Nasty hot

I can't figure out how to get my so-called AC to work so last night was stifling and wearying. Didn't get much rest and then the AC at WORK wasn't working. And it got up close to 90, here. This is Texas weather, not New York. This kind of crap isn't supposed to happen till August and then only for two weeks...but here it is. And I've never liked the heat, much...even when it's a "dry" one. Where do I have to go to find consistent coolness? Antarctica?

So now I have two box fans going, one working in the window, and I let the office know about the AC and they can't get to it till tomorrow, meaning another hot night. And tomorrow the guy's not coming out till the afternoon to deal with the one at work...and so it goes and goes and goes.

Of course, Brendan hits Houston just as the heat is beginning and doesn't like it, at first. I wonder how that'll play out as he evolves into living there and finding a new life and new problems to face? Here's a snippet of some of his reaction.

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It took me a week after that dinner to be able to even so much as climb the stairs without being exhausted, and days after that before I ventured from the house, and then it was only because Uncle Owen was working on his car. It had rained and the air was thick and wet, making it difficult to breathe, almost. I was lying in my bed, staring at the blank ceiling, drifting into my usual nothingness when I heard the engine chugging, outside. Over and over and --

-- Jeremiah O’Shea’s Cortina wouldn’t start on damp mornings and he’d had near everyone he could think of check into it, at no small cost to himself, until he let me look into it as Mr. Green's idiot brother made fun behind me but I found the problem and --


I bolted up then rose from the bed and went to the window. Uncle Owen was at the Volvo, under the bonnet -- the hood, as it were. It was a dark blue PV444 and looked like it had the twin SU Carbs to it. A clean-looking car it was but in need of a wash and maybe attention paid to the rust spots developing between the passenger door and front fender. The interior wasn’t quite as good of shape but wasn’t beyond saving, and from here the engine looked fine. But when Uncle Owen got behind the wheel to turn the key, I could hear it creak a little so lubrication was definitely needed and maybe topping off the shocks.

I stood there and watched Uncle Owen try to start the engine and it just chug along, working really hard to catch. Then he’d go back under the hood, unplug the spark wires and replug them and try again only to get nothing. Then he’d go back under the hood and undo other connections and redo them and try again. Over and over. It was comical, for he didn’t sit easy in that car.

I finally had enough of it and went downstairs and out the back door. The ground was still wet and sticky, and the air felt even more smothering without the house. I wore only my pajama bottoms, still, no slippers even, so the soaked grass tickled my feet.

“Having troubles?” I asked.

He jumped and looked at me as if I were a madman, which I probably seemed to him. “Brendan, what you doin’ out here?" he said in his slow Texas drawl. "You ain’t dressed.”

I only shrugged. “Would you care for me to look at it?” I said, motioning to the Volvo.

He shrugged back at me. “Does this every time there’s a fog in the mornin’. Then in the afternoon, it starts up fine. But I need to get goin’ an’ this is the only car left.”

I looked around and saw two dry spots where two cars had been. “When’s Aunt Mari due back?”

“Dunno. Guess I’ll just grab a cab. Lookin’ a buyin’ this bar in up in The Heights and the owner’s due at one. I’ll get it towed into the shop, later.”

In answer, I leaned over the engine and checked the cables. They were on the old side, probably original. Same for the coil and other wires. I pulled at it without gripping the glove and it nearly separated. “Try starting it, again.”

He shrugged and sat behind the wheel and the car creaked; definitely needed lubing but maybe not so much on the shocks. I pushed both ends of the coil’s cable against their gloves...and the engine fired right up.

Uncle Owen bolted from the car, startled. “What’d you do?”

“You need a new coil,” I said. “It’s coming apart inside the glove, so you can’t see it. Is there an auto supply shop nearby?”

“Up Shepherd. I can stop on the way.”

I nodded. “You might want to think about having all the cables replaced. They’re about due.”

“Damn, Brendan, where’d you learn that?”

“I’ve been at this since I was ten. Clocks, TVs and the like. Cars. Made extra money from it.”

“Your mother never told us.”

“She didn’t know, most the time. When I got on with Mr. Green, she thought I just cleaned the shop.”

“Didn’t you tell her what you were doin’?”

I nodded then headed back to the house, feeling sleepy. Uncle Owen let me go.

I fixed a sandwich from the wealth of food available in the fridge -- cheeses and luncheon meats and lettuce so crisp it could cut you and rich red tomatoes and something called Sandwich Spread all piled high on some brown bread that felt as light as a feather -- and found only a couple of Dr. Peppers chilled in the fridge’s door. I took one, opened it and returned to my room. I sat on the bed and ate, feeling very luxurious, and thoroughly enjoyed the Dr. Pepper; it wasn’t as sharp and biting as Coke. Then I dozed a little before rising, again, and deciding I was weary of having nothing on me but pajamas and around me but these four walls.

