Today is the first day of fall. The weather was a mix of sun and cloud, with a light sprinkle here and there. It was mild in the afternoon and a bit chilly in the morning. All in all an average sort of early fall day.
Most trees have already changed color, the Halloween candy is on store shelves (three weeks before Thanksgiving, which is actually pretty normal now), the sun sets early enough that a post-dinner walk must be done without delay to avoid being caught out in the dark where bats will automatically dive at your head and become tangled in your hair. It’s totally true. I avoid this by wearing a hat. And not having hair.
I am sad that summer is over, even though the first half was stupidly hot and the second half featured a major leg injury that made there mere act of walking painful. Barring some weird climate change burst–which I wouldn’t necessarily rule out–we won’t see a 20+ degree day again for seven months. It will become cold and wet like a dog’s nose, except all over instead of just on a dog’s nose.
On the plus side I may increase my writing output as the urge to go outside and do stuff in dog nose weather fades, and that pesky glare from the sun won’t be quite as pesky for awhile.
All you need to know about the decline of our civilization is that iOS 9 includes a new “selfies” folder for photos. The geniuses at Apple (they have geniuses there, you can book appointments with them at Apple stores) believe that enough people use their iPhones (or iPads, perhaps even the gigantic iPad Pro coming out in a few months) to take photos of themselves with the front-facing camera to warrant a specific storage location for said images. And they are correct, as the web is awash in digital self-portraits.
Admittedly, my complaint (er, observation) feels somewhat “old man yells at cloud.” It may be that we as a (modern) society have always been vain, it just wasn’t as easy to record in high-definition sound and pictures and spread like some doomsday flu all over the world.
Not surprisingly, there is actually a collection of iPad selfies put together to (wordlessly) mock the very concept, on a website also not surprisingly called ipadisnotacamera.com. Here’s one that nicely illustrates how most tablet selfies simply make the operator look like they don’t know how to use a tablet:
Just about to give the iPad a good scrubbing in the sink, no doubt.
In the future we’ll probably have micro-drones following us that are programmed to take the equivalent of selfies at key moments, using sophisticated algorithms to detect important events like “having food for lunch” or “posing with BFF for the billionth time” or even “chasing away fearful old man who hates how technology enables people.”
Continuing the trek toward fifty inane writing prompts…
Write a story based on the song “Heartbreak Hotel” where staying at the hotel will cause your heart to rupture, resulting in a swift, painful death. Make it a romantic comedy.
You and your friends have gathered around the campfire to tell spooky stories. You begin to tell yours, “The Haunted Ketchup Packet.”
Electricity is a recent discovery. Think of 12 things to do while being electrocuted.
In 400 words, create your ideal pudding.
Begin a story with, “His unibrow had gained sentience, just as I feared it would.”
In 200 words, write about your first sexually transmitted disease.
Throw a rock at a little kid in the park, then write about your adventures in jail.
Godzilla and King Kong are finally getting married and you’ve been asked to write their wedding vows, then you kill them because they are big freaky monsters.
Write from the perspective of a smart car with a brain tumor. Make it a romantic comedy.
Using a time travel machine, the scientific genius fixes everything that was wrong with history. What sort of pants does he wear? How did they help him fix history?
As I mentioned, it rained yesterday, which also happened to be my birthday and also happened to be a Saturday and also happened to be the first rain we’ve had on a Saturday in quite awhile. Since the Big Storm™ of late August, the spell of months-long hot, dry weather has been broken, with generally cooler temperatures and a mix of sun, cloud and a some rain here and there.
We need the rain so I can’t really complain, especially given the climate we live in here, which generally leans toward wet with intervals of dry, followed by a lot more wet. In the winter this pattern normally magnifies tenfold on the wet parts.
The change in weather and the imminent official end of summer (in three days) has made me reflect on the seasons and, as always, I eventually came up with a list. In this list I rank the seasons from “please last six months longer through some form of magic” to “I tolerate you with a mix of loathing and open hostility.”
The Best and Worst Seasons
Summer. Number one with a bullet. What’s not to like? The weather is mild or warm for months but rarely gets outright hot (er, this last bit may be changing somewhat as the last few years suggest climate shenanigans are affecting how hot summer gets here). The days are long, with plenty of light in the evening for pleasant walks, runs and other outdoor activities. The trees, flowers and other vegetation are in full bloom. There is lush green and other colors everywhere. It even smells nice. Anyone who hates summer probably hates kittens, too.
Spring. Spring is basically proto-summer. It features a lot of the same positive attributes as summer, just dialed down. The days are getting longer but you won’t be strolling in the daylight at 8 p.m. quite yet. Trees are dressing themselves in leaves but timidly, as if they’re afraid to show off. It can be warm but at least it’s no longer cold. You can stop wearing layers upon layers. Most importantly, all of these things are signs that summer is on its way.
