Thunderstruck

It was literally thundering outside today when I had my first bolt out of the blue courtesy of my muse Nat'ly.

I had already cranked out about 1,500 words of uninspired prose, trying to give enough information about the rituals and ceremonies of Mardi Gras so the reader could understand what was going on without being bored or turning the tale into a travelogue. Simultaneously I was struggling desperately not to stall the story. And I was failing pretty miserably on all counts.

So, there I was, staring at my screen and wondering how to clean up the mess I had just made, when it happened. Project Y is only 113 pages long thus far, but it's already building to a climactic scene I'm calling "The Battle of New Orleans" in my notes. This big scene is a long, long way off, and until now I really only had the vaguest idea of what it would entail, but Nat'ly came out of nowhere, slammed me upside the head and said "here you go."

Nat'ly's gift, her clear vision for "The Battle of New Orleans" is really, really funny, fits the plot perfectly and is just generally kind of ingenious. I've never read any work of fiction that has anything quite like what she showed me. I literally started jumping around in my office, delighted at my good fortune and started writing on my notepad like the idea might get away (not a chance!).

After that, I sat back down and the story started to move again. Thank you sweet fair Nat'ly!

I had a lot to share with you today involving figs, swine flue and other cool stuff, but it can all wait. Instead, I'll give you the longest sample yet of Project Y, since several of you have said that you enjoy these. This bit, written today, is a little over 800 words.

Let me set it up for you. Allen Kunkleman, Klunk as he's known, is a low level member of the imaginary Mid-City Desperados motorcycle gang. He finds a gold cup he thinks belongs to the Krewe of Rex, which is a very real and old-line Mardi Gras organization, and he wants to ransom it.

Since Klunk is a bad guy, it's not surprising that his choice of words is unsuitable for an all-ages format, so I've changed any words that might offend tender sensibilities to "snick" for the purposes of this blog.

Enjoy:

Of course there wouldn’t be a listed phone number for Rex, they were too full of themselves for that, but Klunk remembered one of Rex’s little subterfuges was to call itself the School of Design. This was common knowledge. New Orleans is a city filled with secrets and mysteries, but everybody already knows them. A quick call to directory assistance gave him the number for a School of Design on Claiborne Avenue, which everyone in town knew was the “secret” location of the Rex Den. He was in business.

After two rings Klunk heard “School of Design,” on the other end of his phone. The sprightly male voice on the other end had an educated Uptown New Orleans accent with a bit of a lilt to it, his voice rising on the word “design”. In the background he could hear the sound of power tools as workers put the final touches of the floats being readied for Mardi Gras morning, just two days away. Oh yeah, he’d found the right number, all right

“This Rex?”

“I beg your pardon?”

"Is this Rex?” Klunk repeated, a little more forcefully.

“Sir, this is the School of Design,” said the voice on the other end.

“Whatever. I’ve got your snicking cup you snick.”

“Wow, you certainly have a potty mouth sir, and I have no idea what you’re talking about. The next thing you’re going to hear is a dial tone.”

“Snick!” Klunk thundered as the connection broke. He redialed.

“School of Design.”

“Listen, sni-, listen mister—I have your snick Rex cup.”

"You again? Look, my slow friend, this is the School of Design, and I don’t have a clue what you’re babbling about,” said the voice.

“The cup. The cup. You know, the gold cup you guys use for the Meeting of the Courts. I’ve got it and you’re going to have to buy it back from me.”

“Oh my Gawd! Holy snick!” There was a brief commotion on the other end of the line and Klunk could hear the voice shout “Hey Chip, go into the safe and tell me if the chalice is in there.”

“Listen pal, if you do have our chalice, you need to return it right this minute or there will be big trouble for you. I’ve got your number on my caller ID, so we know who you are.”

“Doesn’t matter. Cell phone’s stolen anyway,” Klunk replied mildly.

“Of course it is,” said the voice in a slightly more resigned tone of voice. Being a New Orleanian, the man on the other end was not entirely unfamiliar with the ways of the hoodlums who resided in his city. “So, what kind of, um, reward are you looking for?”

Klunk had once been told by a used car guy he met in court-ordered rehab that you should always start high when working a deal. “I’d say ten grand ought to be fair.”

“Are you insane? We can have a new one made for a fraction of that.”

Snick that used car junkie, thought Klunk as he realized he had put himself at a disadvantage by aiming too high at the start. He immediately dropped to his original asking price. “But I bet you can’t get a new one made before Tuesday. Tell you what, I’m a Rex fan and I don’t want to ruin your little ceremony. How about you give me two grand and we’re square?”

“Well that’s a little more reasonable,” said the voice, “but I think two hundred dollars might be a fairer repayment for your troubles.”

Klunk knew he was outgunned. He had entered into a negotiation with a member of Rex, which meant the voice on the other end belonged to one of the top lawyers, businessmen or politicians in the city. These guys are the best of the best when it comes to driving a hard bargain—wheeling and dealing is what they live for. Besides, he’d been hitting the Ancient Age from that cup pretty hard all morning, so he knew this wasn't a fair fight. He was about to drop his asking price to two fifty to save face and get it over with when he heard muffled voices on the other end. Evidently Chip had returned.

The guy on the other end sounded confident after his brief sidebar with Chip—it was the voice of a man back in his rightful place as a master of his universe.

“Look, my moronic friend, I don’t know what you have, but it’s not what you think it is. I’m holding our chalice right now and it’s perfectly fine. You’ve probably mistaken a plastic go cup or a hurricane glass for our chalice in that drug addled haze you are no doubt in right now. Now go back to your toothless mama’s trailer or whatever filthy little lair you inhabit and try sleeping it off, why don’t you? And don’t ever call this number again. Trust me, if you continue to annoy us, we can find you and make your life more of a living hell than it already is. Thank you for calling the School of Design.”

Once again, the phone went dead. That didn’t go so well, thought Klunk, who was no stranger to disappointment.

Ovaltine?!

A couple of days ago I wrote about interconnectedness and the worlds we live in.

Today's mail brought me further proof, or so I thought.

Among the bills was a letter addressed to me with a very simple return address.

JOHN GRISHAM
AUTHOR

That was it--the entire return address.

I had no idea how the very famous author of The Firm and other bestsellers had learned of my recent career change. I wondered if he was writing to congratulate me and welcome me to the club. Perhaps he was taking time out of his busy day to acknowledge my tiny freehold on the furthest edge of the literary world.

