Um.
So, it’s been a crazy month, September. Stupid busy. Did I miss anything?
Catechism.
“I’m not making a joke. You know me; I take everything so seriously. If we wait for the time till our souls get it right, then at least I know there’ll be no nuclear annihilation in my lifetime.” —Me, I’m still not right neither. Further bulletins soon enough. (I’d thought my anger at the traffic hot enough, but then I saw the Yes on 43: Protect Teen Girls bumper sticker. Such filthy eloquence! Her ears would have been flensed from her skull, had our windows been rolled down, were we not been traveling at such wind-whipping speeds. —I’m sleepy, and punch-drunk; hurry home, Jenn. The cats won’t leave me alone, and the words aren’t doing what I want them to.)
We wish to register a complaint.
Since when did y’all let new car keys get so dam’ bulky?
“Self-correcting blogosphere,” my ass.
Three days I’ve had “onamatopoetic” down there. Three days. And not one of you said a goddamn thing. (And anyway, the actual “onomatopoeic” is even better rhythmically than my oh-so-cleverly factured “onomatopoetic,” to spell it properly.) —Is this thing on?
An industrial seashell.
They’re hollowing out the upper floors of the Meier & Frank across the street from our office, “they” being NUPRECON, which probably stood for something at one point before it got all “Nu” on us. (I notice they also did for the Danmoore Hotel, on which more later.) —They’ve bolted a giant sheet-metal chute to the front of the building, braced by a webwork of scaffolding, with openings at every floor through which they lustily toss two-by-fours and chunks of drywall and metal brackets and pieces of concrete flooring and ripped-out electrical ducting and pipes and I don’t know what-all else to tumble booming down the chute and crash into the concrete bunkers at street level where backhoes scoop it up into battered containers and there’s the guy whose job it is to hose the whole thing down to keep the gypsum dust and other particulates from choking passers-by. Before today, it was an occasional event, whenever somebody on the sixth or the eighth floor got a load large enough to dump; we’d hear the intial boom and crash of a drop on its way down and apologize to whomever on the phone, hold up our meeting, look away from the computer screen, suspend all conversation for the half-minute or so it took the reverberations to die away. But today? Today they’re really into it. Load after load after load going down. Our only defense is to pretend we’re at the beach, and it’s the crashing surf we’re hearing—the crashing, clanging, thumping, banging surf.
A thoroughly self-indulgent post
pointing out that episode one of City of Roses finished today; episode two begins Monday, and runs Monday-Wednesday-Friday for the next two weeks. So there’s that. —Also, if you haven’t been checking out the news over there, you probably missed some lovely photos from the Portland Zine Symposium, which mostly taken by Matt Nolan and Erika Moen. So there’s that, too.
Personal appearance.
Today and tomorrow and Sunday I’ll be in the Smith Ballroom at Portland State University, sitting behind a table with the irrepressible Erika Moen. We’re there for the 6th Annual Portland Zine Symposium; I’ll be hawking City of Roses chapbooks, and she’ll have a variety of minicomics available, some of which are naughty. —Also, if Dylan Meconis found a decent copy shop in time, she’ll be there with some poetry.
We’re operating under the name Bikini Girl and Tiny Top Hat Man. I should probably state for the record that I do not have a tiny top hat (just a leopard-skin fez), and while Erika may well have a bikini, she won’t be wearing it. No one’s entirely sure who’s responsible for the name, or why we thought it was a good idea at the time. So let’s just move on, shall we? —There’s going to be lots of DIY publications to browse and workshops galore and I for one am eager to learn more about the Multnomah County Library’s new zine collection.
So do stop by, if you’re in the area and so inclined. Admission’s free. Tables are open Friday from 3 – 7 and Saturday and Sunday from 10 – 5; workshops run Saturday and Sunday; parking’s not bad; there’s a farmer’s market for lunches. Liquids are allowed.
Resolute.
Oh, hey. I did it.
(Final print job tonight. First of the promised packages out tomorrow. Further bulletins as events warrant, and do note I’ll be here a week from this weekend, if you’re so inclined.)
Ah, youth, where is thy sting?
—Neil Gaimain; Scott McCloud; San Diego, 1991.
Via 
ivy_rat.
Have you got anything without spam?
Dealing with the junk mail, I find an envelope from our auto insurance provider, Nationwide, and on the off-chance it’s something I should pay attention to, I open it. —It’s an offer to switch our auto insurance policy to Nationwide, where we could save up to $523 a year over our current rates.
