Morning came awfully quick. My monstrous cousins awakened, and as far as sleep goes, like Bruce Springsteen sang, Man, that was all she wrote. My mother tried her best to shush them, but the sun was up, and now we were too. Some of the group managed to sleep through the screaming and laughing and banging (and holy shit, somebody dropped Cathexis's cellphone from the top level onto the floor here*), and got to snooze until nine or so.
I suppose I am lucky, since I crashed after everyone else had gone to sleep (got about ten minutes of audio editing done, and only a tiny bit more of writing**), that I have needed so much less sleep lately, which I assume is due to my exercise regiment and less weight around the middle. Still, it's no fun to get awakened by screeching children, no matter how much sleep you got.
We went out on the lake both today and yesterday, which is rapidly emptying, more than I ever remember before. My brother said it goes down twenty feet or so every week, but even that may be an understatement. Check out how much "beach" there is in this photo (beach being a fancy euphemism for drying mud):
But wow, it was as beautiful as ever on the lake, and people like my uncle and cousins had never been up there before, and seemed to totally appreciate something that I admit I've begun to take for granted.
For this trip, we got our inflatable canoes out of storage for the first time in a couple of years and went out on the water, and I found that both relaxing and exhilarating. It never got up past seventy-five degrees this whole trip, and only my cousin could complain about that.
I did a lot of rowing, which is physical exercise--something pretty alien to me in past years--but I never got tired, and first went out with my sister in the boat with me:
After she got sick of rowing around, I went out by myself, and got fairly sunburned (okay, that was yesterday, but I got burned on top of being burned today--despite actually putting on sunscreen). But there's something about it, about just letting the water take you, watching the fish jump all around, and feeling the warmth of the sun on your arms and legs, that I heartily recommend.
Sit-ups Today: 111
Sit-ups In July: 4167
My uncle's daughter has Down's Syndrome, and she jabbered on and on to me about her favorite movie, SPIES IN DISGUISE (which was originally called PIGEON IMPOSSIBLE, and I can't decide if it's a better or worse title). She has this absolute fixation on the character, Lance Sterling, that Will Smith voices in the movie, and ever since puberty, she's done this thing where she obsesses over some unattainable guy (last year, it was Miles Morales in SPIDER-VERSE) and it's all she thinks about and all she talks about, to anyone who will listen (which turned out to be me this time).
This morning, she brought out her framed photograph of the CG animated character, and stared at it for a solid half-hour. And I thought to myself, Am I any different? Am I any more healthy than she is, with my--
No, of course I'm not. Probably far less so.
Yet here I am, writing again, and if I die, you can put one of these stories out every other month or so, and have a good ten years of posthumous releases. Not that anyone will buy them . . . but hey, I'm an optimist.
Words Today: 386 (guess I know less about sex than even I thought)
Words In July: 24,285
*How the deuce does that happen . . . accidentally?
**So, the love scene. Something nobody has ever taught me in school (except for that "Abstinence is the only reliable form of birth control . . . and every other method will produce sores like the ones in the following eighteen slides . . .") was how explicit and how detailed should your sex scenes be, and how long should you dwell on them? Guess it's just instinctive, because everybody has their own mores and tastes (for example, I LOATHE the technical terms for genitals, and would never use them in any capacity, because they are clinical, repellent words, and exactly what words an invading force of insectoid aliens would use to describe our inferior anatomy (of course, their species would have twenty-two different words for cloaca, some vulgar, some quite affectionate).
That reminds me, a friend of mine who will remain unnamed (a pretty big friend, truth be told) once used the word fornicate in one of his stories to describe the act of pairing off sexually with another human being . . . and the word was so abhorrent to me I had to swear off ever reading anything from him again. Of course, these many years later, he claims he chose that word just to get a rise out of me, but sadly, the damage was done.
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