I took a long scalding-hot shower, letting the steam fill my lungs and wipe away the stickiness of the air, then toweled off...and had to towel off twice more, thanks to the combination of steam and humidity bringing out my sweat. No wonder they bathe every day and layer on deodorant here, I said to myself, if they didn’t they’d reek.

Working on POS

The story broke into three sections -- "Beginning," "Houston" and "Return" -- each with its own ring binder, now. And today, I changed the middle section to "Escape." This subtitle fits better because Brendan does, effectively, escape the horror of Derry's growing chaos, albeit at a hideous price. So comes this complete change in tone and attitude to one more in sync with Houston's casual nature. New people come into his life -- each with their own natures of good and bad -- and his world grows calm...for a while. I think I'll enjoy working on this section...till it begins to tighten its grip around him.

It's been as warn in Buffalo as it can be in Houston. Stifling air with no breeze to lessen the grip it holds on you as you do anything, indoors or out. Granted, this is more like Texas in April and we're almost to the end of May, but if I've brought that damned state's temps up here for this summer, I'm gonna be pissed off. I hate Texas summers because they're hot and sticky and the only saving grace is air conditioning that doubles your electric bill, if you're lucky. Everyone kept insisting it's nicer in the summer in Buffalo. Yeah, tell that to my skin as I wipe the sweat from it. If I do stay up here, I'm getting a apartment closer to the lake.

Rainy day...

So I reworked my trip to travel through Brockport to the Chase branch there and stumbled across the Erie Canal -- at work! It's just a block away.
It's been nicely laid out in this area...

...and the bridge is a major passageway...

...so when boat traffic comes up...

...alarms sound and the lights go red and the bridge begins to rise...

...so the boat can pass under...

...and head down to the next bridge to do it, again.

Then the bridge lowers and traffic continues, and it takes close to ten minutes.

That boat, btw, was from Alexandria, VA...and I wonder if they came up the Mississippi, because it was heading east.

After this, I drove into Rochester...which is not a very pretty town, especially considering the river that supposedly runs through the middle of it was dammed up and only half was of any depth while the rest was as deep as the LA River in a drought. "Sticky Lips" had okay barbecued brisket...though they cut it really thick...but their main sauce is sweet instead of tangy. Not bad, but I've had better at Rudy's, a chain in Texas that has this nice "bite you back" sauce and they slice their brisket by the weight and thin. Plus, "Sticky Lips" was right by a massive rail yard and industrial area and not conducive to sticking around (pun intended).

So I came home and will do some work and get back to POS.

Just travelin' along

I'm running over to Rochester, tomorrow, because that is where the closest branch of my so-called international bank is. Chase has no offices in Buffalo, at all. So if I have to do some business at one in this area, I have to travel 60 miles. Irritating...but it may turn out to be all right, in the long run. I'm told there's a great barbecue place in Rochester called Sticky Lips. With a name like that, you know I had to find a reason to try it out. Plus part of the Erie Canal runs through the city.

It's funny, but I hadn't really thought about how you can make this massive circle around the Eastern US via the Erie canal and the Great Lakes (Ontario, Erie and Michigan) then down the Mississippi to the Gulf and around the Eastern Seaboard back up to New York and up the Hudson to the Erie, again. A woman at work was telling me about how her husband and brother-in-law did that, once, over the space of a couple years. One would take the boat a certain distance then fly home and the other would get vacation time and find the boat and take it farther. It's called "The Great Loop" and sounds like it'd be fun to do, sometime.

I broke POS into its three sections and bought a ring binder for each. Green ring binders, capable of holding 275 pages for a total of 925 sheets. Not counting dividers. Section 1 already has 14 chapters with a good 8-10 more to go. The other two have fewer than 9 chapters. Man, this story keeps widening as I go through it, like a river aiming for the sea. Like "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and Huck's journey down the Mississippi on a raft with Jim, the runaway slave. As the river widens, so does the breadth of their tale.

Y'know, that story is brilliant and elegant and totally worth the read. Mark Twain's use of English in not only the proper sense but the colloquial was unmatched, and his characters unequaled.

