JPEG the Baconator

Jul 18, 2013 13:37

For future reference, Dear SFWA, Spooky and I are not offended at being called "ladies."

Just saying.

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Yesterday's quote, "Also, there's a bug on my nipple."

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The Providence City Council has voted, unanimously, to name an intersection at the corner of Angell and Prospect streets H.P. Lovecraft Square. It's about damned time HPL begins getting recognition in this city. Later this summer, a bronze bust will be unveiled in the Providence Athenaeum.

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Again, this ayem, no sleep until sometime after sunrise.

However, yesterday was better than the day before. I kicked back the depression and anger enough that I managed to read "Ballad of and Echo Whisperer" aloud to Kathryn. Well, what I've written on it so far. It isn't finished. But I did discover I don't hate it, that it's actually pretty good. And I answered email, and I loaded the text for The Ape's Wife and Other Stories onto the iPad, from whence I shall be editing it. I'd prefer to be making red marks on paper. Instead, I'm reading the galleys as pixels, and handwriting a list of errors/typos as I go, a list that will then be typed into an MS Word file so that I can cut and paste it into an email. I want to go back to the old way, please. Sure, I could make it easier by cutting out the handwritten/transcription portions of the process, but I refuse to render the process of editing entirely electronic. I want a lasting, real-world record of what changes were made, just in case someone gives a shit fifty of seventy-five years down the line.

Anyway, yeah, I did all that, which was hardly anything at all, but a vast improvement over what I managed to accomplish during the days preceding yesterday. My thanks to everyone whose had kind words of late; it helps, even if it only helps a tiny bit.

And then we left the sweltering house and headed back to Moonstone. There was a breeze, and it felt much cooler than it had on Tuesday. The blue, blue, blue sky was filled with cormorants, seagulls, and noisy flocks of Least Terns (Sternula antillarum, formerly Sterna antillarum). A sky above the ocean, filled with hungry, squabbling seagulls, somehow it ceases to be a wide carnivorous sky, through an alchemy I cannot fathom. Somehow, it seems it ought work the other way around. This time we swam. The water was warmer than usual, with icy currents braided throughout. I swam out maybe twenty yards or so, to where the deep water began. Eight feet below the waves, I watched startled crabs. I brought a polished lump of granite to the surface, then let it sink again. I floated and stared up into that sky to busy with other matters to bother devouring me. For a few seconds at a time, I could feel myself bleeding away, leaving only a fleeting, blissful silence behind. It was good. It gave me a modicum of the strength I'll need in the days to come.

We left Moonstone about 7:30 p.m. or so and drove to Narragansett, down towards Point Judith, and had dinner at Aunt Carrie's. We had a table by an open window and could watch night swallow a salt marsh and the bay beyond it. I had fried flounder (breaded with cornmeal) and chips, and then Spooky and I shared Indian pudding with vanilla ice cream. We made it home about 9:45 p.m.

The tenth episode of Season Three of Breaking Bad, "Fly," is one of the best we've seen so far. Wow.

I told him that I had a daughter, and he told me he had one, too. And he said, "Never give up on family." And I didn't. I took his advice. My God, the universe is random, it's not inevitable. It's simple chaos. It's subatomic particles in endless, aimless collision. That's what science teaches us, but what does this say? What is it telling us that the very night that this man's daughter dies, it's me who is having a drink with him? I mean, how could that be random? ~ Heisenberg

The heat here today is brutal. We have a heat index, currently, of 104˚F. But we are promised evening thunderstorms.

I have some photos from yesterday, behind the cut (Does the lady in these photos look 49?):





Surfacing ~20 yards offshore.







Also, we found the Baconator in Wakefield Mall. Complete with misspelling.

All Photographs Copyright © 2013 by Kathryn A. Pollnac

Next Step,
Aunt Beast

sexism, providence, swimming, moonstone beach, heat, insomnia, "ballad of an echo whisperer", coincidence, birds, the wide carnivorous sky, the sea, depression, science, much ado about nothing, lovecraft, breaking bad

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