Nah. Not likely. Still, I was intrigued as I opened the envelope and pulled out the cream colored sheet of paper inside. Atop the letter in bold type it read:

JOHN GRISHAM
OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI

I guess when you become as famous as John Grisham, a letter addressed to John Grisham, Author or John Grisham, Oxford, MS will reach you, so extraneous information like street names or zip codes are no longer required. Clearly I've got a long way to go in my climb to the top of the literary pantheon.

"Dear Friend," read the salutation. It wasn't as personal as Dear Hank, but I thought it was a bit forward given that we haven't yet met in person.

"I'm writing to you about Morris Dees, an Alabama lawyer and a friend, who needs your help in his fight to put dangerous hate groups out of business."

We have so much in common, and all John Grisham could think of to tell me in his very first letter to me was how much he thinks I should support his favorite liberal not-for-profit organization.

I felt every bit as deflated as Ralphie in A Christmas Story when he finally got to decode his first secret message from Little Orphan Annie and learns that it's nothing but an Ovaltine ad.

I knocked out another couple of thousand words on Project Y today before running out of gas. It's coming easier, and getting better as I go--at least I think it is. I don't know if I was as funny as I wanted to be today, but I amused myself a couple of times.

I finished Chapter 10 today, but before I locked up the dream factory for the night, I went searching for the right quote to open Chapter 11. I start each chapter with a very brief quote that somehow relates to the chapter. Homer, Plato, Cicero, Byron, Randy Newman, you know, guys like that. Well I stumbled onto the perfect quote to open Chapter 11 and it's from none other than Angelina Jolie. I'll change one word of it here in the interests of running an all-ages blog, but I'm sure you can Google the quote or just figure out the word I changed:

You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; stuff happens...

Isn't that great? I'm not sure her quote really fits the chapter, but I'm keeping it in anyway.

I know I'm starting to hit my groove since I'm now finding myself going into my writing trance and realizing six hours later that I missed lunch and didn't even notice that I was now really hungry. That's good for the diet--eight down, fifty-two to go.

I don't know what writers did before Wikipedia existed. I find myself fact checking on that site at least a dozen times a day. I know that Wikipedia is by no means authoritative and that literally anyone can contribute to it, but, hey, it's close enough to truth for my purposes. Today I used it to look up Louis Armstrong, Adolph Hitler, The Beatles, Pablo Escobar, Dionysus, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Michelangelo and that was just for a tiny section covering no more than a couple of pages. I'll send $10 to the first person who can guess the common thread between all those guys.

Hmmm, it just occurred to me that they are all guys. I may have to go back and add a woman to the mix to seem a bit less than the sexist pig I am. Maybe Joan of Arc.

I haven't left the house in a couple of days, and my hair is starting to get really shaggy. Should I be worried?

I need your advice

The map you're looking at shows me where you are, even if I don't know who some of you are. I like to think of you when I'm writing, whether it's on the blog or Project X or Project Y. It comforts me knowing you're out there. You are an integral part of this process, and today I hope to take your participation to the next level.

I got a lot done with Project Y yesterday. The words flowed and it all felt right. I'm bothered by all the fixing I'll need to do with the plot and especially the pacing after I get the first draft laid down. The big problem I have right now is that I want to move the story forward, but I keep having ideas that take me back where I've already been.

For instance, the structure of Project Y is a little like Dickens' A Christmas Carol in that the protagonist spends most of his time individually with as many as six or seven (I haven't decided quite yet) other major characters.

So far, so good. The problem is that Tony is already spending his time with his third character and I just came up with a "brilliant" and very inconvenient idea for something I'd like to do with them. And that idea just won't leave me alone.

You see the characters Tony is spending time with are all very much "characters" who have stories of their own to tell. My latest idea is for each of them to take some time to tell a story within the larger story, kind of like Chaucer's pilgrims did as they made their way to Canterbury Cathedaral.

As always, I feel obliged to point out that I'm not comparing myself to great writers like Dickens or Chaucer, merely stealing from them.

So what do you think--should I go back and insert a series of stories within the story or do I abandon that thought and get on with it? I'm torn. Tony has a date coming with an outlaw motorcycle gang, and I'm anxious for him to get there, but these other major characters are very, very interesting. I'd like someone else to drive the narrative periodically if only to give the reader a break from the first person point of view I decided to go with at the start.

Post a comment here or pop me an e-mail at hank@hankhenley.com if you're too shy to weigh in on this forum. I promise I'll listen.

It's been a while,how about a little sample fresh off the keyboard? I've changed what you're about to read just a tiny bit from what's in the manuscript to keep this forum safe for nephews, neices and other kids who might stumble in out of boredom or by accident. Also I don't want to give away a few surprises just yet:

“So what about my future? What do you see in my past and in my now that tells you what lies ahead for me?”

“Do you really want to know Tony? Knowing your fate is a huge responsibility. I like you, and if you think you’re brave enough, I’ll tell you. I don’t do this very often, and it sometimes goes pretty badly. You might not like some of what I see, so think carefully before you answer.”

“I think I want to know, but before you tell me, is there anything I can do to change any parts I don’t like, or is what you tell me sealed in stone?”

“It’s not exactly sealed in stone. For example, you might get hit by a bus walking out of here. There will always be some randomness to your now and you’ll always have some degree of managerial oversight in your own life. But knowing what I could tell you would make it much more difficult for you to exercise any control over how you live from moment to moment and therefore your destiny. So would you like me to use my tarot cards or my gazing ball? I think I’ve got a Magic Eight Ball stashed in one of these drawers. That would work too.”

“Which is best?” I asked.

“I’m just messing with you Tony. I don’t use any of that crap and I don’t disguise your fate using vague mumbo jumbo that could be interpreted in a bunch of different ways. I’m no gypsy fortuneteller and I won't give you a horoscope that could fit any situation—I’m much more direct than that. I just tell you what will happen to you and then you know. Now do you want to know or not?

"Tell you what, on second thought, let me pass on my future for now. I’m really curious and I recognize the generosity of your offer, but I don’t want to give up the illusion of control over my life just yet.”

“You’re very wise Tony,” said Jan, whose look of disappointment belied his words. “I’ll let you find your own future, but I think you need to hear this much . . .”

Other worlds

You see, I don't feel human in the morning until I've got at least a couple of cups of coffee flowing through my system.

For most of the year I drink the coffee we think of as "regular" and in other parts of the world is referred to as "American coffee." My preference is Community Coffee between roast, but I'll buy and brew whatever's on sale if I'm pinching pennies like we are now.

