Behind the storms of Saturday night and Sunday morning came an enormous wind. The breath of the sky, blowing across Atlanta. Cooler weather, too. A low in the forties (F) last night, and only the low seventies today. Warmer tomorrow. But this wind is impressive, and there were gusts last night to 35 mph. (or 56.32 kph). Today, it's still blowing strong.

And speaking of that which blows...or sucks...or both...

Tomorrow, I have to be in Birmingham for a noon dental appointment (that's my one pm), which means leaving the house by ten ayem, at the latest. And maybe this molar, the one that was cracked in the Great Seizure of October '07, will be pulled, and maybe it won't be. Hopefully, we'll be back in Atlanta before sunset. However, if I return one more tooth shy, I'll be out of commission for at least a couple of days, which means no writing and no packing. We only have 15 days until we go back to Birmingham to get everything that's in storage there (and has been since November 2002) and only 18 days until the move to Providence. There is not time for mouth trauma, but that means nothing to how things will be.

Yesterday...a very bad day. But, and still, we read through all that has been written on Chapter One of The Red Tree. It's better than I recall. Maybe I can get back to work on the chapter late this week, after the dentist. That's all the writing-work there was to yesterday. I had a very hot bath. We packed and packed and packed, mostly books. I had to order a new battery for my iBook ($139.02, so ouch), and Spooky had to reserve the U-Haul truck for the 27th. About six pm, I left the house and walked to (ugh) Starbuck's, because our landlord needed to show the place to a prospective tenant. I sat and drank, overpriced mediocre coffee and finished Chris Beard's book on the origin of anthropoids. A rather good last chapter, largely devoted to the problem of Henry Fairfield Osborn's racism and also to the ongoing issue of "pithecophobia"* An hour later, I walked home again, to learn that the prospective tenant never fucking showed, so I'd exiled myself to an hour at Starbuck's for naught. After dinner, more packing, until, finally, I begged Spooky for a comfort movie, so we watched Serenity again. I was in bed by three, a little late, but there you go. Seven hours sleep.

As for today, I expect I'll wash my hair, then spend the rest of it working on the Palaeozoic Museum in New Babbage and, well, packing. Only about half the books in my office are boxed. There's no chance I'll get any writing done today, between the distractions and the impending dentistry, and I'm not up to that sort of futility — sitting here, struggling to write through the chaos. And I need to drop Vince an email about Sirenia Digest #30. That's a tiny smidge of work, I suppose.

Yesterday, jtglover asked me, "What do you think is your best story? Top three?" And I said I'd think about it and post a reply today. It's damned difficult, and the list changes so frequently. But right now, I'd say they are:

1. "Houses Under the Sea" (from Thrillers II, Cemetery Dance Publications, 2007; to be reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Vol. 19).

2. "La Peau Verte" (from To Charles Fort, With Love, Subterranean Press, 2005).

3. "In View of Nothing" (Sirenia Digest #16, March 2007; to be reprinted in A is for Alien)

I would also list, among my "best" short stories, "The Ape's Wife,", "The Steam Dancer," "Andromeda Among the Stones," "The Road of Pins," "Riding the White Bull," "A Season of Broken Dolls,", and "So Runs the World Away." Your mileage will vary, as this is a terribly subjective question. And there are several stories I feel guilty for not including. Anyway, Herr Ornithorhynchus just showed up with my coffee, steamy hot and not mediocre, so I shall wrap this up.

* A psychological disorder that paleontologist William King Gregory sardonically "discovered" to account for those suffering from an irrational fear of apes and monkeys, stemming from the truth of humanity's own common ancestry with them ("Two views of the origin of man," 1927; Science 65: 601-5). The term derives from the Greek (pithekos ape + phobos fear). Sadly, it's probably as common now as it was is Gregory's day. Hence, creationism and its gussied-up stepchild, "intelligent" design.

And yesterday was the sort of "day off" that I dread, the usual sort. Truthfully, I should have had the good sense to leave the house, go to Fernbank or the Zoo in Grant Park or maybe the Botanical Gardens...anywhere. In fact, I didn't step outside the house all damn day. I thought I had a plan, but it spiraled into something else, which, as I have said, is the usual way of things. I could neither rest nor keep my mind occupied, and the frustration mounted, the frustration and the boredom.

High points of yesterday: I read Chapter 9 of Chris Beard's book on anthropoid origins (Chapter 9, "Resurrecting the Ghost"). The chapter was mainly concerned with Beard's fieldwork in the Eocene beds along the banks of China's Yellow River (Huáng Hé), between 1994-1997, before the strata were flooded by construction of one of the nation's many idiotically short-sighted hydroelectric dam projects. I packed only two boxes.

And speaking of the packing of the second box, I shall now offer another unsolicited testimony to the durability of Apple computers. Somehow, I tangled my ankle in the power cord of my seven-year-old iBook last night, pulled it off the desk, and it fell three feet to a hardwood floor. And besides a bent jack on the yo-yo power adapter thingy — which is not truly a part of the actual computer — no apparent damage was done. It's only my secondary computer at this point, as I now work on the iMac, but it was still a moment of sheer fucking horror, watching it crash to the floor. I assumed the worst. I was amazed. Thank you, Apple.

