• Mood: productive
• Music: Thea Gilmore, "Avalanche"

the roots of her shiny brass teeth

Lo and behold (she said), I actually managed to escape my own paralysing gravity yesterday and leave the house. Despite the rain, Spooky and I spent part of the afternoon wandering around Little Five Points. We might have picked a better destination. In wet weather, Little Five Points has all the charm of a cigarette butt floating in a Dixie cup of warm beer. But there were bright spots, such as peeping into the pizza place that used to be a Fellini's, the place I set a scene near the end of The Five of Cups, and finding it pretty much the same as it was back in 1992. And there's Sweet Lime, a great sushi joint (where once there was a decent Cajun restaurant, many years ago) that features $1 nigiri all damn day long on Mondays and from 5:30-7:30 p.m. the rest of the week. Back home, there was an incident with a very fat, psychotic squirrel that had chewed its way through the thick plastic on one of the garbage cans (plastic cans? That hardly seems right...) and, just as I passed by it, heading up the back stairs, the beast emerged head and shoulders, popping up like the newborn alien bursting free of Kane's chest, scaring the frikkin' bejeesus out of me. I never knew a squirrell could look so frelling demented. After giving me the hairy eyeball (literally), it immediately scampered — to the degree that a squirrel that obsese can be said to scamper — up a nearby tree. Local Author Dies of Heart Attack Following Encounter With Crazed, Garbage-Eating Squirrel.

Thereafter, I almost OD'd on caffeine and various trendy hipster stimulants, but at least managed to conquer dial-up and get Chapter Ten of the Nar'eth manga online. There's an awful lot of cute in this one. Also, Leh'agvoi (alias setsuled) and I will be collaborating on a Nar'eth "holiday special." I will write, and he will draw, and you will, no doubt, be amazed at the strangeness that will result. No details yet, but I'm fairly confident that there will be lots and lots of snow involved.

After dinner, Spooky and I watched Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes, which we'd missed in the theatres. Utterly delightful. We followed that with the last volume of Aqua Teen Hunger Force Season Three.

Many thanks to blu_muse for the stack of CDs. New music is much appreciated. And thanks, also, to Taylor Ellwood for a copy of his book, Pop Culture Magick (published by Storm Constantine's Immanion Press), which seems to be suiting me much more, so far, than the Phil Hine stuff. More on this in a later entry.

Today, I'm planning to write the long-overdue Chapter Three of The Girl Who Sold the World, in the hope that a couple of hours of fan-fic will snap me back into the Story Place, and tomorrow I can get back to work on Daughter of Hounds.

This morning, I swept fallen leaves off the our front porch. It's very nice having a front porch again. I've not had a front porch since 1997 when Jennifer and I left Athens. It's a sunny, bright morning here in Atlanta, a welcome change after the grey days. The air's a little nippy, but the last of the autumn colour helps take the edge off. I've discovered that it's not the colours of autumn that disturb me, but that terrible, perfect blue hue the sky takes on, that and the diminished quality of sunlight.

Please take a moment to look in on the eBay auctions. The Five of Cups for a scant $20 (plus P&H), an offer that won't last too much longer. "Buy It Now" for a free CD and monster doodle. Don't make me have to take the cat to the plasma donation place again. . .