On winter mornings especially, I love to linger over hot cups of coffee. I take comfort from both the literal warmth of the mug and the liquid in it and also the pleasant jolt to my neurons as I transition from sleep to alertness.

But in the summer, this summer especially for some reason, I've abandoned my American coffee in favor of Cuban coffee--essentially a very sweet espresso. I first got hooked on Cuban coffee when I lived in Miami and where you could buy this stout brew served in plastic thimbles on any street. Virtually every block in Little Havana, and just about anywhere else in Dade County, had at least one walk up window where you could plunk down a quarter, get a dose along with a paper cone of water and be on your way within a minute.

To me, in hot weather those tiny cups of Cuban coffee seem like the way to go. They get the job done without further warming you up on an already steamy day.

I have a cheap stovetop espresso maker that I've used off and on for many years to make my own version of Cuban coffee. These devices rely on rubberized gaskets to keep them properly pressurized, and with age and repeated use, those gaskets eventually wear out and need to be replaced.

My old espresso maker is officially ready for a new gasket as it's started that telltale steaming and drooling from the sides no matter how tightly I try to screw the top to the base. But finding a gasket in Suburbingham has turned out to be more of a challenge than I expected.

In Miami, where almost everyone had an espresso maker or two at home, replacement gaskets were readily available. In New Orleans, I could buy gaskets at Harry's Ace, a cluttered and amazing place that always felt to me that it was half hardware store, half junkyard and totally magical. In pre-Wal-Mart New Orleans, this unimposing building on Magazine Street was jammed floor to ceiling with a cluttered and claustrophobia-inducing hodgepodge of goods of every description. If you lived Uptown, Harry's always had what you needed, even if it wasn't always exactly what you were looking for.

One of the many stops on my failed gasket hunt was a large Mexican supermarket on Highway 31, not too far away from my house. My gringo mind reasoned that Cubans and Mexicans are both Hispanic, and since any Cuban grocery would carry a full line of cheap espresso makers and replacement parts, a Mexican grocery store would be likely to as well. It turns out this isn't the case at all--the market had no espresso makers and certainly no gaskets and only a couple of dusty cans of Cafe Bustelo on the shelf.

I've shopped at this market several times recently and it's an interesting place to visit. To its customers this is both a supermarket and a cultural touchstone, and it seems like everyone here knows everyone else.

I usually see people carefully studying the photocopied notices taped to the store windows. Boisterously loud music from a Spanish radio station blares over the store intercom interrupted periodically by an even more enthusiatic announcer. I didn't know there was a Spanish radio station here--maybe it's coming via satellite.

It's a big enough place, a bit smaller than today's average chain grocery store, but not by much, and it's way bigger than a lot of grocery stores in New Orleans.

In all my visits to this store, I've never seen another Anglo customer. Usually the cashier conducts the entire transaction in Spanish, even with me.

I'm always surprised at how many of the items on the shelves, especially the sweets, are unfamiliar to me, even though I've been to Mexico any number of times and think of myself as someone who has "been around". I'm also surprised the Mexican-American population in Birmingham is large enough to support a place like this. Our Hispanic population is quite small compared to cities in Texas or California or many other places in the Deep South.

The meat counter there is a wonder and there is bin after bin of fresh and dried peppers, many with names I've not heard of.

Their breads and pastries are made on site and their little loaves of bread, bolillo, I think they're called, are only 75 cents and completely delicious. They dump the loaves in a big bin at the front of the store when they come out of the oven and you can sometimes smell the bread baking from the parking lot outside.

I go there when I need to get a fix of Teri's delicious stuffed poblanos. This place has the best and cheapest poblano peppers in town, but only if you get there on the right day. Some days their poblano peppers are big, beautiful, waxy and shining a deep emerald green. They look, feel and smell as if they had come out of the field only moments ago. On other days they look tired and dessicated, with their rumpled green skins turning to black.

I was last there on a "tired poblano" day and I approached the young man working the produce section. "Poblanos fresh?" I asked him.

"Moro," he answered.

Thinking he didn't understand me, I tried adding a word from my very limited vocabulary of pigeon Spanish.

"Poblanos fresco?"

"Moro," he repeated.

I was stumped. I was pretty sure that moro didn't mean "I'll run to the back and get you some," since the stock clerk made no move in that direction. Likewise, I didn't think he was saying "leave me alone, you moron and come back when you can speak the language here," since he seemed polite and not irritated by the obviously dull witted person confronting him.

Gradually it dawned on me that he was saying "tomorrow--come back tomorrow and we'll have fresh poblanos in stock."

"Ah, manana," I said and we both smiled a little sheepishly as the circuit of communication was completed.

Another of my visits on a Friday afternoon was a revelation. The parking lot was packed and there was a long line of men at the cashier's window at the front of the store. I realized that for most of these people, Friday meant payday, and that cashier's window was the closest thing they had to a bank. They needed to cash their checks and to send money back home, and I guess this is how it is done. How different from the way I conduct my business.

This market isn't far from my house and it is on one of the main commercial drags in Suburbingham, but its customers live in a world apart from Auburn/Alabama football and the other abiding concerns of the bulk of the population.

In New Orleans, Teri and I would often cross the Mississippi River to the West Bank where a large Vietnamese population resides. We'd eat at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant and marvel at the oddities in the Vietnamese grocery stores and other shops at the all-Vietnamese strip mall. Just like the Mexican grocery here, we were usually the only non-hyphenated Americans around and the only ones speaking English. Even though we were only minutes from home, we felt like tourists in a new country.

Today we all seem so interconnected and nothing seems foreign or distant. Today I sent some pictures to my new friend Armelle in Paris, and I was "friended" on Facebook by my buddy Tuan in Hanoi. You're connected to me right now through this site even, though you could literally be almost anywhere on the planet.

Yet as connected as we are to one another, we simultaneously live in our own worlds, and physical proximity is often not the point of demarkation. We may be bonded by any number of factors including location, nationality, culture, relative wealth, education, profession, faith or family ties, but I'm abolutely convinced each of us creates and lives within the bounds of our very own unique mental cosmos. We're all connected, but we're all the sole residents of our own planets.

And some of the worlds we inhabit can appear very strange to a foreigner just passing through.

Oh, I eventually found my gasket. On-line.

From Where You Dream

I stayed up late last night reading a couple of books on the subject of writing. Both books were written by men who are extremely successful authors, but their success as writers is measured in very different ways.

