6/15 & 6/16

6/15

Every Wednesday morning, my buddy Jeff calls me from Germany and we talk about the newest episode of "Strange New Worlds."  He watches "Star Trek" on Mondays, and I watch it on Tuesdays.  And we chat about each excellent show, like friends do, I suppose.  There's a lot wrong with me and my life, but for this, I'm pretty darn grateful.

I arrived at the cabin to find nothing changed from last week (which tells me nobody, not even my brother, had visited over the weekend), but there was evidence of a presence, as there were several large chunks of animal dung around the back door and all along the deck, including a thick puddle of congealing animal pee on the welcome mat.  To my (lack of) surprise, there was a family of woodchucks that came out from under the deck to investigate my presence, and my dog, were they bold, not bothering to run when they saw me, and even welcoming their mid-sized adolescent child out to take a look at the big-nosed human who was trying to sweep away their now-hardened dung chunks.  If my brother were here, oh, they'd be afraid to stick their heads o--

No, scratch that.  If my brother were here, they'd already be dead.  

I watched THE GIVER for Marshal and me to review, and with no internet, I couldn't know how well the movie did and/or if it was well-received (or how close it hewed to the source material).  Welcome back to 1992, kids.

Writing or Exercise: Exercise

6/16

I didn't go into how I felt yesterday, shooting at those woodchucks, filled with a strange antipathy for them that rapidly fled when I actually hit one of them.  I felt guilty for hours . . . but today, when I went out on the back porch, I found that the rodents had climbed onto my reading chair during the night and left three fresh black craps on it . . . a taunt if I've ever seen one.  And worse, while I was out shoveling, I saw the one I'd shot yesterday alive and well, scurrying around the woodpile instead of lying dead down in darkness (like I had imagined all yesterday evening).  Again, I wished my brother were here.  He has absolutely no tolerance (much less empathy) for dumb animals . . . perhaps for people either.

I sat down and recorded a story I wrote around 2003 called "Hero Worship" last night, and found it RIDDLED with incomplete punctuation and at least half a dozen typos.  Unfortunately, the file was so old that the only way my laptop could read it was after I'd saved it as a .pdf . . . and that meant I couldn't go in and fix the errors.  Whoopie.  The story itself was quite bad, but served as a pretty vivid picture of what living in Los Angeles was like, including a few details I'd forgotten years ago.  For that reason itself, I'm happy I wrote it.  Maybe somebody else will enjoy it too.

I went out to shovel gravel for a while, just like I did last summer (except I'm in worse shape this year, so I got tired after only two wheelbarrowloads), and while doing so, I thought about a new opening for my ever-forthcoming "Sins of a Sidekick" book.  When I came in, after only three loads, I sat down and jotted down a couple of paragraphs for it.  It didn't exactly get me back into the mindset of the Ben Parks/Lean Rider world, but it's better than nothing.*

Writing or Exercise: Both

*Wouldn't mind having that on my tombstone.