enthralling mid-week update
Wednesday 20 June 2007 | 3 cookies in the jar
The good news is, the only thing wrong with the Daewoo’s A/C was a short in the relay box, a paltry $29 to repair. (”How did shorts get in there?” wonders the Brujo.) Cool air! Just in time for Tartarus. The good news also is, there’s nothing wrong with my brakes, which have only 20% wear. But the confusing news is, Why is my right front tire still squeaking when I brake? Current theory of mechanic: there’s dust under the wheel rim and I should wash it with a high-pressure hose. Competing theories anyone? Unhappy (or perhaps just vocal) mice? Very small pizzicato violinists?
In other news mechanical, the electric scooter is for sale! (Dubious-looking brunette not included.) Take a look at the craiglist ad for details, if you live in Santa Fe and want a nifty little petrol-free ride.
I continue to do bugger-all, at least compared to what I think I should be accomplishing, but after therapy with the DBT on Tuesday (three sessions left…) I don’t feel nearly as badly about it as I did, her having managed to convince me for the umpteenth time that I’m more or less a normal writer and not a moral void. And weirdly enough, even as I succumb to my summer book-reading laziness (the inheritance I suspect of too many academic years), I seem to be getting stuff done anyway.
So last night I wolfed down Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties, Marion Meade’s totally trashy “bio” of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edna Ferber, Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and their set, from which I could hurtle at you an astonishing number of irrelevant salacious facts gathered (Zelda used to mix her own gin out of pure alcohol and juniper oil! Dorothy tied sporty black velvet bows around her gauze-bandaged slashed wrists! Edna St. Vincent Millay slept with everything that moved and some things that didn’t!); but I won’t. An insane, giddy New York writers’ world gone forever, and probably that’s for the best.
(Related: an all-too-spare collection of the quotations of Robert Benchley.)
And this morning I spent a couple of hours writing the first few pages of an inexplicably bleak post-apocalyptic environmentalist/horror screenplay, which originated in my winter-bludgeoned brain during the Baja trip with the Brujo. (On the Mexican highway late one afternoon, I witnessed an involuntary terrifying and surreal vision of The End. The desert probably inspires this kind of thing, or maybe it was being carsick.) So far I seem to have a talent for voiceovers, photo montages and general ominousness, while I fall apart when I actually have to make people move around and say things. Maybe it would be better as a short story, or some sci-fi verse hybrid. Or any twisted form which is all mise-en-scène and doesn’t require creating characters or plot as such. God forbid one should have to learn any new skills to write a mere movie script.
3 cookies in the jar
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You are not dubious looking. You have a dubious look. And you are mighty hot on a scooter.
the sudden commentarist
I think you are very good looking. I feel lucky I stumbled on the picture while “googlin’ for “squeaking brake’ (My brand new scooter’s brakes are squeaking)
And the Brujo agrees with you! Thanks and hope you get your brakes fixed….