I found From Where You Dream, The Process of Writing Fiction, by Robert Olen Butler to be close to useless. Comical, almost. Butler won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, so he knows how to write. His ability to communicate the process leaves something to be desired, however. Based on lectures he gave at FSU, the book quickly devolved into a series of exercises that bear a strong resemblence to what I imagine acting classes might be like.

He keeps saying things like "Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white-hot center of you." Well, that's great Robert--what do I do with that news? I haven't had a white-hot center in quite some time. What's going to come out of the lukewarm center of me?

The best part of the whole book was the quote from Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa that opened Chapter One. "To be an artist means never to avert your eyes," Kurosawa said.

I instinctively know what Kurosawa means and I know to the core of my being that he's right, but I'm discovering it is very difficult to practice complete and unblinking honesty in my writing. If I ever get published, and that is my goal after all, people I know are likely to read what I write, and I've found myself holding back at times--averting my eyes when the story wants me to push on just a bit further. Why? For the sake of modesty? So people won't think that I'm strange? So people won't confuse me with my characters? I'm not sure.

So, how honest and unblinking can I be? If I'm lucky and good, my wife, my mother and my pastor may all eventually read what I write. Do I hold back to keep them comfortable?

Stephen King answered my question in his much more useful book On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft. He casts his lot with Kurosawa's mandate. "If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway," King says.

I can live with that. I guess.

King's books are routinely dismissed by the literati and he will never win the Pulitzer, but he has sold something like 350 million books, which says something about his ability to connect with readers. He spends most of the first 130 pages of his writing book on autobiographical material. Interesting, but not terribly instructive. But once he gets rolling, his advice on the art and craft of writing is both insightful and practical.

A former high school English teacher, he can't resist turning into a school marm at times--frequently evoking the ghosts of Strunk and White and even devoting an entire section to the parts of speech. But even when he's teaching basic grammar, his lecture is interspersed with gems like a priceless sidetrack he takes on the subject of speech attribution.

King and Butler's best advice may be the most basic, and they both make the same point, if in very different ways. If you want to become a writer, you must write habitually. King speaks of the metaphorical basement where he goes to connect with his subconscious and his winged cigar smoking muse. Butler is even more mystical in his approach to the same subject. But their advice is identical to that of the Nike copywriter--"just do it."

On second thought, I suppose "Art comes from the place where you dream," is a fair statement after all.

Cyberland

If you tried to sign in just now using the old web address, you may have noticed that you were redirected to www.hankhenley.com, our new freehold here in Cyberland.

Sorry about any confusion that may have caused, but you've landed safely here now. Thanks for stopping by.

I learned a lot about the web yesterday and nothing about anything else, so be forewarned that this isn't going to be my finest hour as a blog author. If you're new to this forum, it won't be typical of the other stuff you'll find here.

For instance yesterday I learned it is incredibly cheap and easy to buy your name as a web address. Anyone with 15 minutes and 20 dollars can rent any available URL for two years. Since I had the requisite time and money and www.hankhenley.com was available, I bought myself yesterday. How cool is that? I love technology!

Then I learned that it is incredibly difficult to set things up so that your blog directs would-be readers to your new address. It can be done and the proof is that you're here now, but it's not possible without reading a bunch of articles, making a bunch of false starts and engaging in some low level computer programming that eats up hours of your somewhat valuable time. I hate technology!

I also tweaked the blog a bit, and in the process screwed up and eliminated the "followers" list. I feel terrible about that guys--it made me feel good knowing all eight of you were out there supporting me. I'll put the followers gadget back up, but I'm sure you'll have to sign up again. Please do. I love seeing all your faces smiling back at me.

Among the other goodies I added yesterday is a subscription feature that allows you access to new posts or comments without going to the blog itself. A couple of you have requested this. You can do this now if you have a Google or Yahoo home page or use Google Reader or any number of other technologies I don't understand. It takes a little ego on my part to do add this feature since I don't currently subscribe to any blogs this way and I'm not sure why anyone would want to do this with mine. I did use this new feature to add your comments to my own Google home page so that I'll know right away when you're speaking back to me.

I'm starting a list of carefully selected links. The first one is to my sister Carol's blog. Carol and her husband Lee are family farmers in Wisconsin. Given that there aren't that many of their kind left, her window into their daily lives is really interesting. Carol is also a talented writer and one insightful lady. If you know of a very cool and/or interesting website you think I might like to add, let me know.

Check out the fish gadget, which I'll keep up for a little while. Move your pointer around their aquarium and watch the fish follow it. Click around inside the aquarium and see what happens. That should keep you entertained for, oh, 20 seconds or so. Isn't the internet a treasure trove of mindless, time killing fun?

But the grooviest feature I added yesterday is one you guys don't get to see. I added a bit of code to the blog that allows me to track the interaction on it. It's free for the basic setup and the level of detail provided is pretty amazing. For instance, I see how many of you are out there, where you come from (shout out to Orlando, whoever you are), what time you click in, how many pages you look at, how long you stay and all kinds of other cool stuff like that.

Here's what I learned about this blog's readers based on my first day of data:

1. My biggest fan is--well--me. I represented more than half of the visits to the site yesterday, mostly because I kept going to the site as I tried to get the new address to work properly.

2. My second biggest fan base is at the University of Alabama. Thanks to all three of you and Roll Tide! Now get back to work and go back to your studies.

It will be interesting watching the traffic patterns on this blog over the next year. It could be gratifying or depressing, so tell your friends and neighbors I'm out here and longing for their attention. But, either way, I'll keep doing this.

And I'll be looking for you.

'I write'

Who doesn't love a bargain?

Several of the advertising inserts in last Sunday's paper touted the first of the back-to-school specials. Among the treasures on offer, Walgreens advertised five packs of mechanical pencils for 19 cents a pack (limit six), and Office Max was selling those black and white marbled composition books I so dearly love for 50 cents each (again limit six, so I guess that's the magic number).

I needed both for my work and the prices were too good to pass up. I do my writing on the computer, but mechanical pencils and those composition books are tools I use to capture ideas before they drift off like a careless child's birthday balloon on a breezy day.

I had errands to run yesterday that took me past both a Walgreens and an Office Max, so I was in business.

At the Walgreens, I faced a wall of school supplies and in this forest I couldn't find the particular tree I was looking for.

A woman with her Walgreens smock and stocking cart passed by, and I asked her help in finding the mechanical pencils on sale. Of course they were right in front of me all along. "That's a lot of pencils," she pointed out as I bagged my limit. "Are you a teacher?"