What's sad is, I remember a lot of people were loudly offended by Huck's use of the "N" word in regards to Jim. Of course, it was obvious they'd never read the book, because if they had they'd have seen how Huck was brought up to believe Africans were less than human, slavery was protected by the bible and if you helped a slave escape you'd go to hell. All drilled into him by Aunt Polly. But by the end of his travels, Jim had become such a friend to Huck, the boy decided he'd rather go to hell than betray the man. It was a thrilling realization in a deeply humane book.

I'm hardly on the level of Mark Twain (or Leonid Tolstoy) so I can only hope to reach the beauty of that moment in my writing, I know, but it never hurts to try. Keeps me working out my writing muscles.

Weird dreams

I know I dream every night but I often don't remember what they're about. The memory of their details vanishes with my waking. But every now and then I experience one that sticks in my brain and won't let go. I had one like that a couple years back, where I was on an upper floor of a building during an earthquake, and the building collapsed around me but I wasn't hurt. I wound up on the street watching the fire. In another, my car went off a bridge into a lake and I had to swim for shore with a shark chasing me. I made it. What's really weird about that one is, I can't swim...but I was going faster than Mark Sptiz, I gotta tell you.

So last night I had a vivid dream where two people I know (who shall remain unnamed because I halfway think they were representational of others I know) worked together to end my dreams because they felt it was best for me, and I was given no chance to respond. One was fussy and demanding and the other was so sure of being right, condescension dripped from every word. And when I woke this morning, I was so weary, I had a hard time getting out of bed for work.

You know, I was raised Presbyterian and they believe in predestination. Like your life is written and you are just fulfilling it. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but it does seem to have colored my views in more ways than I can think of. The most obvious one being my love of Russian literature, which relies heavily on the idea of "man trapped in his fate." POS has more than a dab of that in it.

I do believe a lot of my life was and is out of my control, most of which stems from events in my past that seem to back that up -- like illnesses as a baby that set the course of my health and well-being, and actions by others that forced changes on me which I did not want to make. And I've watched friends of mine who believe strongly in self-determination get little farther in their lives than I have in mine...which also seems to bolster the notion that we are all trapped in our fates.

It's a scary thought, the idea that you're here and following a script laid down by someone else and from which you cannot deviate. So many of them are tragedy, a few are comedy and some are triumphs over adversity while others are about the dignity of facing the worst the world has to offer. It means luck plays no role in your world, not really. And it means no matter how hard you try, if you're not meant to rise above a certain level of success, you won't. Life will conspire to crush you or distract you or wear you down or lead you to change your mind or just surrender to whatever direction you're being lead towards.

So what I want to know now is, what the hell did I do to deserve the fate I was handed?

Miles to go...

And nothing much to say except I'm seeing POS head up to 8-900 pages and becoming unpublishable. It's a silly thing to be worried about, right now, and the fact is I could trim it back to a triptych...and the very thought makes me see it run up over 1000 pages. And I don't think I'd care. I like what I've got so far and it seems to be building to the conclusion I figured. So...I'm back to it.

In the meantime, here is what Derry looks like, today, in comparison to the photo I posted yesterday.

Quick note

I startled Brendan by digging in and finding the sections I was missing then going over them once and adding them to the printout -- and the story is now 348 pages long; nearly 79,000 words. I now have Brendan going to Dublin and a conversation he has with a mate and the beginning of The Battle of the Bogside.

Now he can shut the fuck up (said with a smile).

This is Derry as it looked in 1965, if I remember right.

Oops, I did it, again

Brendan is pissed at me. No, not pissed...just unhappy. I got lost in setting up this deal on Invested.in and shunted POS aside. I haven't done anything on it for a week...not since I flew out to LA and dealt with the Canadians who were afraid to fly so wouldn't shut up on the flight. I thought I'd at least have the hard copy gone over by now, but nope. Nothing.

I'm not very disciplined when it comes to my writing, I have to admit. I may write every day, but it's not always what I should be writing or even want to write. I currently have a stack of junk that'll need letters sent out (like to TransUnion Credit Services, who keep pulling some nonsense about me not giving them the information they need to correct my credit report even though I've given them exactly what they asked for, again), and I have so much reading stacked up to do and my bills are squirrely, right now. And next week I'm taking a day trip to NYC to oversee the shipping of the books off to The London Book Fair (which I don't get to go to, dammit).

On top of it, I'm turning into the IT guy at this job, and I barely know how to make my MAC work, let alone a program on a PC...so there's that learning curve as well as knowing more and more about UK Import/Export rules. By the time I'm done, I may have myself set up as an expert in it (insofar as books are concerned) so might be able to skip the country and live in London.

