Sketches: A Rumination

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Recently, I've started branchingn out into the visual arts -- or, rather, I'm channeling more of my creative soul in that direction. Below is the first of a series of self portraits I'm working on:

Rough? Perhaps. But I feel it does have a certain energy.

Scratch That

Last Friday (see below), I put up a post in which I pointed out my failure to remember my own blog anniversary, and went on to say that, despite my forgetfulness, my planned post on Allen Baron's Blast of Silence would nevertheless be forthcoming. And it is. But obviously my hoped-for Saturday posting date has come and gone, as has Sunday, and Monday. And now, Tuesday, as well.

Nobody wants to hear my excuses, but I do apologize to anyone who cared to read it. It is coming, and will be the next substantial piece I write -- it's just that my return to work, and subsequent two-day training, which involved a lot of walking on my part (never mind why), has just worn me out. I'm all out of my rhythm. Is that an excuse? Whatever, it's true.

But I am sorry, and I hope to have something up very soon. I refuse to promise anything for tomorrow, though, because we can see how much promises mean to me, apparently. Still, last night I started re-watching Blast of Silence and, if anything, it's even better than I remembered. I intended to watch the whole thing, but felt my eyelids rapidly closing. I'll finish it tonight, but this training I'm dealing with isn't the usual kind, which means I can't zone out for long stretches and begin writing blog posts in my head. No, I have to actually pay attention (there's a test and everything). Tomorrow isn't out of the question, but Thursday seems more likely. In any case, it has to go up by then, because I'll be out of town this weekend.

Let's see, what else should I tell you about myself that hold no interest for anyone? Um...I had some crab rangoon today. It was delicious. And there's a place in Virginia Beach, a video store, that was having a seven-for-$20 DVD sale, and I found nothing of interest there. So that should tell you something.

Mother Effer

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You know what can bring your blog plans to a shrieking halt? Shitty days. Shitty, shitty days. Which is what I just experienced, brother, and how. I was all primed to finish my review of Joe Hill's Horns, but now I barely have an interest in food, let alone writing anything.

Depending on how tomorrow goes -- tomorrow being the sequel to today, in more ways than perhaps the obvious one -- I might get the review up tomorrow night. Then again, perhaps I'll be so furious that I cancel this whole fucking blog outright. Okay, that probably won't happen, but the Horns review might be further delayed.

So. Here's a picture of a robot monster. Sorry.

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Good Eggs

It has been a relaxing weekend, and it is almost over. This saddens me. I may sill try to cram in a viewing of The Devil's Rain, but pretty much my hefty chunk of weekend downtime is at an end. Bummed though I am, I can't help but think of Levine, a book by Donald E. Westlake that I spent a fair amount of the aforementioned weekend reading, which features, at the end, a Medical Examiner responding to a cop's statement that "[t]he wrong ones die" with this
observation: "Everybody dies...It's a thing I've noticed."

All of which is to say that things sure could be worse. And along with that fact is the feeling, possibly inaccurate, that I've done a fair bit of writing on this blog lately, and so I don't feel terribly compelled to write anything of substance right now, as I didn't, you may have noticed, yesterday or the day before. But I'm cool with that, and I'm not usually. The difference today is that, unlike previous fallow periods, I feel pretty confident that the compulsion will return very shortly, like in say a day or two.

In the meantime, I'm going to take a page from Glenn Kenny's book and post a picture of a meal I ate today, one my wife cooked and which we both thoroughly enjoyed. It's called "egg and bacon pizza", or something like that, but there's not much "pizza" going on here -- all it is, is somebody's brand new way to make eggs even better to eat. As if such a thing were possible! But it was good, as you can probably imagine, looking at that picture, and now I think that The Devil's Rain sounds like a capital idea. Hope everyone had a good weekend, and I will talk to you in a couple of days.