What She Said

days of auld lang syne

It’s just hard to say why. Feeling much better this morning, probably because I fought it through yesterday. Probably because I’ve reached out to Steph and found that he can be my substitute daddy when the going gets tough and I feel like I’m trying to learn things in a vacuum with nobody caring or paying attention. Possibly because the music room has come more together with the additional of…

As Dale and Flash rise up from the chaos of midtown Manhattan in Zarkov’s chopper, we hear the strains of The National’s “Fake Empire”. The Green Veil lends everything an air of unreality, as though we were viewing the desperation below through a camera lens made from emerald.

it’s not a blurb it’s the back cover

Tania Cooper is a bot wrangler aboard interstellar Survey ship The Impetuous Moon. She loves her wife, her guitar, and her favorite bamboo grove in the Ring. Rockabilly. Booze and home-brewed psychedelics. The ship’s annual Bacchanal. Participating in the gossip boards and Of-The-Moment polls with her two dozen crew mates. And her big secret. She fully intends keeping that. After her wife Nikki…

if you think that’s cool, whatever dude

Every day Eleanor made the same fucking mistake: she read the news. Just when she thought the pre-inauguration period for The Tyrant was settling back into a normal pattern of press bullshit and spoken bullshit and photo ops, the man with out-of-focus orange hair did something new and unexpected. This morning it was explicit attacks on the major media vehicles of the day. WaPo, NYTimes, NBC, CNN.…

In re Ewan McGregor flattens American Pastoral into ’60s cliché : I saw it yesterday. Had to drive an hour to get to it, since it’s been so universally panned it’s already gone from the city. Maybe if I had read the book I’d feel as cheated as all the critics apparently do, but I believe a movie adaptation has to stand on its own, and be judged on its own too. This is not a great movie, but it’s…

blue blue electric blue

I live in a solid blue state so I didn’t vote, and could do that without having to worry about adding to a Trump victory. But I never liked HRC’s politics. She favored NAFTA, DOMA, prosecution of Edward Snowden, and the TPP. She voted for the Iraq war. No way I could ever vote for her. Got nothing to do with her friggin’ emails, or Benghazi either. The antipathy toward her was not entirely…

Well it’s President-Elect Trump. Flenser-in-Waiting. I can’t wait to see how the country re-aligns itself, retcons, rationalizes; especially the goddamn media. I always said Dubya was going to wreck this country (and he did), but pretty much everybody expects Der Trumpster to trash the place. There’s nothing to do right now except get ready for work.

think i’ll have another glass of mexican wine

We went driving last night after I finished work. Up Damen and east on Argyle, to a little cluster of Vietnamese restaurants I found a month ago during a random bicycle ride. Traffic was light for rush hour and “Asia on Argyle” was a little seedy—about the same as the Bowery is these days, which is to say not too bad, but after the sterility of Roscoe Village it was kind of a shock to see a…

I took a close look at my pension plan this morning, at the numbers. I’d been sort of blowing it off, thinking oh, it’s not all that much. Turns out it kind of is. Not massive, but substantial. Enough to make a difference when I’m not pulling in new income. Like, annually, man.

The other thing that caught my eye was something I had somehow hidden from my own view: the phrase Normal Retirement Age.

I’m not sure yet if I have to retire at Normal Retirement Age, or if I simply can and begin reaping the benefits (as John Lovitz said in The Wedding Singer). I’d been thinking that there would have to be a schlep to age 68, since that’s when my stupid Social Security finally maxes out. But suppose I have to bail at 65. That’s only seven years from now.

Gave me a moment of deer-in-the-headlights to my own mortality. Except yeah, I know, it’s not “mortality”, it’s just the end of my so-called career. But this is what the plan of moving to Chicago for my pre-retirement was all about. Positioning myself away from my previous retirement plan of “cardboard box in Tompkins Square Park”. And suddenly I know it was a good idea moving here. I feel like I have to scramble, actually. Because there’s no time left.