It was a logical question to ask a middle aged man in shorts, sandals and a t-shirt shopping at Walgreens in the middle of a summer day.

"No," I replied, taking the briefest breath before continuing. "I write."

This was the first time I had ever said these words to a stranger inquiring about my profession. It felt a little strange to say the words out loud, almost like a lie, but simultaneously empowering. Notice I didn't say "I'm a writer." I couldn't go that far--that would have been too much. No, for now "I write" is sufficient.

To my great relief, she didn't ask if I had written anything she had ever read. I think my last published work was a letter to the editor in the New Orleans Times-Picayune back in 2004. I sent the same newspaper another letter a couple of years later, but that one was rejected.

Wait--there was also my series of articles about global sales meetings regularly appearing in Wiley World, our corporate magazine. Since I saved the company the cost of sending a PR type to our meeting to document it, my journalistic bent was much appreciated. That series came to a crashing halt when I got bored writing the exact same story for the umpteenth time, and, convinced that the readers of Wiley World must be just as bored, took a slightly more innovative approach. Turns out boring is exactly what was desired, and that article was completely rewritten by one of the corporate communications people (who wasn't there), and I wasn't asked to contribute again.

But, back to Walgreens: instead of asking about the nature of my writing, the conversation took an odder twist.

"I used to write too," the stock clerk said. "Short stories and poems. But my ex burned them all when he was drunk after we had a fight. He was an addict and an alcoholic and mean," she added, perhaps unnecessarily.

From there the conversation became even less predictable, but also less interesting, so we'll leave it there.

Had dinner with Kevin last night. Kevin was my last manager at Big Publishing, Inc., and he was in town training my replacement. We settled on dinner at Lovoy's, one of those 50 year old time capsules of a restaurant, my favorite kind. Lovoy's is an Italian joint, so we tucked into our dinners of veal Parmesan and chicken cacciatore and shared some good conversation.

We talked a little about business and a little about family, but a lot about travel, mostly my recent adventures in France and his trip to Brazil. Kevin seemed genuinely interested, so I did most of the talking. The evening passed pleasantly and too quickly before I returned him to his hotel and his life, which, until very recently, was my life too.

Packing heat

Got nothing accomplished at work yesterday. It's funny how small chores expand to fill the time available. Yesterday taking the dog to the vet, piddling with e-mail and washing and waxing Teri's car seemed to take up the whole day. How could that possibly be?

I finished Merle's Door last night while Teri slept. That's a good thing since I'm not generally a weepy guy. The end of the book got to me, and I don't like to see anyone see me cry. Funny, I don't mind writing about it, I just don't want anyone to witness the act. I'm not much of a crybaby, but finishing a book about a great dog that ultimately dies of cancer at age 14 on the day you learn that your great 13 year old dog's tumor was malignant and is likely to come back hit just a little too close to home for me to entirely control my emotions.

I loved the book, by the way. Thanks for recommending it Kathy.

Next up on my reading list: The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Just before 11 p.m. as I was in bed finishing the book, the doorbell rang. When your doorbell rings in the middle of the night, that can never be a good thing. Our doorbell is quite loud, but Teri remained fast asleep with Scram curled up beside her as Callie slept soundly at her summer post on the cool hardwood floor just outside our bedroom (and just underneath the doorbell ringer!).

Nobody stirred--not my wife, not the cat and not my watchdog; so I was on my own to face the unknown.

I jumped out of bed, hit the floodlights and saw that it was one of my neighbors from the next street, flashlight in hand. His dog had gone missing, he explained, and he wanted me to know that he was about to go into my back yard as he expanded his search.

In semi-rural Alabama, where "he needed killing" is an acceptable defense, it's not a bad idea to alert your neighbors if you're planning to roam on their property late at night. Around here, people could get shot for that if they're not careful. Like any red-blooded Alabamian, I do own a gun--a used .357 revolver just like the one in the picture above that I bought many, many years ago at the Chalmette Jewely and Gun Shop just outside of New Orleans. I got a good deal on it because it was a "retired" police weapon (stamped BPD). It was and is in great condition. At the time I bought it, police departments were transitioning from revolvers to the now ubiquitous automatic handguns all cops carry these days in an effort to keep up in firepower with the criminals they face.

But the truth is, my neighbor was in no danger at all last night. I'm not exactly sure where the gun is or where the bullets for it might be. I have no idea if those bullets, which are nearly 20 years old, are still "good" since they're the ones the gun dealer threw in when I originally bought the thing. I keep the gun unloaded and stashed away and the bullets hidden in the other end of the house just in case a curious visiting child might happen upon it.

The last time I had the gun loaded and handy was during the post-Katrina confusion, when law and order were seemingly scarce commodities. But those scary times passed quickly, and I once again felt no need to pack heat or keep my six shooter ready for action.

Teri hates having the thing around. I tried to give it to my brother once, but he's an avid hunter and already has more guns than the Honduran army and wouldn't take it. I've also thought many times about selling it at a gun or pawn shop, but getting rid of my only gun would almost certainly deduct a couple of my manhood points, and I don't have any of those to spare right now.

Just as I was about to step into the night and participate in the search party, the missing dog presented himself. I rejoined my still sleeping family and the usual state of calm returned to Bayberry RFD.

It's all okay, but it isn't

I just got back from the vet's office where Callie and I went to have her stitches removed following her surgery to remove a tumor on her back hip.

Callie has really bounced back in recent days. Her personality has returned in full force and she seems as happy as ever. With the wonderful cool weather we've had in recent days, we've been taking her on increasingly long walks. Of course long is a relative term in her post-surgical world--we're talking only a matter of a few city blocks--but that's a huge improvement given that this dog couldn't stand up a couple of weeks ago and we were sure was about to die at any moment.

Her appetite is clearly not suffering--the beast weighed in at 106 pounds today. Got to do something about that.

I met with both of the vets who worked on her and got the story of the biopsy. There's a technical name for her tumor, "somebodyorother's sarcoma".

"Is that cancer?" I asked Dr. Fuller.

"Yes, any time you hear the word sarcoma, that's cancer," he said.

I really like our vet. He's kind, but he's always straightforward about what's going on with our pets. He doesn't try to hide or sugarcoat anything.

This particular kind of cancer is often found in golden retrievers and is likely to recur when if its not caught early. Unfortunately, Callie's tumor wasn't caught early.

Dr. Fuller wants us to bring her in every month for the next little while to monitor her progress, but the truth is that there's nothing to be done at this point other than take good care of her for as long as she is happy and able to function.

