Remotely Blogging

This is really pretty cool. Wasn’t sure that my laptop could pull it off. But it did. Hawsum.

Took my IBM X22 on the road this morning. Thought that I would take a detour on the way home and instead of going right home, I would go for a coffee. I knew that the place had a wireless connection and I thought – What the hell? – and see if Ubuntu’s wireless would let me use their network. Got here. Got my coffee. Turned on the machine. Forgot to put the wireless card in. Rebooted the machine. Got a connection. Logged in. Asked for the guest login and password. And here I am. Remotely blogging. Nice.

And I will give a shameless plug for this place because this is the coffee shop I really should have hung out at when I was sixteen or seventeen. This is where I should have been skipping school.

One Red Chair. Clickety click on the Linkety link. Nice place. It really is. I highly recommend it to anyone. Coffee is absolutely excellent. And the espresso is remarkably strong. Fat Monkey they call it.

And here I am, all cool and shit with my old school laptop, and I have absolutely nothing to write about. Nothing. Drawing a goddamned blank. What can I do about that?

Well, if you were me and you were sitting at my laptop, this is what you would see. The keyboard to an IBM X22 laptop and a very dirty screen. The laptop is on top of a worn and scratched, black, wooden table. There is another one pushed up against it, while it is supposed to be it’s twin, only that it’s legs are not level and the one in front of me has one leg a little higher than the other. To my left is a rectangular table with a glass top that serves as computer desk. There is a black Hewlet Packard desktop, with a white 15″ Cybervision CRT monitor, and a keyboard that looks like it has been customized a little, with black keys, and a grey facing overtop of it. To my left and behind me is the door to the place and behind that door is a grey cabinet, overtop of which is a small corkboard with a bunch of local, artsy advertisements. When the door opens it chimes. Next to the cabinet is a magazine rack.

Ahead and to my left is a short, kids table with a wicker backet on top of it, full of kids toys and kids books. One of the small tupperware style containers contains those little magnet toys.

Directly ahead of me is a entranceway to a larger room with mismatched tables and chairs, an uneven tiles floor, a ceiling with a small section of it done with decorative tiles, and the whole thing is lit with spot lighting that is arranged in such a way to highlight the local art hanging on the walls.

To the right of the entranceway is the coffee shop’s mission statement. I haven’t surfed the website to see for sure, but I bet that it is pasted somewhere there. Underneath the mission statement is the One Red Chair of the store’s namesake. That chair is in front of a lower metal table with a glasss top, but not of the same style that serves as a table for the computer to my left. To the left of the table is a long Ikea styled leather couch that looks good for sitting but would make for a poor nap. To my left, and also to the left of whoever was sitting on the couch, are two wooden chairs with blue leatherette seats. Behind those chairs is a high bar with three grey metal bar chairs. This bar is the window seat, where you can look across the street to watch the cars go by, or check out the book store across the street. I have only ever been in that book store once and I don’t see myself going there again.

Further to my left, on the other side of the store, is the place where the magic happens, where they take your money and brew the fine, fine coffee. The prices are reasonable and considering what you get at other places for the same price, the product is excellent. And no, I am not getting my coffee for free. Dude doesn’t even know that I am writing about his place. At least, I don’t think so.

What I like is the little touches. For example, his cooler. He went to the trouble of not just having the manufacturers topper over the glass doors, but designing a logo for his place and having it made and having it mounted up there behind lights, so that if maybe you wanted one for yout house, he could provide it for you. It looks like a well thought out business.

This is what you get for me not having anything to write about.

Wait. Two more story ideas. One was a bad dream. The other is one is an old one that I just rehashed as I was sitting here, thinking of something to write about. Work with me here, okay?

Weak willed man who was left an enormous house in an older but refined part of town – the kind of refined that comes from a neighbourhood of well kept century homes. His parents left it to him in their will. He was their only child and they spent their lives sheltering him and he spent his life not caring. Before he knew it, he was a drunk, he had no money left, and his girlfriend was pregnant. And before someone starts in on me, no this is not a country song and no, he does not have a dog. Anyway, the girlfriend takes off and leaves him with the baby and no clue how to take care of himself, much less a small baby. He rents out all of the rooms of his house to make some money and makes ends meet and does his best. He continues to skim by and uses what he learned from his parents to raise his daughter, who also risks becoming the same kind of person he is. One of the borders he ends up renting to is a girl by the name of Sarah, only her nickname, she tells him up front, is Electric Sarah. All of her friends call her Ellie. And she proceeds to use him the way he seems to be begged to be used, and his little daughter starts to learn from it and do something about it. This is the setting and the characters of the story and a little bit of what I would want to do with them. I would have to write about them for a little bit and create a little situation for them to be in (the man’s daughter’s first soccer game, maybe – something simple) and see what kind of story I can create from there.

This other one is one that woke me up out of a dead sleep last night. I told my wife about it when I woke up and she had a little chuckle at my expense. I had to go downstairs for a glass of milk to settle my stomach. I might have had a couple of bite sized Oreos, now that I think about it. I’ll know for sure when I get home. If I did, I bet that the bag of bite sized Oreos is still on the counter.

“What’s wrong?” My wife wanted to know. “Is everything okay? Are you alright.”

“Bad dream,” I mumbled.

“About what?” She asked.

“Someone is trying to kill the heir to the fertilizer fortune,” I said. At the time, it made complete sense. I had been dreaming it and to me it was real.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Don’t ask me,” I think I said. “It’s only my dream. I don’t have any control over it.”

“Are you okay?”

I mumbled something and went back to sleep. Out Big Fat Cat Mulligan came into bed with us and parked himself on my chest, all twenty six pounds of him (I’ll put up a pic of him if I can find it but I am not exagerrating – the guy is frigging huge) and purred in my ear and oddly enough made me feel better.

