July Sweeps - Day 525

Library closes early on Saturdays, so I got here with plenty of time to . . . oh, dick around on the internet.  

I stopped by Maverik, which is a gas station chain around here, to get a soda before I came to the library.  Getting a soda is something I have enjoyed doing for more than three decades (my best pal Dennis and I had a tradition where we would drive seven miles to the nearest gas station every Sunday, just to listen to music and hang out, and it's one of the things I look back on most fondly, though I imagine he doesn't think about those days at all), even if I'm now drinking the-even-more-toxic (according to Big Anklevich) diet sodas than the ones I subsisted on for all these many years.

"Don't Stop Believing" by Journey was playing on my radio, and as I was pulling into the parking space, one of those cute little Jeep Cherokees (I don't really know if that's the kind of car it was, or indeed, if there was a car and teens at all) with a group of three or four teen girls in it, pulled into the spot next to me, listening to their radio.  And for a second--only a second, mind you--I imagined that they too were listening to the same song.

That was something that used to happen all the time when I was younger--you'd pull up to a stoplight, and the vehicle next to you was listening to the same station, same song, as you were.  And for a moment, you were brothers . . . even if it was a pretty blonde way out of your league.

But no, they weren't listening to a forty-year old Journey song.  And it occurred to me that teen girls today probably don't even listen to the radio.  They have their phones, their Spotify playlists, their satellite radio, their bionic musical chip implants, or maybe don't even listen to music with their friends because it might distract from their individual phones.  And it further occurred to me that that is sad--that even though young people have it much easier nowadays, at least as far as technology goes ("Hey, who sings that song we heard in Forever 21 just now?"  "My phone says it was Taylor Swift . . . back when she was young"), pulling up to a stranger who just happened to also be listening to Billy Ocean or Timbukthree or Buckner & Garcia or Wilson Phillips, is a sad loss to today's society.

Just kidding.  I've never heard Buckner and Garcia played on the radio.  Not once.

Sit-ups Today: 111
Sit-ups In July: 1066

Something I've done three days this week was take my now-four year old nephew out running with me when I do my nightly jog.  My sister has had no problem letting me take him, perch him on my shoulders, and try and make it around the block without keeling over.  He apparently only weighs thirty pounds, but it is a particular challenge, like writing about an imaginary teen's period.

The first time I tried it, I had to stop, gasping, after two blocks, then turned around and came back.  The second time, I made it three blocks before having to stop and turn around.  This last time (on Thursday), I made it a goal to go half a mile before retreating.  I managed it, and felt pretty out of shape having to head back like that, but when I thought about it, jogging half a mile and then jogging home is actually jogging a mile.  So, I won't use that same image of the sloth on the couch for this post.

Last night, my entire immediate family went out to a Mexican restaurant to celebrate my brother's and my birthdays, and it was quite a crowd.  It consisted of my mom and her sister, my two sisters, my brother, me, my sister's three children, my brother-in-law's extra child, my niece, and her boyfriend.  We filled up a pretty big table, and my mom made sure to put my brother and my sister on opposite ends of it, to prevent any friction there.*

Anyway, due to the pandemic, we haven't gone out to eat in ages--I guess a year or so . . . or maybe they've all gone out and I wasn't invited, I don't know.  But it was strange, being able to order whatever I wanted (I got a Pepsi instead of a diet soda, and even though it tasted oddly chemically, I was happy to drink another when they refilled it), and then having so much food I couldn't finish it all.  I hadn't been that overfull since my Uncle Len used to live here (he really should've been one of those competitive eaters you see shoveling wet hot dogs into their pieholes like an Amish girl Rumspringa-ing at Daytona Beach).

Push-ups Today: 194
Push-ups In July: 1264

The other day I got it into my head to write a little scene in the new story where Lara Demming talks to Mrs. McAllister, her new "mother," about her time of the month and where pads are kept.  This is not a subject that I am particularly savvy about (if there truly are subjects I'm an expert in, except maybe getting a librarian to let me use the ladies restroom so I don't soil myself), but it's a specific challenge to me because I don't know how a seventeen year old girl's mind works, not in 1991, and certainly not in 2021.  I don't know how Lara would go about discussing it, except that I have the advantage of the situation being a strange one (the woman who is pretending to be her mother has somehow become magically convinced that Lara is indeed her daughter), so it's okay if the conversation is a bit alien and off-putting.

Well, I wrote the scene, and it ended up being a lot less about Lara's period than about Barbaralinda McAllister's own situation, and her real daughter, and that pleases me to no end.  I am greatly enjoying writing this book, and maybe somebody, in the far-off year of 2024, will enjoy reading it at least partly as much.

Words Today: 1624
Words In July: 11,181

The sound went out on my bloody laptop just now, and there's no way to fix it (that I know of) without rebooting the system.  That means that there's no way to find out if the episode of the Outcast that I just published was the right version (I had three mp3s in my folder, one marked "Patreon Version" and the other two with the same name).  I did open the file and try to listen to it with headphones, but again, it found no sound drivers, so I had to just publish the episode and hope--

--Oh wait, I could check my phone to see if it was the right file.  I stuck my headphones in the jack there and pressed play, and my voice literally SCREAMED through the phone at a volume that I have never been able to play any file or telephone conversation.  Of course I'm at the library on the Quiet Floor again, but hey, at least I know it was the correct version I put out there.

*Thing is, it's my two sisters that have been going at it the last couple of times we've gotten together.  My older sister has a somewhat theatrical personality that can set others off with little to no warning.  Now that my father is gone, I tend to get along with everybody in the family, but I remember how it was when he was around, how we were like oil and water, and I could say something that would piss him off, or he could make me absolutely murderously furious with merely a word.  Family is fun, huh?