There's no way on this earth that we're subjecting her (or us) to surgery again, and she's not a candidate for chemo or other advanced cancer treatments.

I was relaying all this information on the phone to Teri as I drove back from the vet. "It's all okay--but it isn't," I told her at some point in our conversation.

I now know what Warren Zevon, knowing he was about to die from lung cancer, meant when he told David Letterman "You're supposed to enjoy every sandwich." We're going to enjoy every good moment we have left with Callie, however many that may be. Callie already knows all about enjoying every sandwich and living happily in the moment.

I love the picture of Callie and Scram above. It was taken a few months ago, and it's the background shot on Teri's computers. Click on the picture if you want a closer look.

Where are the bats?

It's been a great year for wildlife in our little corner of exurbia.

The hummingbirds (or bumblebirds as we call them) showed up late this spring, but they're here in force now and fighting each other in the late afternoons for their places at the sugar water feeder outside our kitchen window.

The squirrel population has exploded and this week the rodents have managed to strip every single peach from my tree just as the peaches were starting to ripen. I see chipmunks scurrying around most days, but they have to move awfully fast in our yard and not stray too far from their holes as Scram is a chipmunk's worst nightmare.

There's quite a diversity of bird species visiting our feeder each day. The impossibly bright red male cardinals are my favorites, but there's always something new to look at out there.

Every once in a while I'll see a hawk perch for a moment on one of my oak trees or a rabbit hop across my lawn. In the winter I put suet cakes out for the woodpeckers and a bunch of them find us. I don't see woodpeckers very often in the summer because of the dense foliage, but I can hear them out there hammering away on tree trunks or on the neighbors' siding.

What I haven't seen this summer is the bats. Where have they gone?

I think bats are especially marvelous creatures, and I love to watch their erratic flight patterns as they go after their insect prey. Since we moved to Bayberry RFD three summers ago we have had plenty of bats in the sky around our house nearly every warm night starting at sunset.

But this year I haven't seen any, and I've been looking for them. I've read that there's some sort of fungal infection called white nose disease that has been wreaking havoc with bat populations, but I don't know if it has reached our corner of the universe or affects the species of bat we have around here. I wonder if there was a colony nearby that got killed off or if last year's drought decimated the local bat population.

Come back, little guys--I miss you.

I finally finished Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, this year's Pulitzer winner for fiction. What an amazing writer. What an amazing book. The book is a collection of short stories loosely organized around the central character for whom the book is named. Olive appears only in a passing mention in some of the tales, but when taken as a whole, they all combine to tell her story. The last two paragraphs of the book literally took my breath away, and I made Teri listen as I read them out loud to her.

Strout's book and Project Y both explore a couple of the same themes--isolation within a connected society and the transience of existance, although Strout does it by making the mundane fantastic while I am attempting to make the fantastic mundane. Not that I am comparing Project Y to a book worthy of the Pulitzer--I have no such delusions of grandeur.

I still think the luddites on the Pulitzer committee owes Stephen King. Carrie, The Stand, and The Shining, were all worthy. Too often, the committee recognizes only late in an author's career that they missed the boat and give the award for a lesser work. Faulkner is the classic example of that.

I'm about 200 pages into Merle's Door by Ted Kerasote at my friend Kathy's suggestion. This work of non-fiction is about Kerasote's relationship to a stray dog that walks into his life during a rafting trip. The author does a good job of weaving lots of doggy science in with his narrative and has clearly done his research, even if he's a little too free with his opinions on the subject of dog psychology.

Kerosote is one of those woodsy guys who live in a cabin in the great outdoors somewhere out West, fills his freezer with elk he kills himself and makes his money writing for magazines like Audubon and Outside. He lives to ski, hunt, bike and camp. Kind of the anti-me.

Merle is a very cool dog.

I have a feeling I know where this book is ultimately going. From Old Yeller to Marley and Me to Cujo, in most books about dogs, the title character isn't around on the last page. I really like Merle, so I'm going to be very sad for him when Kerosote relays the inevitable.

I'm getting quite a lot of reading done these days. Since I was a kid, I've always been an indiscriminate reader, plowing through anything that looked the least bit interesting.

In the last few years I've found it harder to concentrate on what I was reading and that it was taking longer and longer to get through a book. I also seemed to be getting less and less pleasure out of the books I did read than I had before. I thought it might be a function of age or a more refined taste in reading material, but it turns out neither of those was the case.

I've only now come to realize how much time I've been spending with multiple electronic devices--especially the television, iPod and computer--while I tried to accomplish other things like reading, writing or talking to Teri. I've cut back on all three of my main electro-mistresses, and I don't have any of them whispering sweet nothings to me in the background while I'm reading now.

Multitasking has been killing my concentration and making me stupid. I still dearly love my iPod, computer, television and books, but I'm loving them one at a time these days. With only one set of inputs at any given time, my ability to concentrate has returned, and along with it my love for reading.

Over the transom

A few thoughts drifting in and out of my mind over the last day or so:

I have a tiny vegetable garden in my back yard. Really tiny. But in that space I've crammed eight tomato plants of different kinds, several pepper plants, several types of squash, eggplants, and a variety of herbs (parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme all included).

It amazes me just how much food comes from this tiny plot of dirt. This time of year we eat from my garden literally every day. Right now the tomatoes are coming in fast and furious, much faster than we can possibly consume them. For instance, dinner tonight will be gazpacho made from the best maters on the planet. Home grown vegetables are much more flavorful than store bought and I think some of that flavor comes from knowing that you produced them yourself.

It was before my time, but back during World War II it was considered a patriotic act for everyone to plant their own "victory garden." First Lady Michelle Obama just got a lot of media attention for planting the first vegetable garden the White House has seen in many a year.

I hate to admit this, but church can sometimes be a great place to catch up with your thoughts. I get some of my best ideas there. Our regular pastor was out of town today, so one of the backup guys gave the sermon this morning. He was earnest and insightful, but within a few minutes into his homily, I had already assimilated his main point about the importance of Christians staying connected to their communities and not living lonely lives of isolation. I looked at his sermon outline and my watch and realized that neither the sermon nor I were going anywhere for the next 20 minutes or so.

My mind started to drift as the sermon became fainter and fainter background noise and, BAM, it came to me like a bolt from the blue, exactly what's going to happen next in Project Y. Goodbye writer's block. That kind of thing happens to me a little too often while I'm in church for me to ever become an apostle. My mind just goes where it wants to, and I'm sometimes powerless to stop it.