I dreamed about a story I tried to write a very, very long time ago and left alone for whatever reason. It had to do with a demon in the basement of a large ranch house that had been owned by a man who made his fortune in fertilizer. And the man died of natural causes (all of my ideas seem to start with death) and left the house to his daughter (Jennifer Emqua, of all names – I think I chose it because someone told me that in one native american dialect or another that Emqua was the word for bear and I thought it was cool). But when she went to the house and started to clean it up and get it ready to be sold, she was overcome with the sense that someone was in the house. And the more she checked things out the more she was convinced that there was a demon in the basement and it was the demon that made her father sick and the demon did it for the express reason of getting Jenny to come so that he could take her as his bride.

I woke up just as she was holding the seance in the dining room underneath the chandellier that her grandfather had made. That was when the dream got to be too much.

Again, anyone reading this is welcome to steal the ideas and see what they can do with them, just please throw me a bone on the dedication page, please?

Thanks for reading.

Just things, you know?

Hey

Elected not to go to work on Monday because, not to put too fine a point on it, I was sick. If I were to give a general description, I would say the flu. Upset stomach with general achiness. The achiness went away Monday morning, more or less, but the stomach, she is still achy. As a matter of fact, I am pretty sure, that if I practised a little harder, that I could shit through the eye of a needle at thirty paces.

I was good enough, though, that I could take a short jaunt to Staples and see what it is they had on sale. I like Staples for that. Their bargain bins rock. And they did not let me down. I was looking for a pocket briefcase. One that would fit my 3×5 index cards that I carry around (hey, stop laughing) and would look cool (I told you to stop laughing ; yes, you can look cool and have index cards in your pocket – and no, I don’t wear a pocket protector). What I ended up buying was something else.

A new Dlink wireless G router. I had wireless B for the house for the longest time, and when all you are surfing is porn and reading email with more porn, that is plenty. But my wife likes to watch some news programs on the Toshiba laptop and the speed was getting to her. Got the router for 30.00 CDN. Pretty good, I thought.

Found a new keyboard for 20.00 CDN. A PS/2 keyboard with the standard buttons. But I didn’t check the bargain bin closely enough. There was a Logitech Wave keyboard for 30.00 CDN. I dropped the other one and got the Wave. It has nice action and almost all of the special keys work with Ubuntu. There are some media keys that I will have to fart around with. The keyboard has a, well, it has a wave to it that takes a little bit of getting used to when typing. The keyboard that the Wave replaced had to be eight or ten years old. It is more of a case of these old hands getting used to the new millenium, is all.

Bought some bankers boxes, some file folders, and more ink for my Fisher Space Pen. Good way to spend a sick day. Took my loot home and went to sleep for a little while before going to play with my new stuff. Figure I might start tearing through some of the records we keep upstairs and maybe file them away.

What else? Story ideas. I’ve got a few. Not sure if I will ever get to them. But I wrote down the ideas so that whenever I am bored I can file them away in my Idea File. Yes. I have an idea file. They are written on 3×5 index cards that I have in a little 3×5 inch, black metal filing cabinet that I keep next to my computer monitor. No, I am not kidding. You can stop laughing now. My wife wonders why I don’t get beat up more and I tell her that this isn’t high school anymore. I wish I had been this cool in high school.

Anyway, one of the ideas that I had was about a child who is learning their first words and goes from speaking one word at a time to making the leap to speaking in sentences. And when the child starts to speak the child starts talking about past lives. Nothing really all that special about that. You read about that all the time. The thing is, the child is talking about past lives from his wife’s side of the family and not his. Thing about that is that the mother in question is adopted and has absolutely no interest in her birth mother or father, she loves the parents that raised her. The husband is the one that is interested, because kinda like Danny Torrance and redrum, the little child is trying to use words that it does not understand so the child ends up making up their own words, which gets the father/husband all that more excited because the words are subject to interpretation. I’m thinking of pouring through an old Anglo-Saxon poetry book and digging out old words for old things and seeing what I can dig out of it. Maybe the child is talking about murders and strange occurrences on the mother’s side of the family that make the father nervous and maybe the father starts to distrust the mother based on what her biological family had done. Kinda like The Shining meets The Rockinghorse Winner, you know? Those were the two works I was thinking of when I was thinking about this story idea.

I also had another story idea from an old news story that came back to me in a flash, about a contractor finding the corpse of a newborn child wrapped in newspaper and cemented into a wall of a house he was renovating. That may not seem like much of a story, but if you add a good character, let’s say an enterprising young man that wants to turn around some good money in a short period of time by flipping a house that is in bad shape. He buys a house in the beaches and does just that, in hopes of making money so he can start a new life for himself. And as he is doing the renovations himself, he comes upon this child and he starts to research more about the house and the people that owned it, in hopes of maybe discovering who the child might have been and who it’s parents were. It could start with the day, week and year of the newspaper that the child was wrapped in. Use it as a kind of bookmark in time, where the guy can read it to try and relate to the world that this child’s parents came from and try to understand what it was that happened. A good excuse to do research on life in Toronto in the 1900s or something. I was thinking of setting it around the time that the Titanic crashed, and use it as a symbol in the story. Or something like that. The story becomes a whole theme of renewal and ressurection and new life. The newspaper could be the same as the engravings on an egyptian sarcophagus. Or something like that. I would never get the time for this idea, or any of the ideas listed here, so if anyone wants to steal them, feel free. Just please, do me the courtesy of tossing me a bone on the dedication page of the novel, okay?

Oh, and one more thing, okay? Another Advanced Dungeons and Dragons memory dragged up. Recovering all of my old files still, when I get the time, and I found another one. And, of the two readers of this blog (including me would make that three) there is one of you that might remember this character. I felt good finding him. I just need to find that little pen drawing I did of Fanskar and Venom together.

Here’s the character sheet for anyone interested. Thanks for reading.

And for the person that might be reading this, and would constitute the third reader (fourth, if you include me) of my work, I can’t remember being that exacting with the spell components, but I might have been. I certainly kept a record of it. And man, I got lots of records of it.

