Big Day

Today, Oct. 26, I finished the rough draft of a novel I've been working on intermittently since the summer of '09. The word count comes out to somewhere between 65,000 and 68,000, depending on the software.

This is exciting for me because it's the culmination of a lot of hard work. It's also the second story I've ever actually seen through to completion. The first, which I was also excited about and proud of, was a rough draft of a short story that I wrote over a week in August while taking a break from the novel.

I won't say what it's about. To anyone. Even the mistress.

I'll tell you this though. There is still a lot of work to be done. What's going to happen now is I'm going to spell check it, format it nice and double space it, print it out, put it in a binder, and put that binder on a shelf for another day.

After some time passes, I'll come back to it, read through it, and take lots of notes about things I like, things I hate, and things to change.

Then I'll prop that bidner up on my desk and I'll re-write the whole story.

Then I'll print that out, set it on a shelf. Sometime later, I'll re-read that version, make notes, then prop that binder up and make those changes.

Then, maybe, if I'm lucky and I work very hard, I'll have something worth showing someone.

Until then though, I'll just be proud of doing something that just a couple years ago I would have assumed I'd never do.

Oh, also, I might have forgot to mention:
I didn't get into any schools so the mistress and I quit our jobs and moved in with her dad out in the country where someday she might get some land that we hope to build a house on, deep in the woods, where we can keep bees and raise chickens and goats and garden and just kinda be ourselves but in the meantime we're both broke and working part-time jobs and generally questioning the wisdom of moving in with a man who eats one meal a day that consists of a can of ravioli and half a bag of croutons.

Countdown

No time for carnelian and white.

Cell Phone Camera, Vol. 1

When it came time to upgrade from my first cell phone I wanted to find a phone without a camera. It was 2006, and I had theretofore never felt my cell phone's lack of a camera was a hindrance in any way. At the time, you may have heard me say something like "pshaw! To shoehorn the functionality of a camera, great though it may be, into the convenient package of a cellular telephone would be to ensure that neither performs its best. Furthermore, I see as much in having a photographic device on my telephone as I would in having a phonograph on my toaster*."

Fast forward to present day where I have a phone upon which I can access my personal and work calendar, my personal and work email, run an ongoing chat session, play any number of games, read and compose documents, navigate via online map service using GPS, stream music, browse the internet, and yes, take pictures. Shit, I can point the camera at a bar-code and it will scan that bar-code, then tell me what I scanned, then tell me where I can get that thing and for what price. Damn.

It does so much, but it doesn't do that camera thing very well. The Droid's camera is only happy under ideal lighting conditions, and there are no user tools to help decide how to expose. In the dark, the camera's sensor goes crazy with noise and you end up with 5 mega-pixels worth of picture that looks like a capture off a turn of the century webcam.

Still, I use it, and the best thing about taking photos with a phone is that I always forget about the pictures I took. The means that I get to have moments like yesterday, when I realize my phone is filled with a lot of little gems. Though I'd venture to say only one or two of these is what I'd consider a "good photo", here are my favorites, touched up from "crappy" to "eh" as well as I could manage.






















































* I call trademark on Toasty Trax!

Countdown

You won't see me in maroon.

Countdown

I won't be wearing orange.

The Summer Pretzel

There was a time between my stint in college and my current full time employment where I found myself listless, uninspired, and depressed. That did not preclude me, however, from the ability to find kinship in the most unexpected of places, such as hot pretzel display at Taco Bell.

As the months lumbered by, my friend and I would get together with a couple of other friends who moved to a town off the beaten path, about 45 minutes away. The commute sucked, but one of the perks of their location was their proximity to a Taco Bell.

This wasn't the greatest of Taco Bells, mind you. They didn't have a fryer and that meant no Chalupa shells, among other minor inconveniences. Also, no free drink refills. Still, the closest alternative was a crappier Bell location thirty minutes away.

This Taco Bell happened to be part of a three store complex that featured an ice-cream counter and a pizza shop, neither of which were franchises. It had all the feel of a truck stop with none of the curious conveniences like post cards, third rate books and movies, mini televisions, cb radios, and of course multi-pound bags of beef jerky.

We never bought ice cream, we never ordered pizza. Taco Bell all the way. Minus the lack of refills and a fryer, it was fine faux mexi-merican fast food. There was an oddity, however: between the Bell counter and the Ice Cream stand was a hot pretzel display. In the hot pretzel display were, of course, pretzels - but not many. They looked rather pitiful, that handful of doughy knots in slow orbit under a 400 watt sun.

I can't say I took much notice of the pretzels beyond that, however, until the number in the display shrank to one. One solitary pretzel that remained, paraded slowly in front of all who passed. The first I saw it I thought "oh hey, I guess there was a run on pretzels. Didn't know people actually bought those." I then thought nothing of it until the following week where, again, there was only one pretzel. "How odd" I thought.

Two more weeks passed where only one pretzel circled and I began to wonder aloud about the possibility of it being the same pretzel every week. My friends had already presumed that was the case but I, ever over-estimating humanity, didn't want to think it so. It's not like the place didn't see a moderate amount of traffic, and I didn't want to believe that the staff was that lazy as to not throw away that one last pretzel.

So I went to the case and I studied it; looked for any distinguishing marks that would set it apart from any potential replacements. It didn't take long to find what I was looking for: a thumb print, pressed into the dough, breaking through the brown crust and leaving just a bit of the whiteness below to peek through. I had my clue. All I needed was time.

Time, of course, took care of itself and the next weekend saw me back at the case where I would see the same indentation on the same pretzel in the same spot on its sad and lonely rack. My friends were unimpressed. At first. But the weeks spun and so too did the pretzel, presumably dry as a stegosaurus turd, un-bought, uncared for, unloved. Was employment there so abysmal an existence that the simple restocking of pretzels presented a challenge that could only be tackled after years of counseling and pharmaceuticals? Or did this display inhabit a neutral zone, a No Man's Land under neither Taco Bell's or the ice cream shop's jurisdiction? Was it a buffer between warring nations, or was it simply the pretzel case that time forgot?

I didn't appreciate it at the time, but that pretzel was my mascot for the summer. My kindred spirit. Was it plucked from it's aluminum vine and given the final indignity of a curt disposal, or was it finally sold and consumed by some unknown rube to some other unknown rube who, I could only hope, had a taste for dusty pope-farts? With salt?

Regardless, the pretzel, my unemployment, that summer, all were destined to pass; and so it was.