Kiss them for me.
Hey! It’s the weekend of the massive San Diego Comic-Con. We didn’t go this year, but it sure sounds like Jesse Hamm’s enjoying himself.
Coffee.
The Spouse and I recently went through a couple of weeks where we eschewed coffee and alcohol and sugar and bread and nuts and milk and eggs and cheese and butter and yogurt and red meat, that last not proving too difficult, as I’m nominally vegetarian (though I’m eating more fish, which is completely the fault of the decent sushi joint that’s walking distance from our house), and as I’m nominally vegetarian and do most of the cooking, the Spouse finds herself vegetarian de facto. Even the lack of coffee wasn’t too bad after the first few days with the headaches and the grumpiness. I drank a lot of green tea.
And it wasn’t as bad as you’d think. Anytime you force your diet out of its usual rut you get creative, or so I’ve found. Menus spark up. I found whole chunks of cookbooks I hadn’t seen yet. That lovely gratin with the red onions and the olives and the tomato and the thyme. That “Mexican” stir fry, with the black beans and the corn. The Tuscan white bean and tomato soup with the kale roughly chopped and tossed in to wilt. —Though the tofu with the tasty spicy sauce didn’t turn out exactly as Madhur Jeffries advertised. (Really, the worst of it—aside from the daily infusions of foul herbal nostrums which, we do this again, I’ll just skip, thanks—was the lack of cheese. And eggs. I do like the dairy.)
But the point is not to trade recipes whose names and particulars I can’t bring to mind here at work, away from my cookbooks. The point, despite the relative ease with which I did without it over the course of the two weeks, is the coffee.
Before we did this two-week purge, I used to drink my coffee out of a mug like this:
With milk enough and two spoons of sugar. (It’s a big mug; a bowl of coffee, as the Spouse would put it.) I’d have two of those as I read my blogs and newsfeeds before I considered myself human enough to face the rest of the day.
Now, though? I drink one, maybe two, of these:
And I drink it dead black. No sugar at all. The very idea of doctoring the stuff is on the edge of ick to me, now; has become, oddly, alien.
Weird.
Oh, right.
I was—“procrastinating” is such an ugly word—I was organizing some notes, looking over the list of proposed titles for upcoming fits and remembering which ones I’d found epigrams for and which ones I hadn’t, when I tripped over “Frail,” there between an as-yet unnamed bit at no. 14 and “Plenty” at no. 16.
“Frail.” Hadn’t that been the one with the O’Brian quote? Aubrey to Maturin, or Maturin to Aubrey, one of ’em anyway laughing at what little it is that separates quickness from death? Which the hell book was that from? And why isn’t the quote in the neat little text file I’ve got of all my other epigrammic candidates?
So I opened up the various other text files I’ve accumulated over the years where notes have been stashed and squirreled away, and searched them with the various search tools at my disposal, looking for “frail.” Bupkes.
Did I forget maybe to put it somewhere? Noted it en passant, said to myself, oh, hey, keen, let’s remember to come back and get this later, okay? And then forgot? As it wouldn’t be the first time.
Okay. Okay. We could go look for it. Except I ran across it the last time I was bingeing through the first seven or so of the Aubrey-Maturin books, and I have no earthly idea which one it was in. And I don’t remember enough of the context to make skimming at all viable. Not through seven books. (Maybe I should start bingeing again? Put down The Orientalist and Evasion and Civilizations Before Greece and Rome and The Demon Lover and pick up Master and Commander for another go-round, grimly determined to pounce this time?)
I think I was actually typing “frail” in the Seach Inside the Book! feature over at Amazon when it hit me: maybe I’d written it down. You know, on paper. With a pen. In the main black notebook I’ve been using when I’m not, you know. Near a keyboard.
Found it in two: “Bless you, Jack, an inch of steel in the right place will do wonders. Man is a pitiably frail machine.” —Although I still don’t know which book. Or what context. Oh, well.
(At least I got a blog post out of it. Now. What in hell am I going to quote for “Surveilling”?)
Something I read that I liked.
There ought to be an anthem for grocery shopping, because carefully and clinically choosing the stuff you’ll be made out of is grade-A autonomy.
Porch, with occasional rainbow.
Scott McCloud was here on Sunday. Fun was had.
Apparently, I’m waiting for something.
Though I know not what. —Y’all see anything likely, let me know, okay?
Monkeys and Wolves and termites, oh my!
The Known World is back from database hell. (For those interested in such things, of course.)
