And George Voinovich is dead?

[kingtycoon]

The parade was as lovely as ever and our traditions were upheld.

I am still very strong & enduring.

I have a sense - a weird sense of something bad having happened. Or a premonition, or a distaste - like a sickness getting ready to lay me low, or an unwelcome visitor approaching nearer & nearer. The parade was as lovely as ever, something outside it and around it though, there is a bad feeling of something unwanted coming soon.

Prophesying done.

It's been a long time now & formerly, when I had all that momentum on me - I was in a phase of wanting to continue to move & continue & to move. Settling back into routines (which I'm at best tenuously competent to follow) wasn't a straightforward effort at all. In some work, in some life, you can go to places and talk to people and that will earn you a living. In some lives. I came back and resumed my reckless pace of working & making & raising.


At work I'm writing the guide to how this is done, and how it is made and what is proper when making. A descriptive task, not prescriptive. They've been at this a long time and only Mike in the Yard knows how it's done, it's better if we write it down.

I'm at work on that - and there's a feeling, a dangerous, unwanted smoke on the liminal horizon, something there, is there something there, there is something there.

After the parade and a long day cleaning & later a night drinking and kissing - after that there's Monday & a return to form - there's been a murder or two down the block - on the corner. "Be careful" everyone says about the bus-stop where I stand because that's where someone or two got murdered the night before. But I think, there's something bad on the horizon, something bad will happen, I've not time to consider murders.

I'm exhausted, sick almost from it, on monday - yesterday. I try and think back to what's happened that needs yet documenting here. Where was I? A weekend? Last week I saw a band...

I'll go there. Tuesday - Aesop Rock in the neighborhood bar - I enjoy it but can't abide being in an audience, not that one - which is a collection, you see- a whole museum of this one specific type of dude - who in his life, day-to-day, is quite singular, unalike to everyone he knows - and to see them all together, then there is a show of demonstrating who among them is the most of whatever it is they all are. I can't abide it long. I meet a lady who I talk at from the Town Bridget moved to - naturally she knows Bridget, natrually she is also kind of... awkward & helpless, saying lamentable things without meaning to. I give her a cigarette and that's all. I want to go home but I've had so much to drink and still not enough - I need a drink. So I go to the Wine-Cave reasoning: "It is tuesday when my upstairs neighbor works, I will thank her for silencing her dog."

She isn't there but the would-be cocktail competitor is, he's affable in the choleric nerdy manner of all the academics of the school of bartending. I have him fix me a drink which he calls Rye with an Absinthe wash. I drink kind of a lot of absinthe, just in my day to day. He explains that my neighbor is not there and will not be any longer there, and is sad and that her lady left her and took that dog along. So I go home & find my good-sense, my standoffish detachment, abraded, just enough. I scrawl a friendly note and affix it to a complicated letter that I put together in a wooden box with a gold-painted-octopus stuck to the top of it. It's a box of complicated letters explaining a voyage in dreams. It's a pretty weird thing to give to a person you don't know well.

And here I have a strange interlude.

In which I recollect the complicated letters I've written and sent and that if I've a medium - a voice - if I've got an art that I perform it is the writing of these complicated letters. And how I've done it in the past and what came of it. "I do not want to participate in this crazy thing you want to do." Those are words that you remember, all these years later with the taste of absinthe sticking between your teeth.

I go to sleep not worrying.

I work and work and then I go to the west-side to try and fail to run my putative One-Shot game. My idea is this - I run the game, and write the game and make the book about it. But my form is The Long Form - the campaign. I run a good campaign - I think a fair percentage of my players will agree. I run a good campaign. My weakness lies in brevity - and here you see another example- I can't be brief at all attall. Or even have an interest in it. But you must fashion for yourself something solid that you keep in your back-pocket - something you can throw down and produce at a moment's notice - an example of what you can do and the kind of things you can expect. A story for neophytes and grognards alike. Something that could start a campaign or stand on its own merits. I'm working on that - my tight-4 hours.

It goes more than four hours - notes are given by the enablers of the monday-night crowd. I'm contented with what happens and satisfied.

Once home I find a ticklish note and a free brownie from my upstairs neighbor who is sad.

On thursday I work again and then to get Agatha, and then to sort out all the nonsense of banking that's been the backdrop of two weeks' adventuring - no money. Not a penny. Solved though thursday and then she is to her friend's house for the night - Thursday is the end of school, the end of wasteful nonsense - summer is here and life can be lived. I don't doubt that my hostility to school is a force in her thinking, but I can't pretend to her that I think school is worth attending.

Friday I get her after work. (and I can't pretend much longer that work is a place worth going, a project worth producing). We walk and walk and I've walked so much lately, I'm starting to feel it. We walk to Tommy's for famous milkshake dinner and then to the bookstore for books. I want some.

I get a few books - that night reading the staff recommended book: The Story of My Teeth - which is properly recomended, it is fine. They have a used Mishima there that I take to have and the Latro omnibus of Wolfe's which I miss owning - so I got those. I'm reading Latro again now and it is everything you'd want, again.

calico_pye I should mention to you that the used book store is hosting an event by Danielewski and he'll be around in town. Let me know if you want a thing signed or something wondered. I was indifferent to House of Leaves but I'm very curious how he made it - how it was practically designed and set up, how you make a cut-up book of pictures and have it printed, is photoshop now just an essential element of the authorial toolkit? Maybe I'll see what he has to say - there will be liquor there though I fear not enough absinthe for me and my degenerate palette.

Then the parade, then a lot of walking, in the sun, the sun, and then sunday there's cleaning and afterward grandma's house is A's destination while I stay home for makeouts and beer. Later that night someone or two is murdered at my bus stop.