I'm thinking about that mainly because the right wing Tea Party movement has become really scary, with many of them all but calling for the overthrow of the government and enactment of Christian law as regards morality (but not as regards business, the little snakes). Many of us on the left wing refer to them as the Talibangelicals, and initially did it as a snarky way of identifying them. But lately they seem too damned ready to topple Washington, shoot whomever they damn well want and run everyone who's not a true WASP out of the country. And I blame "American Idol" for this.

You may think I'm joking, but AI actually set up the notion that mediocre people with the brains and ability of a five-year-old can become the next music/movie/political star if they're good-looking and at least know how to connect with their audience. And it's spread to just about everything in American culture and is threatening to take over the world.

So now we have the likes of Ann Coulter, who knows nothing about history lecturing people on the meaning of history because she spouts cutsie lines about liberals; and Sarah Palin, who quit her job as governor lecturing Obama on how to do his job because she still has a rack and winks at the boys in the audience, like any good cougar would; and Glenn Beck going bat-shit-fucking crazy on camera and spouting absolute nonsense as these sheep-claiming-to-be-people think he's making sense, all because he's got a program on cable; and Sean Hannity so lost in his idea that everything a Democrat does is wrong and everything a Republican does is right, he's defending the very people who nearly collapsed our economy (and may still succeed at doing it, if they have their way) and people think he's smart. Rush Limbaugh makes up facts to suit his mood and makes fun of sick people, but if any Republican dares to point that out he gets berated into apologizing to the fat-assed-junkie-hypocrite. All because he has a radio show. Tea baggers have even been shown verbally attacking a man who had Parkinsons (or something like it) telling him they don't do handouts. It's diseased.

Sorry, I'm ranting. But I do think things are getting nastier and nastier in this country, and I don't know if I want to be around it, anymore. Of course, there's nothing new about the right wing's vicious absurdity. Hell, during Kennedy's presidency, there were people who wanted him dead because he was Catholic. And members of the GOP were accusing Roosevelt of letting the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor decades ago. We had McCarthyism and Tricky Dick's CREEP shenanigans in the 50's and 70's. Maybe I'm just too aware of it all, now.

But it is informing my books, and will factor greatly into POS. I finally understand why Brendan winds up in Houston for a while; that city has one of the largest chapters of the Ku Klux Klan in the US, in a suburb called Deer Park, to the east of the city. I got a feeling that's gonna factor into it.

Ah me...always finding excuses not to write...until I find something I want to write so badly, I can't not write it.

Unfinished Business

Okay, I'm trying something new and different -- I posted a short film project I want to make on this site called Invested.in and I'm trying to raise $10,000 to make it. Here's the link to it and some info.

Unfinished Business: "A young intern is forced to save the life of a man who's been dead for 30 years. If he fails, he'll be killed -- just like the 5 doctors before him."

This will be a 14 minute long short film in the suspense-thriller genre.

It's definitely festival fodder and geared to show off my abilities with actors and make me king of the world. Any takers?

Unfortunately, this was all I was able to get my brain to do, yesterday. Oh, I got my laundry done and paperwork sorted and expenses worked up...but creatively? Zero. Zip. Nada.

Except....for working up a banner for the money-begging site. So...anybody got a spare $10K lying around they don't need? I'll send you a signed DVD of the final project.

(See what happens when you go to LA? You get reinfected by the movie bug.)

Catch up day

Lots of stuff to do and paperwork to clean up so nothing much else is on the agenda. Maybe tonight I'll get back to sifting through my printout of POS to see what I've got and what I need, but I'm also remembering I've written more than what I have in this hard copy so probably should search that out, first. Those bits may change the direction of events, slightly.

Man...I am so NOT organized. For all the backup disks I've burned and USB drives I have with all my past work on them, I got nothing consolidated into one place; everything is everywhere. New versions of scripts are on one disk while old versions are on another...except when they aren't or are vise verse. Sections of stories wind up spread over three USB drives...I think. I should take a few days -- hell, a few weeks, it seems like -- and sort everything out so I know what I have and haven't done, what I do and do not have in Word and Final Draft and Photoshop and PDFs and such.

Like with POS, I know I wrote a bit where Brendan and a girl he likes, Joanna, catch a ride to Dublin and spend the day and begin to think it would be a good place to live instead staying in the growing horror of "The Troubles." But it's not on my USB drive, and it's not on my laptop, even though I was using my laptop at the time to write POS. There's also a bit where Brendan sneaks through the checkpoints to get to the Waterside to make an appointment at a park overlooking Lough Foyle that I wrote that I can't find. Irritating. I guess I need a jump drive just for POS now, since CD-Rs won't let me add rewrites to them.

Something more to join the list of what to do to procrastinate in my writing.