Clicky on the linky opens up the pdfy

Fanskar

ABBA and good memories

Afternoon…

I am blogging from work because that is the only place I have really been in the last while. I did go away with my wife and my daughter but I wanted to enjoy time with them and not on the computer.

I’ve been writing the whole time I have been away but it has all been longhand – in my Moleskin pocket notebook and my Moleskin large notebook. Mostly about stuff that I was thinking about, things I saw, and things I was thinking. Mostly they are more rambling than this thing is, so I might go back and retype them here for all to see. I have two faithful readers, anyway, who might be interested. And I do not take those two readers lightly. That’s two more readers than I usually have, not counting myself.

The reason why I am blogging from work is because the memory that came to me was so damned insistent and I had no notebook handy (big notebook is in my zippercase in the BMW and my pocket notebook is, well, in my pocket) so I decided to log on quickly and type out a quick note.

I don’t remember the year. Might have been 1998 or 1997. My friend was turning 19 or 21. Man, I don’t remember which birthday it was, but it was an important one. For the friend that might be reading this ; sir, I am sorry. I remember the birthday event, but not the birthday number. But one is more important than the other, right?

And the reason why I remember it is because it kinda meets up with an audio book that I am listening to. I already read the book about a year ago or so, but I found it on tape while we were shopping last weekend. The BMW does not have a CD (it’s an older car, but a great car) and I don’t have an MP3 player, much less an adaptor for the tape deck, so I need to get books on cassette tape for the time being. Bought four or five of them for like eight or nine bucks each. The audio book I started with is Stephen King’s “Lisey’s Story”. And the part I am on is the Bool Hunt before she goes to Boo’ya Moon (read the novel for yourself to get the gist of what I am saying). Suffice to say that a Bool Hunt is a fun treasure hunt that has clues to it, and the clues are called Stations of The Bool. And the Bool at the end can be a treat or a kiss or a drink or an RC Cola. Anyway, when I heard ABBA on the radio here at work and was overcome to write, the audio book came back to me and the Bool Hunt that I was part of that I didn’t even know was a Bool Hunt. And it had to do with my friends birthday, the specific birthday number I’ve since forgotten.

You with me so far? Good.

Anyway one of the stations of this particular Bool Hunt (another one was where we had to do one for one for pushups while I smoked a cigar and shouted like a drill seargant – I wasn’t long out of the Armed Forces Militia at this point) was that my friend had to go to a bar and sing karaoke of a song of someone else’s choosing. At this point, there was a large collection of people involved in this particular Bool Hunt and it was organized by two other people. I was part of it by association.

So, the friend whose birthday it was, the friend that I hope still reads this, had to get up and sing whatever came up. And what came up was ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’. I don’t think this friend of mine even so much as batted an eye and went right into it. I don’t even think he had to look at the prompter for the words. And he got right into it. Singing his heart out and grinding and swooning to the tune, much to the amusement of the Bool Planners. I remember someone else getting up afterwards and trying to sing Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” or maybe it was “Purple Rain”. But I do know it was Prince and I do know that it paled in comparison to the spirited birthday rendition of “Dancing Queen.”

Phew. I feel better. Had to get that out. Sorry about the quickness of it all. I had to type this was inhaling a banquet burger from down the street that someone was good enough to pick up for me.

Back to work. Thank you for reading. Sorry if you had to re-read it and ask ‘What the fuck is this guy talking about anyway.”

KTHXBAI

Hey

Most of what I already wrote today is in longhand in my other notebook.

Some good ideas in there. I won’t forget them. But I won’t retype them here, either. I will just let them sit and fester for a while and see what comes out of it.

Point form notes of today’s writing includes

Blogging is not journalism

Bloggers who confuse themselves with journalists, help confuse people into not trusting themselves

Blogging is fun

Blogging is about personal thoughts and feelings

Writing is easy. Being an author is hard.

I have 1 story, 15 000 words long, that took ten years to write.

I am never going to be religious

I think LOLcats are funny

On those last two notes, let me post a funny. If you don’t know what a LOLcat is, just click on the link.

And if you go to Fark.com on Saturday, you will find a Caturday thread and you will learn more

Song of Solomon 1

Teh Beluved:

1 Solomones Song of Songz, kthx.

2 Let him kiss me wit da kissus of hiz mouf–
for yer love be moar delitefool den cheezbugers. Srsly.

3 Yu has a flavr I likez;
yer name is like smellz poorded out.
Deh oter chikz luv yu too!

4 Take me wit yu plz, come on!
Letz go! the king bringme into hiz chamburz, k?

Revelation 6

Teh Sealz

1 Den teh lamb opened one of teh 7 sealz and teh furst doodz say “Come and take lookz!”2 An behold der wuz white horse, wif a man sittin on it wif a bowz. An crown wuz given to him an he went out to take all cheezburgerz.

3 Den dat lamb opend nother seal and doodz say “Cum”4 Den anuther ridin red horse cum. He wuz allowed to takez all teh worldz cookiez and milkz, and send dem tu bedz eerly. Sum peeps mite die tu: an he can has great sword an stuffz.

5 He prozeded to opens nuther seal an big black horse cum. Living doodz say “Come” an he balanced stuff in hiz handz.6 An den sum dood said “Sum stir fry for denarius! An denarius 4 cheezburger! Better not eated mah cheezs and bradz!

7 An i oppeneded nuther seal an 4th dood say “Come and lookz!”8 Lo behold a pale horsez with a dood sitin on it, his naym wuz Deaths, an liek Hadez an stuff followd himz. Him had enuf skillz to kill lots of doodz, with antifreezez and curiositiez.

Falling Behind

When you actually count the words that I have written this week, I have exceeded my daily writing quota. So it’s not as if I’m not writing, I’m just trying to make myself feel not guilty about not writing yesterday. I was just too damned tired. I hate to say it, but it is work that is getting me down. I just want the Long Weekend to get here already.

