• Location: Cirith Ungol
• Mood: fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck
• Music: Jethro Tull, "Locomotive Breath"

"This scar is a fleck on my porcelain skin..."

Not exactly the best morning ever. Overcast and drear. The temperature is going up to 57˚F, which means I fucking ought to get off my ass and be Outside. But I won't, because I took my break (during which the weather was wet and freezing) and now I have to work. And, besides, getting back to how this morning sucks, I hardly slept last night, and right now the pain, toes to knees, is at about 7.5. When the fuck did I become this pathetic old shit? I'm pretty sure 48 isn't supposed to hurt this much. Fuck.

Anyway...

Yesterday, I wrote the first 1,439 words on Black Helicopters. I'm liking it. It might turn out to be one of the best things I've written in years. Of course, it might not. We can never tell, can we? It's science fiction, and I know that it will have a non-linear, episodic structure, somewhat like that of "In View of Nothing." While the "present" of the story is October 2012, there will be sections set decades earlier. Probably. The opening scene takes place in Bewley's Oriental Café on Grafton Street in Dublin, Eire, where I last dined in 1996, so lots of working from memory and cribbing from the internet (mostly for any changes to the place in the last sixteen years).

Yesterday, I also discovered that the Saltines I eat have 60 calories per serving (five damn crackers). That's fucking insane. I had no idea. So, now I have to find a low calorie and non-gross alternative. Perhaps some flat bread or another (but not diet crackers, if such a vile thing even exists). Last night, we watched the first four episodes of Nurse Jackie, having finished the astoundingly good Season One of Boardwalk Empire (possibly the best television since Deadwood, I shit you not). We're very much enjoying Nurse Jackie, but some of the songs chosen for the soundtrack are painfully treacly.

During the writing of the now mostly vanquished ogre known as Fay Grimmer, I was unable to read much in the way of fiction. I even skipped my annual November reading of House of Leaves. Mostly, I read Bloom County and technical/nonfiction paleontology stuff: Sébastien's Steyer's Terre avant les dinosaures (translated by Alain Bénéteau); Tom S. Kemp's "The Origin and Radiation of Therapsids"; Smith, Rubidge, and Merrill van der Walt's "Therapsid Biodiversity Patterns and Paleoenvironments of Karoo Basin, South Africa"; and "The Evolution of Mammalian Endothermy" (those last three in Anya Chinsamy-Turan's Forerunners of Mammals. The new Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology (December) arrived, and I read "A new eosauropterygian (Diapsida, Sauropterygia) from the Triassic of China." Spooky and I are finishing up The Return of the King, which we had to set aside back in the spring (can't recall why), and I love it as much as ever.

I don't know who sent me a copy of Jim Steinmeyer's Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural, but whoever it was, thank you. I was delighted to see that To Charles Fort, With Love is actually cited (alongside Paul Thomas Anderson's fabulous Magnolia).

Anyway, here it is 1:12 p.m., and I need to write. But first, kitten:





Kitten Beefcake!



HOLY FUCK!



Life Is Pain,
Aunt Beast