Sense of Adventure

Time to take this one off my Amazon Wish List (where I’d just placed it) …

… and time likewise for you to put it on yours.

My good and beloved friends L. Neil and Cathy L. Z. Smith found themselves taking an unexpected trip to Tucson, which brought them through Burque today. I got an email alert from El Neil a couple days ago. I’ve not seen them for a couple years, which is that long too long, so I was happy for the chance to see them.

Early this afternoon Neil called to let me know they were on the road. He’s suffering laryngitis and asked if I did text messaging. I told him I didn’t. He said, too bad, since he used it all the time and it would save his voice.

So after I hung up I got out the User’s Manual for my Tracfone to look up how to do this here new-fangled texting thing. Yes, as I told Steve Kubica in my reply to his comment on my keeping stuff straight post, I’m boldly striding forward into the past and finally learning!

This delighted me. The upshot being Neil and I whiled away the afternoon texting each other like 12-year old girls.

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I had to share this with you.

The following is an email I got just now purporting to be from “The lonely woman from Russia [SuzyQ]“. I’ve changed the correspondent’s alleged name to [SuzyQ] in order, I suppose, to preserve the sensibilities of whatever halfwit Russian spammer ginned this up.

Anyway, I think I can promise you this makes the most befuddled Nigerian scam email you have ever imagined seem like Tolkien.

Appended were two photos of a vaguely pretty, putatively Russian young blonde woman, which to my annoyance Thunderbird loaded in the message. I excised these, as well as the return email address, for the protection of my readers.

By the way, the phrase in bold below served as both the email’s subject and its first line. (I’d say, “somewhat surreally,” but if you read on you’ll see that description is just full-spectrum inadequate.)

Now, for your delectation and edification, after the jump (click if you dare! click but beware!) behold the splendor and the glory of:

Hello not the man familiar to me!

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Lately, thanks to the low company I keep (i.e., my fannish friends) (hey, their tastes are low enough they hang out with me) I’ve had a ditty stuck in my mind from an old Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode that featured a Gamera movie:

Gamera is good to eat,
Gamera is full of meat!

Now while the first contention is at best unproven, the second is surely true. Yet I wonder how well advised one would be to sing that song in the actual presence of Gamera:

(thanks to: http://markvine.com/Photo_Kaiju.htm)

I mean, look at him. Looks a bit, well, cranky, doesn’t he? And never forget, he’s over 200 feet tall. Mightn’t singing such a song remind him that you yourself are full of meat, good to eat, and nicely bite-sized?

It’s important to think of these things. Yes? Yes?

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On what I hope’s a more serious note, anyway, I have a plea for all my friends and readers who are also writers – I know some of you are lurking out there. Really.

Which is: how do you keep straight the proliferation of facts – well, facts within your ficton – which you generate in the course of writing a book? Your characters, primarily: their histories, their traits, their interactions, their loves and grudges and weird little habits?

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There’s never a bad time to learn more actual history. What better day than Memorial Day to cut through some of the propaganda we’re inundated with from birth onward?

Thanks to Sheldon Richman.

Back from a flying trip, in sundry senses of the word. Some fun stories to tell. Some not to.

Tired now.

When I left it was 90°. Or more. Naturally I left the swamp cooler running so as not to bake the cats. It gets cooler at night usually, of course, but I figured it was no big deal. Especially as opposed to making the cats endure potentially lethal daytime heat.

So I’m flying back this morning and they announce that in Albuquerque it’s 49°. Whoa! 49! And when we arrive, it’s like 48°.

My friend Larry gave me a lift home. Also he drove way to hell and gone north to Corrales so we could retrieve the Em. He’s a pal.

(My car is … not reliable right now. So I had to plea for help.)

When we walk in of course the cooler is churning away. Out come TJ and Squeak. And they look at me and are like, “Dad? FREEZING!”

Oops. I mean, the damn heater was on. Took me a minute to figure out what was making all the noise, once I hastened to get the swamper off.

Oh - I also contrived to get to the kennel without Emma’s retractable leash and X-harness. The kennel guy lent me a leash to get her to Larry’s car. We got in the backseat; she seemed pretty eager.

The plan was for me to sit in back and hold onto her - usually I cinch her in with the shoulder belt through the harness. Which I lacked Also I figured that was less hassle on Larry. I was hoping Emma would be okay with the proximity to Uncle Larry as it was: even though he’s a close friend, and official External Member of the Milán Pack, he hasn’t spent a lot of time around her. So I wasn’t altogether sure he had yet graduated to the Official Emma List of Approved Persons. And if you’re not on that list, you’re on the Watch List.

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Or maybe, not so holy.

Just went out, daring the early rush hour traffic, to do a little grocery shopping. Coming out of the store I saw a headline on the local paper about an “animal” attacking a local boy in the Sandias. The unspecified “animal” reference intrigued me; looking a little closer (which sadly entails my reading glasses - they’re a reason I wear ‘em constantly on a lanyard around my neck when out and about in the world) I saw that while the parents claimed it had been a big cat, “authorities” discounted the possibility it was a cougar.

Whoa! A mystery cat sighting of Burque’s own? Not to mention an actual attack?

Here’s MSNBC on the subject; for a local report, go here.

Yes, you can just about be sure that if NM catches national ink - and especially international - it involves something discreditable.

NM Game and Fish has narrowed their scope to a bobcat, a cougar, or a small bear. Yet it claims the injuries match none of them. Indeed.

It’s most likely a bobcat, although I know of no previous bobcat attacks on humans. But we never know. And of course the official explanation may or may not bear any resemblance to the truth…

Just another day in NM. That’s why I love it here. Well, not kids getting eaten; that’s a Bad Thing - although the child appears to’ve pulled through. What I love is that something goofy or weird is always going on.