I booked something of a vacation for my wife. I wasn’t too sure about it when I did it, because it was an idea off the beaten path and I wasn’t sure how my wife would take to it.

For her birthday, back in March, I told her that we were going on a shopping trip to the States. The idea in mind was that I really wanted to buy her some nice things for her birthday, but I am never too sure what to buy. I thought it best to take her to the best shopping places in the states, take advantage of the dollar, so that she can shop her brains out while I look after our daughter. My wife will likely want to spend all of our money on our daughter, and I’m good with that. I just want my wife to be sure to spend some on herself. I really do. I want my wife to shop and I want for her to spend money. Otherwise it is just going to sit there. Because I sure don’t spend it.

I drive back to forth to work, that’s about twenty bucks a week.

I don’t read as much as I used to, so I’m buying maybe a book a month, and that is more often than not a paperback. Though, sometimes, if it is an author that catches my eye, I might spend the bucks on the hardcover. I took the hit not long ago for Stephen King’s ‘Duma Key’ and for Richard Bachman’s ‘Blaze’. I took another hit for Ken Follet’s ‘World Without End’. But that’s about it. I am struggling now to get through Orson Scott Card’s ‘Empire’ and not doing too well. I’ll finish it, I think, but it is not engaging. Oddly enough, the book I enjoyed the most lately was one that I borrowed off my Dad (and likely won’t give back unless he asks for it ; which means that I come out ahead because I didn’t pay for it) is Agatha Christie’s ‘Passenger to Frankfurt’. I was never an Christie fan and sadly it was because I never gave her a chance. This is the only book of hers I have ever read and I plan to read more. Anyway, I don’t spend much on books.

I have been guilty of a Red Bull or two through the week, just to keep the blood pumping. Those are three and a half bucks a shot. Mell disapproves of that almost as much as she does smoking, but I see no harm. Walmart sells six packs for seven bucks or something. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to snag one or two of those and stash them in the office fridge at work. Hmmmm. Note to self….

I drink beer only in the summer and I go through about six beers a week, maybe. All year round my wife and I take turns buying a bottle of wine on Saturday nights. So, that’s maybe twenty five, thirty bucks a week. We usually drink that with whatever I am cooking on Saturday nights.

Which brings me to food. We don’t go out for dinner that much anymore. Swiss Chalet, maybe, every couple of weeks. McDonald’s once a month or so (sadly but it is the truth ; and there have been months where it has been more than once, but those were generally bad months for us being busy and needing some really greasy, carb jacked, comfort food).

Mell cooks and I am starting to really like to cook. Mell is more practical when it comes to her meals, but they smell awesome when I come home from work and just want to collapse. When I cook, I have to go over the top and try something new everytime. Last weekend it was Shrimp Simmered in White Wine with Linguine Carbonara with Creme Brulee for dessert. The Bruleet didn’t come off that bad. It was a little too mooshy, but I will try again this weekend, maybe with some Bailey’s. Because we cook, we don’t spend so much on food.

We don’t party. We don’t go to clubs. We don’t go to movies. We do buy movies, but not very often. I do toy with the idea of not watching television at all and just buy the television series when they eventually come out on DVD, but my wife likes her television, so it stays.

Don’t spend much on technology. All of the laptops I have are gifts and so was my desktop. I bought the 320gB HDD for the desktop, but that was all of a hundred bucks or so, and that was it. I bought an inkjet photo printer for 50$ off of Ebay, and that was only because it was the cheapest printer I could find that would print on my index cards (more on the cue cards later, if you don’t mind). I am happy with plain old DVD and Blueray really holds no interest for me. We spent big bucks on thirty six inch Sony Wega when we first moved into the house and it still works just fine so there is no need for another one. My one rule was that we only ever had one television in the house. I don’t want one in the bedroom. Bedrooms are for two things, and one of them is sleeping and the other one is none of your business.

I want to get an iPod but I will wait to see if I can get a good on refurbed from the internet or maybe when we are in the states. I do spend money on music. That more than books, these days. As much as thirty bucks a month, some months. And I will stock up. So if I don’t buy anything for a few months, I’ll go nuts and spend a hundred or so. Haven’t got the whole iTunes thing yet. I like CD cases and record cases and reading the liner notes while I listen to the music. If I do get the iPod it will be more for downloading free audiobooks from the internet (LibriVox.com). Nothing recent. Just the classics. All for free.

Speaking of record cases, what I was also looking forward to buying was a record player, but my in-laws were doing house cleaning and they found two of them. My wife, beautiful and tolerant woman that she is, scooped them both up for me. So I have the pick of what I want, but I will likely keep both. My in-laws also had an old IBM Selectric typewriter, complete with extra ribbons. I was all over that.

So, when it comes to toys and gadgets, I really am low maintenance.

I don’t play hockey, soccer or baseball. I don’t ski, waterski or swim. I only ever play golf, and not that often and only at cheap courses. And that’s not because I’m cheap, it’s because I suck. I suck so very, very hard it hurts my cheeks to think about it. Bad, bad, bad. But I like a good walk and when I get me a pullcart for my golfbag, I get a workout.

I don’t watch sports on television and the professional sports event I last went to was a game between Toronto and Montreal and that was more for me to hang out and have a few drinks with my youngest brother than anything else. The game was incidental. I had a better time hanging out with him.

What I am getting at is that I really have alot and it only gets better from here. I know my wife loves to shop and even if she doesn’t buy anything, she really enjoys seeing what there is to buy and work out comparisons to find the best deals on everything and anything. I like making her happy and it doesn’t cost me anything at all so I am looking forward to being with her and our daughter for four wonderous days.

And if work calls me for anything, they will have a tough time. Because the cell phone and the laptop will be at home. I swear. But don’t check my napsack or my zippercase please. Those are…uh….private. But I will bring the Toshiba laptop. I want to be able to surf the net before going to bed.