Oh hey, look, I just bought a car. A brand new car. One that’s supposed to be mechanically sound and has a good resale value, and I got the base model tricked out with the Pop and Tech packages that give me heated seats and backup camera and all kinds of doodads. It reminds me of choosing a computer, where you’re looking for the sweet spot in the price points. And I think that’s what I did. I bought the middle-priced option and maxed out the RAM and disk.

I guess it should last me until my retirement. That’s part of why I wanted to buy a new one—so it would last. That’s part of why I wanted to get it tricked out—because the doodads and Tech Package stuff will get cheaper and more integrated into all models over the coming years, and won’t seem like such a luxury in ten years.

My relocation from NYC was never just about the money. It’s about living, and doing those things I want to do without having to suffer too much to do them even after the income is gone. E.g., I still haven’t published shit, but I’m writing. I like to write. I don’t necessarily like to finish, but I like to write…

And I’m not playing out but I’m still playing my guitar. We went to Indiana to see my friend T yesterday. Drove down in the car, used the Carplay Apple Maps to get there—actually no, because I like them better I used Google Maps but you can only get the navigation audio through the car if you’re using an iPhone. It won’t show you the Google Map. Big surprise. Thanks Cupertino.

Kind of confusing, kind of distracting, and I got us lost in Gary on the way home, where we at least ran into an awesome mural of the Jackson Five before I figured out I had Maps in how-to-get-there-on-foot mode. It was making me kind of nuts, lost in weird Indiana (BTW? Indiana:Chicago::Jersey:NYC), wondering why it said it would take 12 hours to get back home. (“Home to Chicago”, another weird thought.)

But even though I didn’t play guitar for or with T’s stepchildren, I know I will with them or with other people, and soon. I can make that happen too. And that’s something else that makes me happy, and a part of what I need from life and my so-called retirement. Possibly a large part.

By the way, Chicago looks like a little jewel on the horizon of Lake Michigan when seen from the Indiana Dunes. (Full disclosure: that’s not actually Chicago on the horizon–Chicago is tinier and out of frame to the right. But it was there, and beautiful.)

And I got to swim in the lake too—something else that makes me happy.

P.S. Eleven Herbs and Spices Fried Chicken last night. Pretty good Labor Day weekend, all the way around.

sapphire bullets of pure love

I think we’re reaching the end with Miss Kitty. She can’t even get up to walk to her food bowl or the litter box. Last night she peed on herself. Good thing I had a pee pad underneath her blanket. The living room has been her hospital room since we moved from New York. The couch has been her bed since before then. We’ve done fucking everything I could think of to help: pet stairs to get up and…

Tania Cooper is a white woman pretending to be a person of color.  Her wife is missing some time. Captain It is one of twelve neuters trained by the Grand Planetary Survey to command their starships. They’ve been gone from Earth for over 300 years, searching through the Kepler catalog for signs of life without success. That’s about to change.  Welcome aboard The Impetuous Moon.

just gonna leave this here

Working through one last belated polish. Changed the name of the book, comped up a new cover. Hopefully the estate of Earle Bergey won’t need to get paid for the image. Coming to Amazon self-pub shortly:  

christmas twin falls idaho

I dreamed we were split into two warring camps of Extraordinaries and one camp of normal humans. The warring ones were possibly trans. SG was there. P was there and called me a “meta-wife” because my complaints and nags were so outrageous that they endangered everybody equally. We could go to another star. We were already in space, in zero g. I might have be S’s “meta-wife”. So it was all bad. We…

we are hope despite the times

Made it to Chi-town. Chiraq. Murder Cap. Windy City. The toddlin’ town. Carl Sandburg bullshit but damn the pork chops we ate last night were like three inches thick and half the price of the ones I liked from D’Agostino’s. Good drive across eastern America. No highway incidents to speak of other than Indiana has very stupid ideas about how to schedule road work. The supervisor in charge of such…

this story about a chick who dropped out for 2 weeks, before the cops returned her to her mother: http://gothamist.com/2016/05/29/former_columbia_student_who_started.php Read the comments section. Lots of haters. I know she made her mother worry like hell, but I applaud her bravery and her ability to drop off the grid even if for just a couple of weeks. These days it’s a job of work to untangle…