Fall. Fall is kind of special in that it’s the only season that gets a bonus alternate title, Autumn. The best part of fall are the weeks when the trees still have most of their leaves but they’ve changed into a spectacular array of bold colors: red, oranges, yellows. For a time the world looks like a really nice landscape painting. You know, the kind not done on black velvet. Early fall also features the last vestiges of summer–the days are getting shorter, it starts getting cooler, but the changes come gently, easing you away from Best Season.
Winter. Everything about winter sucks. The days are short. You get to a point where it’s dark when you leave for work in the morning and it’s dark when you get back in the afternoon. If you work in a place without windows you may never see actual daylight for weeks or months. It’s cold. It rains a lot. Wind often accompanies the rain, turning umbrellas into hazards to be dodged as their owners struggle to keep control of them on the sidewalks. Buses get smelly and damp. Sometimes it will snow and for a brief time the world falls silent and the blanket of white stuff brings a sense of calm and tranquility to the city. Then it warms up, the snow changes to rain and you have to slog through giant flows of slush. On top of all this, there are no flowers, the trees look like they’ve been nuked and the world is generally gray and dreary. About the best thing I can say about winter is that it’s nice to curl up with a cup of tea or hot chocolate after coming in from the cold.
As promised, here is the final selection of stories, first by category and next as a single, magical list of titles.
Definitely in:
Learning to Die
Slice of Life
The Cobalt Sensation
The Chicago 8 vs. Time
The Chicago 8 vs. Armageddon Hello?
The Lunch Gnome
The Dream of the Buckford County Church
Possibly in:
Cervidae
The Sometimes Island
At the Door
Killing Time Laura
The Graffiti Avenger
Lily Tries to Go Shopping Follow the Tracks Sammy Takes a Dive
Would require re-working/additional drafts:
The Broken Bridge
Stop That Cow!
Rainy Day Trolling for Fun and Profit The Invisible Weekend
Unfinished:
Dented World
The Box on the Bench
Not written:
Regina and the Shortcut with Teeth
Sanity Road/Bent Metal The Capitol Dome Swimmers and Fog
Picture This
And the full list below:
10 Pairs of Shorts
Learning to Die
Slice of Life
The Cobalt Sensation
The Chicago 8 vs. Time
The Chicago 8 vs. Armageddon
The Lunch Gnome
The Dream of the Buckford County Church
The Sometimes Island
At the Door
Killing Time
The Graffiti Avenger
Lily Tries to Go Shopping
The Broken Bridge
Stop That Cow!
Rainy Day
Dented World
The Box on the Bench
Regina and the Shortcut with Teeth
Sanity Road
Picture This
This makes for a grand total of twenty stories or ten pairs of shorts, a nice, even number.
My next weekly update will finalize the stories I want to work on completing next. I reserve the right to put this off if I win Wednesday’s $16 million 6/49 jackpot.
It’s birthday time again and once more my reaction is “meh.”
Highlights of the day:
rain for most of the day. It’s barely rained the last five months.
a massive headache
napping for about three hours because of said massive headache
shuffling around the condo
not writing
not reading
not getting to kill that stupid spider in WoW because Blizzard has jammed players from 500 servers into one, resulting in newbie areas having a population density similar to Mexico City
feta-stuffed olives
The last item on that list is an actual highlight. Feta-stuffed olives, mmm.
All told, I continue to not particularly care about marking birthdays so the non-event nature of today’s doesn’t really bother me. I could have done without the headache and rain, though.
The debate is whether I want to participate this year or skip it.
Pros:
if I’m in a writing lull at the time (November 1, to be exact) it’s a great way to kickstart things
I commit to a longer work that I may not have otherwise (short stories are so much easier because they’re, well, short)
the camaraderie of toiling along with other NaNoWriMo participants is nice
seeing the word count go up every day is more satisfying than it has any right to be
Cons:
if I’m in the middle of a writing project, the necessary pause for NaNoWriMo can derail it
a novel written in 30 days is usually not very good
it’s easy to write 50,000 words in a blur; rewriting them takes almost the same effort as writing another book
the camaraderie only takes you so far
my NaNoWriMo bio is never as clever or witty as I want it to be
In the end I’ll probably take part if the first item in the Pro list is happening come November. NaNoWriMo is a great way to get rolling on some steady output when work/life/the universe has otherwise snuffed out your enthusiasm and smothered your muse with a pillow borrowed from the Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
If the multiverse exists, I wonder if another version of me in some parallel dimension is also fumbling to come up with something to post to his blog. I hope so, because I hate to suffer alone.
And now, a haiku dedicated to all the possible universes:
I am here and there
Across the universes
Me, myself and I
I’m feeling out of sorts at the moment and so I’m not writing anything today except in the technical sense, as these are words and they do constitute writing.