Water Therapy

I thought about the name for this post before I actually knew what Water Therapy was. I went to my favourite site of all sites – Wikipedia – and searched for it and kinda freaked myself out. I had heard of water intoxicification and wondered if it was possible to get drunk on water, but I didn’t know that people could die from it. That is not the message I wanted to convey with this post.

What I wanted to say with this post is that I had a very bad day. A very bad day. A long day. I was at work for twelve and a half hours and probably could have worked a few more, but I wanted to get home.

My daughter tried to get my attention, showing me what she was doing in Nanny’s garden this afternoon, but I was to distracted by what was going on in my head. She even – with the guidance of Mommy – went into the fridge and got me my dinner (macaroni and cheese with cut up hot dogs ; I’m a simple man), handed me the ketchup, and then handed me a beer. I followed her up the stairs and ate in front of the television watching Jeapordy while she ran all around the room, climbing all over the couch, trying to do headstands, trying to tackle Mommy and Daddy.

Dinner was done and I got Final Jeapordy wrong. I said Whitman ; but Leaves of Grass didn’t have essays, it was poetry. I should have known it was Henry David Thoreau, but it has been so long since I read either, Walt Whitman was the first that came to me because he was the hero of Robin Williams’s character John Keating in Dead Poet’s Society, who inspired Ethan Hawke – Todd Anderson – to come up with the excellent line of ’sweaty toothed madman’ for a picture of Walt Whitman. And the reason I was thinking of Dead Poet’s Society is because of Robert Sean Leonard, who plays Wilson in my favourite television show, House, which was on at nine tonight and it was a new episode. I wanted to see it because of the character that was being diagnosed was Smith from Sex in The City. Samantha’s boy toy. I only watch good television, and frankly, since they took Star Trek:Enterprise off the air, there isn’t much to watch. I have been guilty of rewatching it from the first episode to the the last every few weeks or so. My daughter smiles and dances to the excellent 80’s theme song (the same song, you would be interested to know, that Dirk Diggler tries to record after he leaves the porn industry in the fine, fine cinematic classic, Boogie Nights). Anyway, the reason I got Final Jeapordy wrong is because I was preoccupied.

Then, my daughter reminded me. “Bubbath?” she asked. “Bubbath?”

“Yes, honey,” I replied. “Bubble bath.”

And she chased me to the stairs and I carried her to the bathroom and let her watch while I filled the tub with water and used exactly 3 capfulls of bubble bath to get those bubbles started. I thought about taking her to her change table to take off her Onesie and her diaper, but elected to change her in the bathroom instead, wrestling with her while she laughed. My wife gathered up the Onesie and the diaper and left the bathroom for me to give her a bath.

“Daddy bath?” she asked. “Daddy?”

“No, Honey,” I answered. “Not right now.” I haven’t ever bathed with her and I have no intention of doing so.

But I brushed her teeth in the bath (can’t really keep her still anywhere else), and I cleaned her ears, and washed her with lavender bath soap, then I wetted her hair and washed it. The whole process was straightforward and rather mechanical, I washed her while she played while I went over in my head what it was that happened to make my day at work so very, very hard.

She grabbed her squirt bottle, one of her bath toys, one that we got for free from somewhere, while she disregarded the two dozen other mutlicoloured toys thay we paid for, and tried to squeeze with all her might to squirt her daddy. There wasn’t enough water so Daddy filled it. She tried to squirt me but I held up my hand so I wouldn’t get wet, but she kept on trying and laughing.

That is when I stopped and smiled at her. I then leaned over, refilled up her water bottle, and let her go to it. She squirted me in the face, my hair, my shoulders. She even stood up in the bath to make sure that I got the hair on the back of my neck wet. I then sprayed her. Then she sprayed me. And we both laughed. She started to kick in the bath and throw up all kinds of water. Not wanting to be shown up my an eighteen month old, I showed her what for and tossed water all over the bathtub. All over her, all over me. Splashing and making waves while she fell over laughing. I picked her up and splashed some more. The water was starting to get cold, so I started to pack away the bath toys, telling her to pull the plug (‘Tug The Gator, actually. Her bath plus is a little green alligator). She splashed and splashed until the last of the water went away. There were some bubble left over, so she played with those. She turned back around and stared at the drain.

“Awgun?” she asked

“Yup,” I answered. “All gone. Ready to rock and roll?”

“Wockinwoll,” she smiled and held up her arms. “Up?”

I wrapped her in her pink terry cloth towel with the little hood, let her laugh at her wet, curly hair in the mirror (and her hair is curly after the bath ; I like to make it into a curly mohawk and get it to dry that way so she has a curly mohawk all the next day), and then took her to her bedroom to get changed into her peejays. She wore her two piece white ones with the little, pink piggies on them the night before, but they weren’t that dirty and she looked so cute in them that I wanted to put her in them again.

“Hans?” She asked. “Hans?”

“Yes, honey,” I said. “I’ll put your lotion on.” Which is a lavender lotion that I rub on her back and her chest and her neck and arms. I put some on the palms of her two hands and she rubs them into her chubby little legs.

“Lubooo,” she said when she was done. “Lubooo.”

“Love you too, honey, ” I said. “Give Daddy a kiss.”

“Lubooo,” she said and puckered up to give me a kiss.

Mommy came in not long after and wondered what all the noise was about. I had no idea what she was asking. Same thing about the bad day at work. She asked me if I wanted to talk about it, to make sure that I was okay. Our conversation late in the afternoon had not been a good one or a long one and I think she was kind of worried. I hadn’t had a bad day at all, I told my wife with a smile. As a matter of fact, it had shaped out to be pretty cool.

And that, my friends, is Water Therapy

New Tool

I write every single day. I have written every single day since I was about thirteen.

