Hell is filled with empty subject lines.: greygirlbeast

I suppose I have to begin with the news that a U.S. district judge has struck down Alabama's gay marriage ban. I thought it would be several years more before this happened. So, surprise. Is it good news? Yes, obviously. But this is Alabama we're talking about, and if the judge's ruling is upheld by the Supreme Court, it will also mean that, in some ways Alabama will only get meaner. When you enforce tolerance, it makes the bigots even more hateful. Which is why we have the Tea Party. But, for today, congratulations, Alabama. It's a start.

I woke about eight this morning to a beautiful, heavy snow fall. Two or three inches. And then I went back to bed. When I got up an hour and a half later, it had already begun melting. Hello mountains of slush, goodbye beauty. It's smothering, claustrophobic, and manages, somehow, to be simultaneously too bright and gloomy. This photo from my office window at about 10:45.

Yesterday, after one more hour of banging away at the damned thing, I pronounced the bibliography "finished," and we packed up the galley pages for Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea and left the House. It was cold, but not bitter. As long as I didn't look up, I could stand it. First, the bank, Mother of All Anxiety, and then we crossed the Providence River to Wickenden Street and went to the UPS place at Wayland Square. All the corrected pages were photocopied, because I trust no mail carrier. Forty-two dollars, plus, to ship the pages back to Subterranean Press. Thank you, internet, for ruining the postal service. Afterwards, we went to Paper Nautilus Books.

Please, if you're so sick you can't breathe without wet, racking coughs, STAY THE FUCK HOME, so that you're not spraying your contagion all over a bookshop.

Anyway, we wandered about the shop for a while. I picked up Kristin Leutwyler's The Moons of Jupiter (2003) and Michael Hanlon's The Real Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, Mars Express, and the Quest to Explore the Red Planet (2004). I was flipping through a copy of an old textbook, Vernon L. Kellog's Elementary Zoology (1901, 1922), with the name F.S. Wylie written inside, and a date – January 14, 1926. Inside were two slips of paper, so aged and fragile that it's hard to handle them, two biology tests taken by F.S. Wylie that same spring at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. I could not possibly leave all that behind, not after bridging the span of eighty-nine years.

After Paper Nautilus, we went to the market and checked the mail. There was a letter for me, bound as a chapbook: "The Letter about Kathleen Tierney, Writing Culture, and Ghosts" by J.T. Glover, who I spoke with at World Fantasy back in November. This sort of this is worth a thousand emails. At least a thousand.

There are photographs from yesterday, behind the cut: