The Beard of the Season for Laughing

I went to Wikimedia Commons looking for the pic of the day, just to have a picture. Thinking it would have nothing to do with anything here. This is what I got. The post explains why I think that’s . . . remarkable, at the very least.

So, palsomine, it has been awhile.  Things have been afoot.  Well, actually, no.  I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop.  And sweeping the Ladybeard off her feet.  And toeing the line, and . . .

Ahem.

First things first: I finally finished the “The Novel I’ve All Been Waiting For” revamp that I laid out for myself in the spring and promptly forgot about.  Not much going on with trying to sell that book.  The gatekeepers are otherwise occupied.  That’s not strictly true–I’ve gotten some interest but have been remiss in keeping the queries going out while I tried to figure out if I was about to go completely broke and have to consider moving out of NYC again.  Anyway, it’s done, it’s over to the right side, and that makes it remarkable that the picture here to the left is what Wikimedia Commons showed me.  That’s Lumpini Park, in the middle of Bangkok; this is part of a wide panorama shot taken from atop the Banyan Tree Hotel, which does show up in my book, and it doesn’t help the hankering I’ve had of late to go back to Thailand.  I left behind some friends there, and I like to see my friends.  Incidentally, I lived about 1.5 miles to the right; this picture makes everything look lovely.  Walk just out of frame and just behind the office buildings, in the daylight, and you’re in the shit.  I miss my old neighborhood sometimes.  I miss some parts of my old life, too.  Just not the lie that, as it turns out, it was founded on.

Shit gets complicated, brah.

So what have I been doing?

I had me some posts ready to go.  Man, I got on a tear.  I was gonna talk about Obama on The Daily Show and why I consider Stewart/Colbert basically Fox News with a better sense of humor (man, and I’d thought the indifference I expressed when the new Daily Show book was mentioned to me–incorrectly taken as anger or annoyance–brought on an awkward silence.  Dropping that comment at a dinner table in midtown . . . whoo, boy.).  I was gonna point out that Stewart actually had done a pretty goddamned good bit a few months back about how Obama’s basically continued all of Dubya’s policies (even though he spoiled it a bit at the end by somehow blaming Palin for all of it) and how I was gonna watch the interview with some interest.  I was gonna talk about the interview, about how Stewart mostly soft-pedalled it, letting Obama give all sorts of different spins to the question–which isn’t the right question, by the way–of “why isn’t everything all better now?”  I read a quote on a friends Twitterfeed the day after saying “I said change you could believe in.  Not change in 18 months,” which is funny and does a breathtakingly good job of changing the subject and avoiding the question.

I was gonna give Greg Easterbrook (my favorite NFL columnist; he’s actually known for writing center-left political commentary, especially about the environment, but I know him as an NFL columnist, which tells you how good I am at being right) an earful for calling on Congress to regulate the NFL because sometimes people get hurt there (then being dishonest about how he’d been using that cudgel) and for his seeming belief that regulation is magic.

I was gonna talk about David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I still might (you should read it.  I think he comes closer to having actual substance in that book than any he’s done before, which are all mostly so breathtakingly well-styled that I honestly don’t know if it matters that he doesn’t seem to have anything all that interesting or enlightening to say about the world and our endlessly entertaining passage through it).

But . . . nah.

What I’ve done is gain about 75 lbs (though most of that is beardweight, which resides in another dimension), move into and out of Westchester County, join Costco and make numerous false starts on continuing with the book I’m working on right now, called The Meat Tree and the Beach.  I was making headway there, but some life-related nuttiness got in the way.  Which was nice, because I was having trouble drawing out the parts of the book that come before the parts that are going to be hard to write, which I’ve been whining about a lot.  They were blog posts written with the expectation that they’d be edited mulitple times later–which is to say, they were even messier than this right here usually is.  If you can believe that.

Anyway, that’s all–just wanted to stop in and say hello.  Fiction Friday didn’t really pan out.  There are a couple stories I’ve been holding back for no good reason, so I believe I will begin posting those soon.  But I’ve got me some productive momentum (promentum, if you will, and you shouldn’t) going, a lot of work reading to get done and some me writing that it’s about damn time I stopped talking about and just did, already.

So . . . hello, there.  Hope all’s been going well for you.  Let’s keep in touch.  That is to say, touch me.