My first notebook was what I called my Zippercase. It was a one inch, three ring binder with a burgundy faux-leather cover and it could be sealed shut with a zipper. Thus, the name Zippercase. It accepted three hole punched, lined paper. I would load it up one week, write every single day, and by the end of the week I would pull those papers out, file them in another, larger, plain white, three inch binder, then fill the Zippercase up and I was off to the races. As the larger, plain white, three inch binder became full, I filed that away and got another binder. Sometimes Mom brought ones home from work. Sometimes Dad did. I know I had alot of them. I don’t remember ever having to buy a single one. I do remember buying the paper. The feeling I got – and still get – when I go to an office supply store is probably the same feeling that a true penitent feels when they enter their church. A sudden, overwhelming sense of possibility. I used the Zippercase all through my last years of grade school and all of high school.

I still have it. It’s in the basement.

I still have all of the white binders, too. About five of them. The handwriting is horrible. Tiny, little scratches, looking like arabic script, making you wonder if you read it right to left, would it make more sense.

I can’t remember why the zippercase got retired. I might have had good reason. I remember going to the Goodwill store with Dad because of some ’silent auction’ thing where you had to chance to bid and buy on items that could be collectors to someone and then may, just maybe, you could get lucky and make a few bucks with a good find. I can’t remember what Dad bought. I know what I bought. I still have them both. A small kaliedescope, welded solid and very beautiful. And Zippercase Mark II.

This was a brown plastic portfolio that opened up top with a zipper. I think, at one time, it had the emblem of the City of Winnipeg on it somewhere. What it evolved into was something of a Writer’s Purse. I would carry multiple pens, pencils, pencil crayons, magazines, books, and finally, my new media of choice, The Black Book.

I’m really not sure what these are called if you ever went to your favourite supply store. These are the 92 page books, measuring about 5″ x 8″ or so, with a hard black top and bottom and are bound pretty good. The front page has all of your contact information, then you open the book and the rest of it is yours. I used these when I bought Zippercase Mark II. I kept all of these, too.

I must have either slacked off as I got older, writing fewer and fewer pages per day, for whatever reason. But I think I have all of the Black Books that I ever used. I put my count at about eighteen of them, filed away downstairs. Everytime that I look at that shelf, I think of the movie Se7en, where they finally break into the apartment of the killer, and Somerset sits there in the killers room, going over all of the killer’s notebooks, and remarks on how they are written from margin to margin, with no paragraph breaks or anything. The killer had hundreds of those notebooks. I only have a dozen or so. And I have never, ever killed anyone ever, in the name of God or anyone else. But, I do put The Divine Comedy and City of God among my favourite books

(though, City of God is a brainful ; I’ve never read it cover to cover. I keep it and read books of it at a time. It is currently underneath the couch upstairs – it’s an emergency release for me in case I catch myself up there not wanting to watch TV but still be with my wife. I can read with one hand and rub her back with the other while she watches the tube.)

I went from those notebooks to a PDA. I started with the Palm III, then the Palm IIIc, and then the Palm T3, all of them good. I learned the ‘graffiti’ script so that I could write with it like I could write with a normal pen. I think that it eventually had a dramatic impact on my current handwriting, to a point that when my hands get tired or I am in a rush, that it looks like the graffiti shorthand. I got more and more into my Palm, putting all of my work on it, my reading material on it, my personal email on it. I even tried to Bluetooth it to my phone, so it would be on my hip forever and for always. The the Palm T3 crashed. And I lost everything that I had electronically. And I never ever went electronic again. That’s why I won’t go to this new thingie that they are trying to sell through Amazon.

Make it as easy to read as you like, but my paperback has a reliable operating system (my brain), good memory (my brain, again), and a reasonable lifetime (some of my used paperbacks are twenty or thirty years old).

I went to something called a Hipster PDA, and that works well. Still does. I tried writing on it, and it doesn’t work as well. I bought a cheap, inkjet printer, that accepts the index cards and I use that to type up all of the important reference information I need. And I use the cards from time to time if there is a recipe I want to save or some notes that I want to file away for later that I know I will want to index. But not for writing. They are just too small and not too accomodating. But the Hipster PDA? If you ever have the chance, Google it or just take a walk over to 43 Folders and have Merlin get you up to speed.

My current ride is Moleskin and the Fisher Space pen. Moleskin, because, well, it’s cool and it takes a good deal of punishment and comes in a notebook form or a pad form, and they fit nicely into the front left pocket of a pair of jeans. They sell bigger notebooks, and I’ve got a couple of those (I think they measure 7 x 10 or something like that) that I’ve managed to fill in the past few years ; with one more on the go in Zippercase Mark III.

There was a brief period between PDA and Moleskin where I didn’t write anything at all. That lasted about a year or so. It didn’t have anything to do with the crash.

No. That’s a lie. It did.

I am an atheist. Tried and true. But when that crashed, I stopped writing because I thought it was a sign, a kind of karmic knock on my door, telling me to either take writing seriously and get something done, or stop jerking off in the boys washroom like some kind of cheese-eating schoolboy and grow up. I chose to stop jerking off and do what I could to grow up.

But other than that short period where I lost my mind, I have written no less than five hundred words every day since I was thirteen years old. And I have done it where ever I was. At home, in the bathroom, the car, on the bus, at the dinner table, waiting to be served dinner, waiting to be seated, sitting at the bar waiting for a beer, after being at the bar for a half dozen beers, while eating greasy, messy chicken wings with my left hand, dipping it into the sinfully delicious blue cheese dressing dip, while writing with my right hand, putting down the pen only when I wanted to sip my beer. I write all of the time. I almost always have. I keep my notebooks on my at all times and I always have a pen on me.

This blog is a new tool to for me to use to make sure that I get in at least my five hundred words every day. And so long as I have access to a computer and the intertubes don’t get jammed or suddenly ass-plode all over, I won’t lose anything.

And now, for the first time in thirteen years, someone other than me is reading what it is that I write. Because to date, despite having written approximately 2, 372, 500 words over the course of the last thirteen years (this excludes writing that I had to do for school or for work), this is as close as I’ve ever gotten published.