In other news: I’m hoping to get the swamp cooler - evaporative air conditioning: it’s a desert thing - going before the pets and I melt. The problem: I’m terrified to go on my roof.

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Actually, that’s Joseph Reichert. I’ve known him about forty years now. That’s another story – or a volume. Maybe two.

What I was just moved to write about was my other best friend – or as I sometimes refer to him, “my best little friend.”

This would be my orange tabby cat TJ. Which, yes, is short for Thomas Jefferson.

You might think it would be Emma Dog, based on the volume of verbiage I generate about her in my posts. But that’s a sampling error. She’s a wonderful friend, don’t get me wrong. She’s also - even as we approach, in two days I think, the fourth anniversary of her coming to the Milán Pack – still something of a novelty in the house, whereas both cats have been with me over ten years. Also because she alone accompanies me on excursions and adventures outside the house, even no further than the backyard (and remember - if you can’t find adventure in your own backyard, why would you expect to be able to find it anywhere else?), she plays in more anecdotes. In addition, there’s frankly so much history between me and the cats that I hesitate to bring them in because I hardly know where to begin.

I’ll skip Teej’s bio for now – he’s worth a volume on his own – for an anecdote that may enlighten you as to why I consider him by best friend.

As a part of my daily ritual I recite a formula gleaned from the work of Napoleon Hill, specifically his Think and Grow Rich!* – still the best self-help book ever written, and pretty much the fountainhead from which most subsequent worthwhile self-help books have sprung. There have been advances on his work, as well there ought be: it originally came out, if I understand correctly, in the 1920s. (Nope - 1937, if one believes Wikipedia, as in this case, why wouldn’t I?) It still stands as well worth reading.

Anyway, since I began this ritual about six years ago, a curious thing has happened. I recite it by habit right after I finish breakfast or lunch (mostly semantics, there.) As it happens most times, and as it happened just a few moments ago (it’s currently 3:27 PM in the Mountain West. So, maybe chronology more than semantics.) And that is: if he’s in earshot and awake, sometimes even if he’s drowsing, TJ turns up.

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I hope - how I hope - I truly hope the new Indiana Jones movie doesn’t stink as badly as the “first” - i.e. the new - Star Wars trilogy.

Advance notice on the net is unkind. Of course, fanboys can be beyond hypercritical. You knew that, I’m guessing?

On the other tentacle … it wasn’t as if the subsequent Indy movies lived up to the first. The second lacked a plot; it couldn’t live up to its own opening sequence, which smoked, and ran rapidly downhill once the Gratuitous Kid Sidekick was introduced. The third was … deeply okay. Perhaps they didn’t bite as much cheese as Die Hard II, or any Lethal Weapon flick with a numeral. But the second wasn’t good, and the third, not great.

Still, I dare hope. Meanwhile, there’s always Iron Man.

So I had the German Bomber Channel on for electronic wallpaper a little while ago, and they were showing their Engineering an Empire show on Rome. And I was struck by a wonderful vision. (Thud.)

The scene: a couple years in the future. I’m enrolled in a course at Syracuse University. And the tall, lean, distinguished-looking professor points to some projection or exhibit and in his characteristic deep, slightly nasal, slightly metallic voice asks, “Can anyone tell me what this is?”

And I’ll pipe up in my best Professor Hikita accent, “It’s your hand, Buckaroo!”

Enough whimsy. Okay; like that’s gonna happen.

Yesterday was a good day. Got a lot written. Annja’s current exploit’s really picking up steam, and The Dinosaur Lords are going great guns. Plus I did a lot of necessary world-building on DinoLords, which helped the writing a great deal.

The key there was that I actually wrote story, not just typed notes and drew maps, both of which I also did. I know way too well what kind of a trap that note-making thing can be: a whole novel, The War for America, wandered off into the swamps and bogged down because, in large part, I devoted so much time to writing reams of notes. That and not having an actual synopsis, but rather an idea in my head where I wanted to go. Not so good an idea. It turns out that, while I have a great gift of improvisation, I need a certain amount of structure both to activate it and to direct it usefully. Who’da thunk it? Anyway that’s why I’ve got upwards of 700 pages of novel and am not half done - and have, I judge, upwards of a million words of notes. Seriously.

(Someday I’ll go back and finish that. If events don’t overtake it first. Which is a major possibility.)

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So today I decided, no more excuses, and went forth into the back yard to plant my honeysuckle.

It’s supposed to get really windy later. That struck me as not ideal for planting a tender transplant. Then again, it’s gonna have to get used to our wind soon or late. Also I’ve been putting it off already for, well, a year.

First I dug a hole by the wall to embed the fan-shaped wood trellis I bought from Mundo Wally for the purpose. There proved to be a sort of lip of foundation at the base of the cement-block north wall which served nicely to prop the base against. A small chunk of busted-up cement from something or other I’ve had to demolish since moving in helped wedge it in place from the other side.

At this point, as usual, Emma took my presence in the yard as meaning I wanted nothing more than to play with her. So nothing would answer but that I had to roam around the yard holding my arms out before me like Calvin playing Frankenstein’s Monster and making zombie noises. Which is how one plays the Puppy Monster. Emma happily raced around fleeing the Puppy Monster until she got tired and went to lie down in the shade. Fortunately it wasn’t too hot out there yet.

A few years ago I tried planting honeysuckle and it just flat died. This amazed all the people at local nurseries I asked about it, who unanimously said that honeysuckle’s so robust that if it didn’t have purty flowers it would be roundly hated as a weed. I did a little more research this time.

Hope it helps. Fingers crossed.

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