Oh, but that was not a high point. Uhm. There must have been others. We watched two more episodes from Season One of Millennium ("Powers, Principalities, Thrones and Dominions" and "Broken World"). I built a sort of homage to Dr. Suess' McElligot's Pool behind my Abney Park Laboratory (in Second Life). To quote the message I posted to the New Babbage forum (written, of course, as Prof. Nishi):

"The Abney Park Well:

While trying to recalibrate a portion of the lateral array of my temporal-spatial teleportation beam, I confess that I accidentally confused the X and Z axes, and, thereby, vaporized a vertical shaft of masonry and bedrock just behind the laboratory. The width of the vacated area is approximately 4.2 metres in diameter, with a depth of some 100 metres. The accident has unexpectedly tapped into some subterranean extension of the Mare Verne, creating an Artesian well (though the salinity of the water renders it unpotable). However, initial investigations indicate that the pool is inhabited by a number of species of marine life, including fish of various sorts. All those curious are invited to visit the pool (which, for the sake of public safety, I have walled in) and fish there. I have named the pool in honour of that great, lately deceased New Babbage ichthyologist, Dr. Theodor Geisel McElligot. No swimming, please. Study of this new hydrological feature will continue..."

Spooky (Artemisia) did most of the actual work. I did the design. And yes, you can really fish there, and really catch fish. I also made a few new LJ icons, inspired by what I'd written about Panthalassa yesterday. The one that I'm using today is, of course, a view of North America during the Late Creaceous, with the Mississippi Embayment and the Western Interior Seaway very prominent. I also did one of Pangaea, and one of a Tyrannosaurus rex, and a William Stout painting of a trilobite. I did a little work on the Palaeozoic Museum in New Babbage, adding another of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins paintings and two lithographs of Archaeopteryx. That was the best of yesterday.

Today, we make corrections to the manuscript of A is for Alien, which came back to me from sovay and Massachusetts on Friday.

And here, a mere 21 days remain until Birthday No. -04. Shudder. Belatedly, I'm taking a cue from docbrite and faustfatale, and declaring the whole month of May to be my Royal Birthday Month. So, if you are given to such things, here's my Amazon wish list. Thank you. You wouldn't think a world could get this much more messed up in only -04 years, but you'd be wrong.

I want to write more about Panthalassa — particularly about how one can simultaneously be an atheist and a polytheist, and how one of the things that, increasingly, disturbs me about "orthodox" Wicca ("Gardnerian") is that it is drifting ever nearer a default monotheism, a sort of surrogate Xtianity where the tripartite goddess stands in for Jesus/"God"/the Holy Spirit (maybe chuck the Virgin Mary in there as a "female" mask), and any number of Panthalassa-related issues. But this is getting long. I'll save it for tomorrow, instead.

I have known since the conclusion of the New Reconsolidated March back in February that the horrors and tribulations of the winter would, in the fullness of time, require an epilogue, that this bit of work was not yet quite entirely done. There would be revision. I knew that. But then I allowed myself to become complacent, to be lulled and reassured by the silence from the west, and Maybe, thought I, the worst is over. Wrong. And yesterday — a proper shitstorm of a day — was the day I learned just how wrong I have been and that these marches have not yet passed and there are, truly, miles to go before I sleep. And I hope you will forgive me the necessarily cryptic nature of this paragraph, and maybe the next one, too. I am not at liberty, as they say.

So, today begins what I shall call the Mordorian Death March. But don't let the name fool you. It won't be any fun at all. The good news? Well, as it happens, that's also the bad news. The Mordorian Death March may only extend so far as the 23rd of May (though there's at least two months worth of walking to be done), and not likely a day longer. Which means, including today, I have only thirteen days to complete this stroll from the Mountains of Shadow north to Ered Lithui, passing the still black waters of the Sea of Núrnen and moving out across the plains of Nurn and Gorgoroth and the Plain of the Black Steed. See, that makes it sound not so very fucking bad, after all. Better than if I'd gone and used Dante for my metaphor. And in the end I will, I hope, have learned my lesson, so it will not be necessary for me to pass this way ever, ever again. There will be maggots and biting flies, thorns and stinging winds, the suspicious stares of orcs and always the stink of sulfur upon the scalding air, but I will tell myself that on the other side I shall at last be free and this pelican may be cut from about my aching neck (thank you, Josiah Kennedy). And at least I have learned that I do not look good going about wearing butchered pelicans.

---

But turn not pale, beloved snail, for even such awful days as these invariably yield grim moments of humour. Which is to say, I had a little too much in the way of alcoholic beverages late in the afternoon, wishing to dull the prickling sensation of imminent doom tumbling about inside my head. Spooky decided it would be best if we took a walk and got some fresh air and dinner, figuring it might do me some sort of good. But neither of us counted on the skinheads at L5P. Two of them, in fact, and really this is where the whole lamentably extended orc metaphor began. These two racist assholes and their white power T-shirts and tattoos and suspenders and this oily little weasel of a girl lurking in their sooty penumbrae. I remember she had a video camera, so perhaps all that follows will wind up on YouTube.