Which reminds me, I made a bet with someone a few years ago that I never honoured. I think I owe him a case of beer. And back then, I couldn’t afford it. But these days, well, all I have to do is ask my wife and bang, I’ll have enough money to buy that case of beer.

I’m joking. I’m a big boy now. I get an allowance and everything.

My Youngest Brother and His Big Wheel

This is me at work

I really should be working my ass off, because there really is alot to do. But I found a picture on the internet early this morning that I really want to share. But before I share, some background, please.

I grew up in Scarborough, Ontario, in a little court whose name shall remain anonymous. But for now, let me tell you that it was a string of townhouses on one side, a large, orange brick apartment building on the other side, complete with an ominous (and sure to appear in a short story or a novel coming to you any century now) undergound parking garage and above ground pool. On the other side was a townhouse complex of a hundred or more homes, snaking in and around. On the other side was the only in and out street, then there were detached homes and other neighbourhoods. Going back there now in my head (I have not physically been there in years ; and my childhood memories are stronger than the ones of a few years ago, oddly enough) and running those images through my thirty six year old filter, it occurs to me that my parents were really not all that well off. Never figured that out until a little while ago. But anyway, this is where we lived.

I owned a Big Wheel and I owned a Green Machine. I loved the Green Machine. It was infinitely more dynamic, in my opinion, with the way that you were able to steer it with a gear shift instead of handlebars or a steering wheel. And the exercise was excellent. Though now, even if I could wedge my fat ass into that uncomfortable, black, molded plastic seat, I doubt I would last five minutes before wheezing so hard I would have to puke. The big wheel was fun, too. And just as much work. But too straightforward. I do remember a story about a Big Wheel, but it didn’t have to do with me, and I don’t remember it (and I have a pretty good memory for little things like this) but Mom tells me it true so that means that it is.

My youngest brother liked the Big Wheel in the house. He rode it outside, I understand, but he also rode it everywhere else. Our townhouse (I really don’t remember the square footage ; my child memory tells me it was huge, my thirty six year old memory, adjusting to scale, tells me it was about fifteen hundred square feet or so) was long and narrow. You went up some conrete steps to a very small concrete landing and porch, through the front door, up some more steps into the house. Turn to the right, and there was the kitchen. Turn to the left and there was the stairs going up. Go straight ahead and there was the dining room ahead of you and the living room on the right. Go through the living room to the sliding glass doors and you went into the backyard. Go back into the living room and you will see a door that takes you down a narrow set of stairs into the basement. At the bottom of the stairs is a landing, and you turn left and go down a couple more sets of stairs. Stand at the bottom of those stairs, on your right is the laundry room, ahead of you is a small bedroom with a window, which served as my basement bedroom when from the ages of eight to about eleven or twelve. To your left, down a low, narrow passage, that leads you to the recreation room, play-room, call it what you will. The room was lined with bookshelves. And I mean lined. There were thousands of them. And saying that is not an exaggeration. I have a pretty good book collection now, all of them packed away and probably disintegrating, waiting to be put onto shelves. My collection is about five hundred and fifty books. My collection is a quarter of what my parents had. I remember only a few of them. Most memorable were the Encyclopedia Brittanica, which I would read when I was bored and wanted to be excited by something. Others include the fantastic ‘Man and Woman’ collection, which is also something I would read when I was bored and wanted to be excited by something ; moreso as I got older and appreciated what those images and paragraphs were trying to tell me. I have to thank that book for showing me where the clitoris was. I wouldn’t have found it without a GPS or ones of those ultraviolet lights that Grissom uses on CSI.

Now that I am walking through with you to this place, more memories are coming to me that I am jotting down in my Moleskin notebook (with my Fisher Space Pen ; an excellent combo – better than the best PDA you will ever buy and marginally better than the hipster PDA that I sometimes use for work) so that I can refer to them later when I am out of ideas.

But this is where we lived and the kind of house we lived in and this was where my brother hauled the big wheel around in. Well, it happened one day that Mom left the front door open. In that time and place, in that neighborhood, that was not a problem. You were raised by your parents and cared for by the rest of the neighborhood. The kind of place where if you stepped out of line and your parents weren’t there, sure as anything someone else’s parents were there and they would not hesitate to give you what for. And complaining to your own parents was worthless, because your parents were certain that whatever you got you deserved. And it was probably hot that day – I don’t remember having air conditioning until we moved to Newmarket – so that door would have given us a nice breeze.

Mom was doing something. I imagine she was in the kitchen, making us lunch or something, while she smoked cigarettes and had a cup of tea. Mom and Dad smoked in the house until we were well into our teens. When we were younger and lived in that townhouse complex, it was nothing for one of the three of us to Hop The Wall (more on that later) and run to the variety store to buy a pack of smokes. Mom was Benson and Hedges Light 100s and I think Dad was DuMaurier Light King. And the store would sell it to us. I mean, sell packs of smokes, sometimes three and four at a time. To kids that were all under ten. And they had no worry that any of us would try to buy for ourselves. Somehow, I think we knew that if we were buying for ourselves, some kind of Big People Telepathy would tell them what we were trying to do and we would get nailed for it.

And while Mom was doing that something, my younger brother had brought the Big Wheel into the house. Again, no big deal. Then she hears a horrendous thump and bang and crash of plastic against linoleum, and then against concrete, and then the sound of plastic wheels turning and grinding furiously against pavement pebbles. Mom dashed out of the kitchen to the hall and looked out the open front door.

My younger brother had successfully ran the Big Wheel down the hall from the dining room, down the stairs in the house, down the concrete steps, and out onto the driveway and onto the street. Mom didn’t tell me what she did after. She tells the story to explain that she knew when my younger brother was very, very young, that he would grow up and do whatever it is that he wanted, no matter what the risk, if only to see that it worked.

So what that tells me, is that even though Mom never said what she did after she saw him do it, is that she went back to the kitchen, took another drag off her smoke, downed her cup of tea in one gulp, and started boiling water for another cup.

