Wait For The Second Entrance.

Click here and see what showmanship is about.

The Mundane.

It's all over the internet today. A giant man killed his wife, his child, and then himself. In the family home. It's absolutely horrifying. And, I think, something that lives in the back of all of our minds. It's like the Shining, except that it happened. Was there a struggle? Or merely cowering in fear? Was the event that caused the chain of events something small or something big? A moment in line for coffee and wondering what it was all about anyway? The futility of the driveway crashed over his head like an asphalt wave?

There is a darkness in every home.

Cozy And Cold, Put The Horse Before The Cart.

Memory, at best, is a tricky thing.

I am dieting again. This is not anything newsworthy for the people who read this occasionally. I guess I should not call it a diet as much as it is "a change in lifestyle" etc. Gross. I had to eat another apple since I was getting hungry and did not want to dive headfirst into the bowls of candy that are strewn about here like so many gastronomical landmines. It's quarter to five and all I want to do is go home and sleep. I should get back to work on the book though. The reason why I think memory is a tricky thing is because whenever I eat an apple, it makes me feel slightly cleaner, which makes my body remember what it is like to be younger. And all the recollections that go along with that. Whether or not these recollections are to be trusted is another matter entirely.

Because I was reading a blog.

There is nothing to make fun of if someone lives their life with sincerity.

Time goes by. So slowly.

Kids:

We are a few days into our calorie counting. I am using fitday.com to track my eating. I tried the google calorie counter for two days but found it to be not so great. Not enough food items and I felt like I was clicking a lot for nothing. Fitday seems to be more comprehensive, and oddly entertaining. At least, I like the rush one gets when being controlling.

Meanwhile, I am adjusting to lower calorie intake, and am sleepy. Sleepiness might be a result of the immense amount of caffeine I am putting into myself.

Blech.

In order for me to hit my goal weight, and in order for me to ditch the pounds I have piled on for the last three years, I am going to have to count calories. I can't count to 10 let alone add numbers. Disgusting.

Habits Appear So Quickly.

It seems I turn to this before I start working on "The Weight of Rain." At least, that's its working title of the moment. When it was going to be a screenplay it was called "becoming." And the little "b" was used purposefully. I've just recieved a book written by Robert Harwell Fiske about overused words and turns of phrase. Flipping through, I can see that it's opinionated to the point of possible militancy, but having definitely feelings about something is definitely prefarable to wan, flaccid mealy-mouthing.

However, I wonder if I do read the whole thing, it will be another example of one angry white man telling the world what to do and think. It smacks a bit of that committee that meets in France to stabilize the French language, or at least attempt to. One of the joys of the English language as a work of interactive mental technology is its inherent ability to adapt and change. Quickly. Most certainly I am not proposing the inclusion of new words into the lexicon only on the basis of newness or faddishness - my previous rants here about businesspeak illustrate that - but our mother tongue's ability to consume and incorporate foreign terms and new ideas make it the Borg of languages. I like that.

Oh, For the Love of God...

Just go here:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=9oxTy7KIAaA

And then we're all going to run away and live in mad passion in Italy.

When You Were Mine.

It's a good song, no?

It's bopping about my head these days. Well, not really days as much as this morning. I'm sitting at my desk, and thinking about the now novel. We had a delightful time at Zuma this Saturday. We being Richard, Betty Ann and I. We made the delightful discovery that beach chairs do indeed provide a whole new level of enjoyment for the beach. Then there was the "Evan Almighty" premiere yesterday, which was fun and they had pigs-in-a-blanket at the party after so I was really happy with that.

There is a Light That Never Goes Out.

And that light is the hope of continued weight loss.

I am wearing pants I have not been able to shimmy into for a year. It's a nice feeling. I celebrated by binge eating chocolate covered pretzels.

I am thinking, quite seriously, not just of My Darling but also of doing Barry's Boot Camp in August. Such masochism is extreme even for me, but I feel like it would be the kick in the pants to really put me over the edge into fitness, to the extreme. Monster Truck, etc.

What Goes Around...

Very well.

So it seems I have discovered that my Southern-Gothic-but-in-New-England is transforming itself from a screenplay into a novel. As the story does not exist fully formed in either iteration is mostly irrelevant at this point; I feel the tightening grip of seriousness that I imagine swaddles a "novelist." It's like a very dramatic scarf - you love it, but there is no way you can avoid it being self-reflexively ostentatious at best, and merely showy at worst. I must confess that I do not find it disturbing as much as I find it familiar. Of course, I would like it to be a potboiler in a classic sense of the word - fun, entertaining, generating oodles of cash, etc. but I am concerned that because of the subject matter that people will make the mistake of calling it literary. If it must be categorized, let us put it into a new genre I propose here - the Homicidal Kitchen Sink Drama. I'm not quite sure of that category name yet, it's just not pithy enough to catch on as a cultural zeitgeist. I always have thought the key to establishing oneself as a dictator of The Zeitgeist is merely sitting back and uttering a zinger of a phrase, encompassing the work of others in a statement that only points to your own cleverness. Even disappeared from the quotation that becomes standard vocabulary, the inventiveness of the utterer is implicated. And in some unfortunate turns of phrase, the unseen utterer should be indicted. Recent examples would be words such as "steampunk" and "internet."

I suppose I should attend to my actual work, by which I mean what I am paid to do. But in all honesty, I feel like listless commentary really is my calling.

He said I just think you're depressed.

This just blows the doors off of everything out there right now.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=GgfrxZlrYR4

I actually think it's better than the album version. A little before the three minute mark she opens a hole in space and time with her voice and lets you glimpse Heaven for a glimmering, thrilling moment.