Instead I present a cat that is clearly not feeling out of sorts:
I first read this book when it was originally published in paperback in 1988. That was literally half a lifetime ago, as I was 24 at the time. Over the last few years I’ve been returning to some of the books I read in my teens and 20s, to see how they resonate with me now that I am older, if not entirely wiser.
The first thing to strike me upon re-reading this book 27 years later is that I could recall nothing of the story. I mean, yes, I knew there was a detective named Dirk Gently, I knew it was a bit weird and froopy in that Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy sort of way, but I could not recall any real plot details at all, nor any of the characters. I vaguely remembered something about cats. Cats are mentioned several times, though they play no significant role in the novel. I think I just like cats and projected.
The plot is a convoluted affair that unfolds like some complicated contraption you can’t recognize until it’s finished unfolding itself. You then stand back and say, “Aha, so that’s what it is!” Despite the narrative being at turns mysterious and then more mysterious still, Adams keeps events moving along briskly and the characters are more nuanced than in Hitchhiker’s, while still apt to say clever things we could only wish to come up with in our daily conversations. Eventually the mysteries come clear–the story is a time travel/ghost/romantic comedy of sorts that follows a few very peculiar days in the life of a software engineer who can’t remove a stuck sofa from his staircase–and all ends well, given the previously unrevealed cosmic scale of the stakes at hand.
What impresses me most about the book, and this may seem an odd thing to say in context of Adams, is how mature the writing is. There are ideas on the interplay of math, science, art, philosophy, mortality and more here, handled with wit and grace and occasionally genuine pathos (the scenes of Gordon Way after his meeting with the electric monk stand out vividly in their depiction of despair and sadness). I suspect when I was 24 most of this was lost on me, as I was expecting a Hitchhiker’s retread, which Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is very much not. Unfulfilled, my brain apparently flushed nearly all memory of the book, to better make room for all that great late 80s music and fashion. I forgot Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency but remember parachute pants.
I very much recommend this novel for those not needing their stories filled with car chases and instant gratification, or for anyone who has ever been flummoxed by seemingly immovable furniture.
Again I find myself unable to think of anything witty, relevant or interesting to post and the more I try to think of something the greater the blank space where that something would be becomes.
But I’m not going to post another cat image. I’m tempted. Oh, so tempted.
Instead, I will recall that I had dimly remember two dreams last night. One was being part of a crew setting up some kind of Mars research facility. This was a space station/habitat sort of thing that was going to either be on Mars or in orbit around the red planet. I remember the facility being large, clean and very empty. I don’t remember what I actually did but I like to imagine it was very important. Perhaps I met Matt Damon. I’m pretty sure publicity for The Martian is what prompted the dream.
The other dream involved me watching a passenger jet coming in for a landing at YVR, as passenger jets will do at the airport. I was watching from near 41st Avenue and Cambie and the plane was coming in north to south rather than east to west, which is silly, but that’s dreams for you. I marveled at how close to the ground the planes get when coming in, except this one actually started scraping its tail along Cambie Street. The pilot wisely pulled up, presumably to try again with less scraping. Instead of just looping around he did this strange series of climbs and descents, which I interpreted as him trying to gain momentum or height or something. I don’t know, I’m not an airplanist. The jet moved off to the west, somewhere further down 41st Avenue and did another climb but this time when it came back down it started twirling and then disappeared out of my sight, presumably crashing as out of my sight would be where the ground was. I woke up and was bummed out until I remembered the earlier Mars dream. The airplane crash dream was inspired by me watching a YouTube video of plane crashes that was a “related” video to something I watched that had nothing to do with planes, crashes or plane crashes. Probably a Boston video. Watching it was not one of my better ideas.
Tonight I’m going to watch kitten videos before going to bed. If I dream of being chased and eaten by lions I am going to be very cross with my brain.
Summary: After the first 500 weeks of the 2015 federal election campaign, the race has tightened, with all three major parties nearly running neck and neck (and neck). I can only assume the crazification factor is behind the continued support for the Conservatives (the crowds at his campaign events may not be helping, either).
With another 600 or so weeks before election day there is plenty of time for one of these parties to move to the front of the pack and claim victory. Remember, Canada, don’t be stupid!
The highlight of the last week is probably Stephen Harper using the drowning death of a Syrian child refugee to underscore how important it is that we continue to bomb the hell out of everything because bombs fix things.
Other than that it was another week of candidates from various parties forced to drop out because they can’t stop saying appallingly stupid and/or offensive things on social media. I’m normally not that enthused about Facebook, Twitter et al but they have proven their worth by continuing to weed out those who should not be seeking public office.
Also, Trudeau keeps trying to make hay about the NDP and their policies toward Quebec/possible secession. Hint: NO ONE CARES. The Quebecois themselves do not care–look at the moribund support for the BQ, even with the return of party favorite Gilles Duceppe (the Firefox spelling checker wants to replace “Duceppe” with “Produce.” My browser is now offering political commentary).
Anyway, I’ll have another exciting summary somewhere around Week 900 or so.
