I spent approximately twenty minutes this evening thinking that I'd either lent Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man to somebody without remembering who or when, or alien thieves in five-dimensional squishsuits slipped out from behind the fridge at some point and stole it.
Then I found it, and added it to the latest pile of books I'm investigating. This is what I do: I pile things in significant places for the purposes of research, or to direct my irritation against, or whatever. Basically I got to thinking about weird short stories and wanting to write one (no, wait, all my short stories are weird), thought about Cory Doctorow's science fiction stories using famous titles, thought about Bradbury, there you go. There's also a copy of Robin Skelton's Hanky-Panky in there, and Vonnegut's Bluebeard, which is a novel and not short stories, but he wrote in an organic, episodic format and there was all kind of weird shit ideas in his stuff and.
I end too many sentences with conjunctions.
What was my point? Oh, right, I should probably organize my bookshelves at some point before I die, and maybe I should get more shelves so that I don't have all these knee-high piles of books on the floor. I'm starting to feel like Edward Gorey, and I can never find anything.
My father's bought a house in William's Lake and will be moving there over the summer. Moving back there, because we lived there until about 1986 before heading off to "scenic" Prince George. This probably means I'll be heading up there at some point to see the place, for good or ill. It has a lot of hills. William's Lake is hilly territory, and I'll probably end up at a rodeo, which will probably require me to get drunk, because it's a rodeo and that will require self-defense mechanisms. It's either booze or I walk around having flashbacks to Billy Crystal in City Slickers and Jack Palance. Jack Palance scares the crap out of me. The only thing creepier than Jack Palance is Jack Nicholson doing an impression of Jack Palance.
My father is moving in with a woman when he moves to William's Lake. As is traditional with Rawluk men, I found out he was officially with this woman at the same time he told me they were moving in together. More or less like how I happened to mention to my parents, back when I was nineteen, that the friend who was coming to dinner in a half-hour had been dating me for four months by that point. I think my mother nearly had an aneurysm. We do that. We're really terrible with dropping those sorts of bombs. I'd figured out months ago, sure, that my father was probably seeing the woman, but he'd only ever referred to her as a friend.
Getting two stories published in a small-press run of hand-bound books being put together by a librarian friend of mine. Most of the stories will be hers, but she's got a couple people contributing one or two. Both of mine are in different ways scandalous, and she's had to consult with me over the use of racist terminology in one of them. She understood the need for it to establish the setting and atmosphere of the story, but the first sentence had to be restructured so that it wasn't the first word, which is fine. I like that particular story a lot. It doesn't make me want to vomit or stare soundlessly at the ass of a closed door from the depths of a closet where nobody can find me, which is kind of the same thing as liking it.
The other one is plain smut, but it's smut that I wrote so it's basically hopeless, existential smut about an inability to connect in any meaningful way with the people around you, and there's no actual, direct sex in it (well...). And it's smut that's sort of preoccupied with the rocket science of Wernher von Braun, of all people. I should never direct a porn film, because it'd probably end up looking like a bad remake of Alien.
As I have every intention of getting over this damned cold, I'm looking forward to heading over to Vancouver on Sunday to spend a few days going to the art gallery, hanging out with Michael, seeing Matthew for the first time since before he left for France (finally!), head out to look at UBC a bit, and generally unwind. Four days off in a row that involves using no vacation time is not something to be taken lightly. I will of course demand martini bars and listless afternoons in coffee shops where scripts are spoken of, men debased with words, and hypothetical novels bandied about like other people talk about perfume.