. What does this mean? They’re not looking forward to having to haul all their stuff, so for this month there is a big sale. Used paperbacks are 75% off original cover price, with a minimum of 75¢. That means most books are under a dollar in their used section. A lot of the comics are 10¢. The other day I walked out with a pile I could barely carry for just over $15. You should check it out if you are in town.

Well… that was about the stupidest thing I’ve done in a long, long time. I spilled coffee on my computer and flattered myself into thinking that I’d managed to not get any inside the vents. I left it on, and now it’s looking like a best case of $400 with a worst case of a whole new computer. Plus I’m not even going to find out for a few days. It’s a very special feeling.

Making matters worse is the fact that I’ve seen this happen to other people before. I know better. Always turn off the computer as soon as you can after something spills on it.

And now, here I am, without the stuff I was working on, with the old computer back out, and wondering what to do next.

Well, the trip to Portland was nice, though not productive in terms of finding housing. It was instructive in learning about the different renting cultures between Portland and Minneapolis. Here, landlords are trying to rent things two months out. Everyone tries to get things covered soon, so that people have time to plan. There, everyone just assumes that they will be able to rent the place out in short order, which seems a safe assumption based on how things went over there. It did mean though that when I talked to people, they almost universally thought I was insane for trying to get this done two months out.

Today K and I started to finish up the wedding plans. It’s in two weeks now, and I’m going to be going to reunion next week, which means that I need to get as much done this week as possible, to avoid angry calls. It also means that I need to finish up a few things that I keep drawing a blank on, gift type things for people who may be going through customs. Tricky.

While in Portland I also got to go to The Teardrop Lounge which was fantastic. It’s the bar I’ve wished I could find here in Minneapolis for years. The men behind the bar knew what they were doing, but more importantly, they cared. I ended up tossing back three excellent drinks, which was harder on my wallet and liver than I had intended to be, but was imminently worth it. There were assorted good restaurants, and much good beer during the rest of the trip, but the highlight was the Teardrop.

Tomorrow I head to Portland, hopefully to find an apartment, and a place that sells Lemon Hart demerara rum. While there, I’m going to get to see Dosh and Anathallo at the Doug Fir Lounge. Dosh is on tour with Michael Lewis and from what my brother tells me, they’ve been turning in some awesome sets. Until Dosh, I had only really seen Lewis working with Happy Apple. Indeed, it had been long enough since I had seen Happy Apple that I had forgotten how amazing the man was. Watch him stretch his multi-instrumental chops:

Now, check them out if you get the chance.

K and I are moving out of our apartment. This has triggered the landlord to get to work fixing a few things up. She’s been good about the place, but now that we’re heading out, she’s got her eye on a few things, like improving the basement storage and such. So I hear her down stairs with some guy assembling shelves and it’s not a huge surprise.

What comes as a huge surprise, is that after a great deal of clanking and talking, in which I overhear the mention of shelves. Things sound like she’s finishing up, and the melancholy sound of a music box starts to quietly but insistently permeate the house. Two minutes ago it was all pipes and metal and wood, and now it’s the soundtrack to a childhood memory for some wrist slitter of a movie.

There are very few times in life that you can look to and say, “Now I know that ‘x’ book changed my life.” Usually, whatever way a book might have changed you is subtle and insidious. You never notice the choice you made or the shift in your reactions.

Today was not like that. My reading of this BBC article was changed by having read Haruki Murakami, I’m not sure for the better. My initial reaction, upon reading that the knifing happened on the same day as another knifing from 2001, was to think that it would be a Murakami story in a few years. A lot of his work is about finding order and shape to the seemingly meaningless events that surround us. Once the matching dates came in, it just felt like one of his stories. Combine that with an increase in mass stabbings… and well, I start to feel a little guilty thinking that way.

And let’s have another Hot Chip video, shall we? Why not.

So last night I played a game of kickball with my former co-workers. It went well, we won 25-1 and I managed to not just kick high lobs and get caught out the whole time.

After that we went to a bar called “The Chalet.” While there, I had the worst burger on earth. It was a mushroom swiss burger. The mushrooms were clearly from a can, and surrounded by some sort of goo or pulp. These had been superheated, so much so that I burned my face bringing the burger up for the first bite. I wondered why this was, but when I actually got into the burger, I found out that it was because they melted the cheese that way. The meat was a little cold, and had a sort of Styrofoam texture to it. It bounced a bit and fell apart in my mouth, but not in a good way.

When I got home, K had the perfect idea for cleansing the taste buds, banana cream pie ice cream from Sebastian Joe’s. Someone, an ice cream genius, over there got the idea of making banana ice cream with nilla wafers in it. I cannot explain to you how delicious this is.

One of the worst parts of writing, to me, is the fear that I’m just running along the same lines as some book that someone else published and I never read. I have been working with the idea for the current project for about two years now, while I finished up the last one and read for this one, and then started writing about a year and a half ago.

During that time I read Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Absurdistan. Both were pretty good books, despite frustrations and flaws that I had with them. Nothing is perfect after all, and I’m a fussy bitch of a reader. But I also spent an undue amount of time while reading these books thinking, “is this too much like what I’m writing?” Well, of course it isn’t, because I’m writing my own damn story, and while there are elements of the stories that I can’t help a little overlap with, that’s all of fiction. There are only so many things you can put in a novel, and any novel, sufficiently long, will have overlap with something.

Nevertheless, because my main character thinks he is a relative of Grand Duchess Anastasia, I have been feeling a little like the man in Ficciones who sets out to write Don Quixote from scratch.

Today I found out that there was a thriller published in 2004 that had the Romanovs as the central element, I had a long period of panic that I was sitting on over one hundred and twenty thousand words that were too close to this other one. I had to read the wikipedia entry on it to satisfy myself that it was sufficiently divergent, a standard antiquities/supernatural/thriller in the style that a certain Mr. Brown, not to be confused with the Browne who will be a groomsman at my wedding, has made popular.

And even then all I did was shift the worry from accusations that I’d stolen and idea to the idea that I’m working on terrain everyone is sick to death of. That may be due to the fact that everyone is a little tired of the Anastasia stuff. Hell, I’m tired of it, but I tell myself that it’s not such big part of the plot that it sinks everything.