The weather has been magnificent here the last few days. It has been sunny, with highs in the low 80s, lows in the upper 50s and not much humidity. This isn't typical for Alabama in July. I know this weather can't last and more brutal heat is on the way soon, but I'm enjoying this preview of autumn while it's here. Last night we slept with the AC off and the windows open--what a treat in July!

Because Friday was so spectacularly beautiful (and because I didn't have a clue what was supposed to happen next with Project Y), I went to Trailer Park Lake for some swimming and biking. The mix of people at Trailer Park Beach is amazing. On Friday, there were a few youngish corporate types playing hooky for a couple of hours and marveling that they were just 15 minutes from their downtown Birmingham offices. There are always lots of moms with their kids and a handful of dads with their kids. There's a smattering of lone middle aged guys like me and I always wonder why they aren't at work either. There's often a busload of inner city kids, and Birmingham's Hispanic population is well represented. Most adults at Trailer Park Beach have at least one tattoo.

But I love the place. The whole Wal-Mart verging on Dollar General vibe is really kind of cool, the sun, sand and water are nice, and there are miles and miles of park roads and trails to hike and bike on.

The forecast for Friday said there was a 50 percent chance of rain, but the sun was shining, so I struck out anyway. Maybe it was the forecast, but there were unusually few people at Trailer Park Beach for a midsummer Friday. Among them were three boys between 10 and 12 years old accompanied by three burly men in their 30s who hung out together on the beach while the boys swam. I knew these probably weren't the kids' dads, since one of the boys was black and all of the men where white, but it was a really happy scene of normal kids having a great time in the water on a summer day.

I jumped in the lake to cool off and get a little exercise. When the chubbiest of the three boys addressed me as I swam past. "Hey, there's fish in here. I'm going to try to catch one," he said excitedly.

"Really?" I said, humoring the boy.

"Yeah, there's bass and catfish down there!" Then, for no reason whatsoever, he said in a much quieter voice, "we live in a group home."

"Well, good luck with the fish," I said, getting back to my swimming and leaving him to his adventures.

I don't know why the boy felt compelled to tell me that--it struck me as strange, and a little sad, at the time. A while later one of the other boys had some sort of emotional outburst and the three big men surrounded him instantly in an effort to both control him and to calm him down, making me realize their true roles. I also saw that this boy was bigger and more muscular than I initially thought and would be growing into a man's body very soon. I didn't know his story, but I have a pretty good idea about his future, and that cast a cloud on my sunny day at Trailer Park Beach.

One of the best parts of the Best Year Ever program is that I get to try new things and develop new routines. For example, Teri doesn't like me wearing my hair as short as I have for quite a few years now. She says that I have a full head of hair when many men my age don't. Even though it's getting awfully gray these days, why not let it grow? I can see her point, and there's no need for me to look "corporate" at the moment, so I haven't cut my hair in quite a while now. I'm not sure how long I'm going to let it go before going back to Carl Suggs barbershop on Morgan Road, but they probably won't recognize me when I do eventually return.

When we changed our cable package a few weeks ago, we added back a bunch of stations that went missing when we downscaled to the basic, basic 12 channel package a couple of years ago. During that time we didn't even have ESPN or CNN, for goodness sake. The biggest set in our house is only 19 inches, smaller than the monitor on my computer and there are none of those newfangled flat screens at our place, so we didn't see the point in having a whole lot of channels available on our crap TVs. Our TVs are all the tube kind--$99 or less blue light specials when they were new, which was years ago. We sometimes talk about upgrading to a larger flatscreen TV, but we never quite get around to it. In the meantime, nobody ever asks us to host a Super Bowl party.

When we upgraded the cable, I briefly went on a TV orgy and watched the Food Network, Travel Channel, political slander on the news channels, old movies, the World Poker Tour and the Tour de France until the wee hours.

Then I realized that this was probably not the healthiest behavior over the long run, so here's what I'm doing:

I'm limiting myself to turning on the TV only two days per week at most. The only exception is that I can turn on the basement TV whenever I'm working out to dull the pain. Should be a fun experiment. I've already noticed one benefit of the limited TV rule, but we'll save that for tomorrow.

Hank's Diet Book

According to recently released statistics, nearly one in three Alabamians is obese, a scientific term for "disgustingly fat."

Alabama rates second in the nation in terms of obesity, weighing in at 31.2 percent. As we southerners like to say when it comes to any kind of statistic related to health, poverty or education--thank God for Mississippi.

In the latest report, all but one state (Colorado, I think) had an obesity rate of over 20 percent. In 1991, none of them did.

Well, I'm one of those three Alabamians and one part of the "best year ever" project is to attempt to drop 60 pounds, which would take me from my current disgusting "obese" status, through the "overweight" bars on the BMI chart and just dipping into the wonderful world of "healthy" weight.

I have no idea if I'll be able to actually do this--like many obese Americans, I've dieted and failed dozens of times in the past. But I'm 15 pounds down from my weight at Christmas (the most I've ever weighed) and six pounds down from my "starting" weight in mid-May. Since two weeks of the diet were spent on a food orgy in France, I think I'm doing pretty well.

Given the growing rate of obesity, you'd think that diet books would be extremely popular, and you'd be right. We buy over half a billion dollars worth of diet books each year and sales of diet books grew 263 percent between 1995 and 2006. As fat as we're getting, you'd think we were eating the damn things instead of reading them.

Each diet book has its own gimmick. There are foods you can't eat or foods you must eat or times of day you can't eat or ways to eat to reduce particular body parts (butt, belly, etc). A well meaning friend recently gave me a diet book that individualized your menu based on your blood type. Whatever.

The deal with diet books, and the reason I won't be writing one, is that they all work if you follow them, because they all follow the same basic diet rules, even if they're cleverly disguised by the gimmicks they're named after.

Think I'm kidding about the gimmick thing? Here are some of the titles of the current bestselling diet books on Amazon right now: The Abs Diet For Women, Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person, Flat Belly Diet, The Eat-Clean Diet, The Mediterranean Diet, Skinny Bitch, The Raw Food Detox Diet, The Fat Smash Diet. And I wasn't looking for weird titles, these are all among today's top 20 bestsellers!

Here's Hank's diet book:

Chapter 1--Eat Less Food, You Fatso!

Chapter 2--Get Off Your Lazy Butt and Move Around!

That's pretty much all you need to know--everything else is just the gimmick.

Of the two chapters in my diet book, I've found that the first is the most important.

