"You Know What I Feel? Bored."

Maybe it was the lightning, but the Choir was on fire tonight, spontaneously combusting into two new verses of We Three Kings that had poor Santa possibly being violated in a jail cell. But it turned out to be the beginning of a new romance!

I shouldn't be having a smoke, the way my throat was catching tonight singing, but after the rum, it tastes so good. Which two facts bring us to...

Twimoms, a, um, phenomenon, that's been written about everywhere else, so it was time for the Post to give it a front, in the charmingly tentative way it treats all newfangled trends. Written by Monica Hesse, bless her heart. It's a manu-trend, older women who are obsessed with the Twilight books and movies. I haven't read or seen said books and movies, except for this Buffy mashup (linked for the Facebookers, embedded for the rest).



The Salon columnist steered it to my demographic's conflict with distant Daddies, and I'm really glad I didn't have to read Miss Hesse going there. (I remember interviewing Sherman Alexie in a former life, and there's this line he threw down that stuck with me, tho I couldn't use it in the article: "Brown dads leave, but white dads leave while they're still sitting in the chair. They're reading the newspaper, but they're gone.")

Reader, I'm sticking with Snape. I know, I'm behind the curve, but at least he's a grownup. Disillusioned, bitter, used by the powers that be, working for the Man and never getting the damn job you want and are fully qualified for--I can relate. That Twilight vampire just sounds like more abstinence and stalking--two things I've had way too much of in life and don't enjoy.

But as for the whole, um, phenomenon? It's those Brontes again! Look, working is boring, being a grownup is boring, marriage is boring, it's all a big slog from time to time. Our minds and bodies and emotions are constructed to crave a tough workout, and life gives the typical working woman none of it. A woman today's circumstances are as imprisoning as any corset; you need to watch every bit of what you might do lest you be labeled immature or unhealthy and drugged into dullness--for your own good. I don't blame them one bit for seeking an escape valve. If I didn't have openminded, supportive DH watching my back (as I watch his, believe it or not) and my pseudonyms and writing, I'd be clawing at the yellow wallpaper, too. I wonder what it would be like if all the Twimoms decided to become artists, though. I'd like to see what they'd do.

Now the lightning tonight? That was exciting.

Image: Kris Waldherr's Tarot of the Goddess. She's really beautiful.

Voices in the Mist

Night's work done, time to have a glass of sake and decompress. I hate looking at old work. In fact, I rarely revise anything. Once I write something, I'm kind of creeped out by it and bored by it, and it's all so disappointing--improve it? How? Not because it's perfect, but because it's hopeless. I also get this weird feeling of "who wrote that?" as if someone else had taken over my mind and voice. So to avoid that, I rarely look at it at all.

Which makes an evening like this, once DD is in bed, dull and taxing, and more of it to come. I'm turning a series of old poems into a play in the hope that they can be useful somehow. On top of that, with our computer limping into senility, I now have to go through some 70,000 old emails, with all the mixed feelings that entails. I want to save some things, like emails from friends, those to my daughter from my mother, for instance.

Plus decide which poems, stories, outlines, drafts I need to save and keep somehow. Plus I guess I'm supposed to gather up things and try to publish them, but it's a horrible exercise--for all the reasons given, and larded with futility; publication is unlikely, even if publications themselves weren't keeling over daily.

I guess I should be glad that actual revising, cutting, pasting, tossing, changing--none of that is difficult. I don't have any sentimental attachment to what I've written. Maybe because I never feel like it's mine, like I really wrote it, anyway? And some 25 years of newspapering gets you used to being chopped up. This makes me unpopular in writing workshops, for instance, where I say unintentionally mean things like "you could just kill that middle section." Another side effect--if it's not from the past week or so, it's like I haven't written anything. I always hated it if I went for a week without my name on something new. A lot of poems I've just written on this blog, cold, and never looked at again. I'll have to sort through those and gather them up sometime, too, I know, I know. I know if I'm going to be a grownup writer, I'll have to show more respect for The Work, but it's a drag. I have so little time left, but even less time to waste in making excuses this way.

So going through old poems goes against my nature, but I know, even if it's to no use, it's something I'll have to learn to do, as a karmic exercise. It's just like sifting compost. I hope it will build up some muscles, at least.

Speaking of something new, the Post redesign--fail. Appalling in its willingness to scoop up scraps from other dying newspaper carcasses and paste them onto its thinning skin--an NYT logo here, a WSJ engraving there. It's like someone costumed out of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. And everywhere, column after column of underpaid people telling me I have to go out and buy overpriced vodka at some damn club. Glad the City Paper called them on their shit, but it's not like that's a hotbed of ingenuity either. Sigh. Nobody has any new ideas.

The crap happening with the LA Sheriff and TMZ is proof that the "new models" are no solution--unless you have a strongman with lots of money and lawyers sworn to watch your back, you'll be at the mercy of anyone who wants to sue, take your notes, whatever. Journalists at "new model" media will have to not only buy their own health insurance, but buy something akin to malpractice insurance, not to mention save up bail money.

Better drink up and clean the kitchen. Tomorrow: Write something new, even if it's just a wheeze of exhaust.

John Deere vs. Courteney Cougar, Cage Match

So much cougar-hating coming across the doorstep, mostly engendered (get it) by the Courteney Cox TV premiere. Boffo.

Worst offender was the straining at a fun little piece in this morning's Post, in a voice that's this weird pastiche of blogger snarkery and Sex In the City-edited-for-Bravo-reruns voiceover. How'd that thing end up the display lede when they had good stuff like Hank Stuever, Lisa deMoraes, a new James Ellroy, Tom Shales, the new Taffety Punk show, MacArthur geniuses...oh well. I know the rules, no leading with reviews, but it's scary to think they probably didn't have the bandwidth to handle anything beyond an AP mashup on the MacArthurs. Just one more bad part about being old is you can remember a Style section that changed the industry instead of one that gave cute perky tips on lip plumpers, "dating dilemmas" and vegan dog food. (All respect to Robin Givahn on fashion, btw, who is a serious writer and reporter and knows her stuff. It's the Style Plus recycling that's so annoying.)

I watched a little Bored to Death last night too, not intentionally, and I was so afraid I'd pull a muscle from cringing from looking at this fucking hipster for 1/2 hour, but hey, not bad! Some decent writing! Ted Danson helped. I was getting a little nauseated from some of the twee needle-drop soundtrack, and then to top it off they played about .04 seconds of my favorite TV on the Radio song. Which will always be a great fucking song but was hip like two years ago or at least one year ago? Which is why I get so fed up with you youngsters. Your job is to show me something new, and you give me a one-hit in a pilfered Viagra bottle.

For someone who didn't watch TV for 20 years (I've still never seen that first show Ted Danson was on), I'm watching a lot of it. That's because the broadcast medias is so much better than the movies now, especially the writing. Exhibit A: You wake up and you're on top of the world, and then you get your foot run over by a lawnmower??!!??

I've decided I want my first ultra to be along the Delaware shore after running trails around Henlopen this weekend. They're flat. I found one nice piece that was about a mile and a half of everything ranging from gravel to soft sand. I know they say don't run on soft sand but up to a mile can't kill me. Maybe in Florida? Wild boar and alligators. That's another way to lose a foot. Or two. An ultra circling Okeechobee. Sign me up.

Photo: My blog won't let me push a little button and put up pirated photos anymore. Probably serves me right, bitch.