But the reason why all of this came to me is because of one picture I saw on the comments section of the excellent site Fark.com. It is a picture of a Big Boy’s Big Wheel. It is a picture of a machine that I know my youngest brother would look at and wonder how much it was worth and wonder if there were a set of stairs anywhere he could run it down and see if he could make it.

[edit] This was never intended to be a picture of my neighbourhood where I grew up. Those pictures can be saved for later. This is a picture of a bad ass Big Wheel that I’m sure my youngest brother would love to take for a spin.

Last Post before I go to bed. I swear

Personal

“Burning Bridges”

• Not sure where I got this idea from but it is written down in my notebook so I must have gotten it from somewhere

(sic)”My daddy tole me to never have no fear of burnin bridges you ain’t never want to cross agen.

“So I got to figgerin that if iss only ever me whose gonna cross that bridge, then what’s the point in burnin it when you can nuke the motherfucker.”(end sic)

Personal

Mixed Drinks

Sex in Georgina

• Raspberry Vodka
• Triple Sec
• Lemon juice
• Grenadine
• Champagne

• Not sure what the ratio is of what to what, but I am sure that someone can figure it out.

Personal

Mixed Drink

“Harvest Moon”

• Amaretto
• Vanilla Vodka
• Cranberry juice

• Same deal, no mix details. But if I got it right, I think my wife would like it alot.

Personal

Story Idea

“Secret Sharer”

• but with clones on a merchant space navy carrier thingie
• What if one clone kills a human – are all strains of that clone considered to be bad material?
• Would a clone who is designed to follow orders report on himself?
• Would he report on another clone?
• Would the bad clone try to frame the good clone?
• Would then they both not be guilty of the same crime?
• Would a good clone not have self-preservation built into it?
• Would the renegade then try to take over the ship and then track down and destroy his old ship to cover up all evidence of his misdeed?
• Then he would eject himself back into space, claim that he ejected at the last minute after he was sure that his crew had escaped
• But the renegade clone made a point of killing all the survivors that did escape.
• That would be the conflict. The good clone would be able to predict what the renegade would do. The good clone would get mad that he could think in such a way ; meaning that he would be capable of such an act
• Start the story off with a simulator that let you feel a part of space
• Make a reference to John Varley’s ringers (characters from The Ophuichi Hotline)
• Don’t get all Star Trekky and cheapen the whole damned thing.

Done.

There is something wrong with me…

I finished writing the last post then remembered that I really should have been changing my cats’s littler box and taking out the garbage. My wife called down to make sure that I was okay.

While I was taking out the garbage and scooping the cat box, I started to think about my post and what else it was I was going to write this evening.

I was also thinking about how much money I wanted to spend on a keyboard, because the keyboard for my basement desktop (1.3Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 500GB HDD, running the new and improved and flawlessly updated to Ubuntu 8.04) is not very good, the IBM laptop on the mainfloor is the best laptop I have ever used for writing (despite it being almost ten years old ; my youngest brother can correct me on it’s age – It’s a Pentium III, 733 with 512Mb of RAM and a 20G HDD with no floppy, no nuthin, running Ubuntu 6.06 – and my brother and law and my wife helped me find a docking station for it, not to mention the fact that I bought an aftermarket battery for it that gives it a four hour operating time) but I like keeping it on the mainfloor and I do my best writing in the basement, and the Toshiba laptop (running stupid Vista because stupid Ubuntu 6.06 or 7.10 won’t run on it because stupid Toshiba has some stupid thing where the wireless card is actually a USB adaptor that Ubuntu has a hard time recognizing – though I have not test driven Ubuntu 8.04 on it yet) that I have is absolutely superb for everything else except writing.

But this isn’t about my computers. This was about my post. The reason why I am writing this is because the Atreus character that I posted is wrong.

Wrong, I tell you. Wrong.

How do I know?

Because I remembered. And it came to me so fast and so furiously that all I could do was come back from emptying the litter box (I elected to dump instead of scooping it when it all came back to me), filled my Steamwhistle pint glass with water (I try not to drink booze when I know I am going to write), and zipped into the basement, knowing for sure that what I was looking for would be there. It was simply a matter of finding it. I found it. And here it is. When my friend reads this post, he will know for sure. Because Venom of the Crush is not easily forgotten

I deleted the player’s name. My friend is a family man now. The Good Lord only knows what would happen if one of his children found out that their father hung around with geeks.

Character Venom

Player <Deleted>

Strength 18/78

Intelligence 10

Dexterity 16

Wisdom 11

Constitution 17

Charisma 11

Thaco 15

Hit Points 60, Armour Class -1(-3)

Class Level 6 Warrior

Experience 43,000 xp (43,000/_________ )

Alignment Chaotic Neutral Age 24

Race Cyclops, Height 7′1″, Weight 365lbs

Abilities -1 initiative

Natural tolerance to weather extremes

Equipment Zachary’s fire (3 charges /___ ),

50′ rope, 3 weeks rations (21/__ ),

flint and steel, tinderbox, torch,

leather backpack, grapple,

iron spikes (5/___ ),wineskin (1gallon/___ ),

Whetstone (3/__ ),black leather gloves,

black leather hiking boots

Currency 250 Nemedian gold peices

Armor Black Dragonscale Armor

Weapons +4 Bastard Sword ‘Axe’,

+2 Warhammer ‘Smash’

Magic Ring of Jumping

Secondary Skills Miner, Leather working

Weapon Proficiencies

Two Handed Weapon style

Long Blades Tight group

Bastard Sword specialist

Warhammer specialist

Non Weapon Proficiencies Modifier

Blindfighting, Endurance, Hunting

Wrestling (double specialization)

Weapon, spd, sz, dmg SM / L, Thac0, #Att

Bastard Sword+4, 2, m, 1d8/1d12 +10, 8, 3/2

(Using it 2 handed), 1, m, 2d6/2d8 +11, 8, 3/2

Warhammer+2, 0, m, 1d4+1/1d4 +9, 10, 3/2