wildcat

Speak lowly, children, for the rains come.

A small child of about three years stood on a plastic deck chair in the Sparklebright Laundromat and gabbled incomprehensibly and loudly to his father (who wore a pink shirt) while shoving a photocopied twenty dollar bill into the change machine; he was mostly gabbling because the machine wouldn't take his rather pitiful attempt at counterfeiting (Geez, kid, at least use the full colour photocopier for your petty larceny). Lucky thing I had exact change, no doubt, and could plug it all in to the machines as necessary. The kid kept sneaking up to peer at the cover of the comic book I was in the middle of reading -- some bland, incomphrensible (sense a theme?) X-Men shit that makes me despair that Chris Claremont is apparently being paid a lot of money to crank pointless comics out while I'm not. Thank god I borrowed it from work and didn't actually spend anything on it.

After I finished reading the dreck, I switched over to the Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy, as edited by Johanna Sinsalo. Much better. I'm taking it in short bursts, starting at the beginning with an excerpt from Aino Kallas's "Sudenmorsian," which translates as "Wolf Bride." I'm assume Angela Carter read it before she wrote "The Company of Wolves," because the story certainly reminded me of Carter's. "Wolf Bride" was written back in 1928.

Headed up to Thrifty's to pick up about half of what I need for the dinner party on Wednesday. I'm going to make sushi and I hope it doesn't fail completely without Joy there to give direction. I expect way too much sushi rice to materialize and the Holy Spirit in the bathroom screaming "Where's the beef?" Because today's been about Leonard Cohen and that's probably going to continue for the rest of the week, as it does. I waited around for twenty minutes in the cold, then the bus came and we got about three stops before I had to get off while baby strollers were crammed on because apparently nobody at BC Transit thought that the high-volume Number 4 route could use, oh, a couple double-deckers during rush hour.

But I got home, and I had spicy salmon pepperoni for dinner with lime sherbert for afters, and the upshot is that today has been a day of minor inconveniences and I may be exhausted but there's this novel that I'm writing, even if it veers too close (and too unexpectedly) to Fantasy Territory (I'll feel better when I get to the gun battles of Part 2), so I can't really complain but must soldier on.

But that's okay, because even with the occasional bout of Oedipus-Rex-blinding-himself anguish while doing it, writing is still the most fun thing I can think to do by myself, and that even includes the other thing.

Anyway, a couple sentences:

Two days, Luanne has spent two days locked in a shack out on Old Man Shackle's property, plotting her own sweet daddy's murder.

This is Eli, all elbows and very little neck; he's worn a light linen suit, mangy white in the squalid air already, and it can't be past eleven. Early in the day. Behind him, cracking his knuckles like always, crack-crack-crack like a rat scraping its belly along the bottom of a bathtub, Shamus snorts at the air with immense nostrils. The Shackle Boys.

I'm on page 46 and I have to burn through 1000 more words so I can call up Michael and see how he's doing. He's had a bad stomach ache for a couple days and needs some attention.