Anyway, they were just standing there, glaring, clearly appalled at all the unabashed diversity milling about, and I'm wondering what gawdsforsaken rock these two sorry sonsofbitches crawled out from under. I haven't seen skins in L5P in ages. And Spooky must have noted some warning glint in my drunken eyes, because she seized hold of my arm and with fierce (but futile) determination tried to steer me back towards Seminole Avenue. Too late. Of course, had I been sober, none of this would have happened. When I'm sober, I just grumble to myself and keep on moving, pretending I have some obligation to tolerate intolerance and stupidity and hatred. But I wasn't sober. I walked up to the skinheads and asked if they wanted to go bowling.

For a moment, they only stared silently back at me and Spooky. Indeed, this silence lasted just long enough that I began to suspect they were only clever illusions or waxworks or something of the sort. Finally, one of the ugly fuckers leaned towards me.

"What did you say?" he asked.

"Would you like to go bowling?" I asked again.

"What?" he asked again.

"B-o-w-l-i-n-g," I said, spelling the word, just in case he could, you know...spell. "Bowling."

"What?" asked the other skinhead, and by this time, of course, Spooky is freaking out, being somewhat sane and in possession of at least a dim sense of self-preservation, whispering for me to shut the hell up and come on.

But I'd started laughing, which actually seemed to confuse the skinheads even more than the whole bowling thing. And then, I swear to whatever vile beings keep watch over idiots like me, I asked the skinhead, "What country are you from?"

Skinhead: What? (this makes what #4)

Me ('cause the drunker I get, the better I quote Tarantino): "What ain't no country I know. Do they speak English in What?"

Skinhead: What? (#5, I shit you not)

And then, even as the next line in this surreal exchange was passing from my vocal chords to tongue to lips ("English, motherfucker. Can you speak it?"), Spooky grabbed me by one arm, sinking in her fingernails, and hauled me away towards the relative safety of the Corner Tavern, where we were headed before I decided to poke at the skinheads with a pointy stick. They just stood there and watched us go. When we reemerged after dinner, alas, the skinheads and the oily weasel girl were gone and in their stead there was only some skinny one-armed guy who kept telling me that I have "remarkable hair." No, I did not ask him to go bowling. But if you want to hear a really funny story, mostly free of orcs, have a look at this entry by tagplazen.

Thank you. I'll be here all week. Where the hell else am I gonna go?

So. It's 6:30 ayem (CaST; 5:30 EST), and I'm standing in our basement, in water up to my ankles. And yes, that's how Solstice began this year. Spooky woke me about half an hour before, as she'd been awakened by some peculiar roaring sound. As it turns out, that was the torrent pouring from the hot-water heater. By the time we got downstairs, there was a lake. A small lake, yes, but a lake, nonetheless. Wet and pissed off, I came back upstairs while Spooky found the correct valve and shut off the water. Our landlord arrived sometime afterwards, before dawn, I think. In some places, there was more than a foot of standing water. Right now, we're waiting on whoever's coming to pump out the basement. The heat's off, which means it's mostly freezing in here, since this couldn't have happened last week when it was warm. And the water's off. No heat. No water. No viewscreens, no surveillance, no freezers, no fuckin' ice cream, no guns, no rubbers, no women, all we got here is shit. Okay, well maybe it's not quite that bad. Yet. But after the theft of Tuesday, a minor basement deluge and the attendant chaos on Thursday morning is quite a bit more than enough crap for one week, thank you very frelling much. We've mostly canceled our Solstice plans.

Oh. Wait. There's a commotion directly below my office which sounds like the floor may collapse at any moment.

Now its stopped.

Spooky took some photos for the insurance people. I'd post them, only I'm too tired and annoyed to be bothered. Sadly they were all taken after the water was shut off, so the mighty cataract itself has not been recorded for posterity.

I did manage to finish "The Voyuer in the House of Glass" yesterday afternoon. The story came in at 4,858 words, and it's an odd story, a bit more disturbing than I'd expected it to be when I began.

I'm wondering if it would be possible for me to transfer the entirety of my journal at Blogger to Typepad? Does anyone know? LJ would remain the main journal, with Typepad replacing Blogger as a mirror. I looked around the site yesterday and liked what I saw, but could not find an answer to this question.

I've been getting e-mails from people asking if they can help out in the wake of the iBook theft. Truthfully, the best thing you can do right now is subscribe to Sirenia Digest, bid in the current eBay auctions, or pre-order Daughter of Hounds. Or all three. Or hey, just send cash. Cash is always good. At any rate, the kind words were much appreciated yesterday, especially by Spooky.

I'm not sure what's to become of today. There will be no writing, I fear. And today will get an L, though it won't be my fault. Perhaps we'll go to a movie. Perhaps I'll just go back to bed. Poor Spooky, I think she's had maybe six hours sleep spread over the last two nights.