I will share my diet tips, but they still won't add much heft to my diet book. I have found that one thing that works pretty well for me is portion and variety control. It's possible to bore myself into weight loss by doing most of the same things every day. For instance my breakfast these days is always the same--two poached eggs with two pieces of toast (with apple butter and no calorie spray margarine). My lunch is the same--two hot dogs with diced onions, jalepenos, pickle relish, mustard and catsup. If I'm still hungry after eating my hot dogs, I can have a tomato from my garden or a piece of fruit. Dinner varies tremendously from day to day, but we're eating a lot of tilapia filets these days, and their portion size is very small, which is perfect for a person on a diet.

It helps that my garden is producing abundantly right now, so we have fresh veggies every night, and we usually eat those raw, grilled or sauteed with only a bit of olive oil.

I love a cold beer while I grill in the Alabama summer heat and I love a good G&T when I relax on my porch in the evenings, but I'm keeping the drinking to a bare minimum. One or two drinks on the weekends, that's it.

But I'm not killing myself either. Last night we had BLTs loaded with bacon, mayo and guacamole. A few nights ago I made a big mound of garlic mashed potatoes loaded with milk, butter and sour cream and topped with cheese and bacon bits. They were disgustingly good, so Teri and I scarfed them all down (Callie helped a little).

I've always had a ferocious nighttime sweet tooth, and fruit doesn't do the trick, so I usually have a small packet of Lance choc-o-lunch cookies with milk at night.

But the bottom line to all of this is that you've got to be a little hungry at least some of the time for your diet to work. That's no fun, but let's keep it real here.

As painful as the "eat less" part of the plan is, the "exercise more" part is even worse. I'm doing time on the treadmill at least every other day and lifting weights two or three times a week. I log each workout carefully and add a tiny bit more to each workout (one more situp than last time, five more calories on the treadmill than last time, etc.). It's sweaty, nasty business and none too pretty with my middle aged body jiggling all over the place. At this point I'm resigned to never having abs of steel, but falling into the healthy weight section of the BMI chart would be nice.

Instant gratification

Pounds lost so far: 6--Yay!
Project Y: 28,322 words

Okay, I guess I've discovered writer's block. I'm on page 93 and Tony has just learned from a third party that he's got to join forces to help retrieve a lost object. He's been led to a seemingly vacant warehouse and . . .

Crap, I really don't have a clue who or what is in that warehouse or what's going to happen next. I do know quite a few things that are going to happen down the road, but for now Tony is frozen right where he is and I don't know how to get him moving again. To make matters worse, my personal muse Nat'ly hasn't been around in the last day or so.

So I guess I'll talk about mowing the lawn. Yesterday afternoon, in lieu of going to Trailer Park Beach, I elected to do the responsible thing and mow the lawn instead. It was one of those days where the 93 degree heat and infinite humidity turned me into a puddle. By the time I finished, it literally looked as if I had been swimming in my clothes--they were that drenched. It's a big yard and I have a small mower, so I usually take a water break in the middle of the job, but yesterday I had to stop three times before completing the task. My neighbor Tesley even interrupted to warn me that I'd get heat stroke if I didn't put on a hat. He's a good neighbor and always offering helpful tips like that.

I didn't really mind. In fact I kind of enjoy mowing the lawn. It's good exercise, but the real pleasure of the job is in the instant gratification that comes from bringing order to your world. I can't control most of what goes on in the world; I can't fix the economy or make myself brilliant or prevent my dog from developing a tumor or even control myself half the time. But I can take my shaggy lawn and, with some mowing, edging, trimming and blowing, put it back into perfect order.

There aren't many ways to invest a couple of hours that will restore a real sense of comfort and order to your soul. For me, mowing the lawn is one of those.

The only downside to the whole lawn mowing enterprise here in Bayberry RFD is that I definitely have lawn mower envy. The lawns around here are pretty big, and just about everyone in the neighborhood has one of those big riding mowers. I've got a little 20 inch no-name mower I bought new for less than a hundred bucks a few years ago at Harry's Ace Hardware in New Orleans. It's a push mower--not even the self-propelled kind. For a New Orleans lawn, that's more than enough to knock out the job in a half hour or less. Anything more would be overkill and a temptation to thieves.

So when I see the other men of my exurban paradise behind the wheels of their big riding lawn mowers, I can feel my own testosterone levels dropping. Some of them even wear their Caterpiller or John Deere caps while operating their mowing behemoths, further decreasing my own feeling of manliness.

My small push mower eventually gets the job done, but I can't help thinking the neighbors worry that there might be something a little off with a guy with such a small impotent mower for such a large yard. Sure, they smile and wave as they drive by while I'm out there, but I can feel the disdain behind their closed minivan windows.

Tesley, out of pity I think, even offered to give me one of his old self-propelled mowers one day last year on one of those blistering hot days. I have a feeling there are more mowers in his garage than automobiles on the average used car lot, so he wouldn't miss it. I gratefully thanked him and then declined the offer. The truth is, my little red no-name gets the job done, and I feel a little smug having less invested in my entire lawn mower than my neighbors do in their big riding mowers' tires.

Also on the bright side, Teri says she falls in love with me all over again whenever she looks outside and sees me dripping sweat as I clear my own little piece of the jungle. I'm not sure what that says about her or about me, but it does remind me . . .

. . . here's a little out-of-context bit of dialogue on the subject of love from page 89 of Project Y:

“Some people love everyone, and some people can’t love anyone—not even themselves. Neither of those conditions are particularly good, but people who are incapable of love are the unhappiest on the planet.

“It’s very possible to fall in love at first sight—it happens all the time. It’s also possible to be in true love with someone and then fall out of love.”

“True love can last a lifetime, but true love can also last a split second.”

“Love isn’t entirely about procreation, but love sure does help motivate the continuation of the species.”

“Love usually blossoms through proximity. Contrary to the old saying, absence does not make the heart grow fonder—that saying is just wishful thinking invented to comfort couples who find their love fading through separation.”

“It’s possible to truly love more than one person at the same time, but those situations almost never end up well.”

“Love is the true opiate of the masses. That and cable television."

“It is possible to make someone love you, but not anyone worthwhile.”

Random thoughts about Project Y

Project Y is up to 27,845 words and 91 pages, which is close to a quarter of the way to being a book.

I really like what I've got so far, but I know it has huge problems.

First of all, the pace is way too frantic. The point is that the protaganist is supposed to be disoriented from the beginning as he's dragged through the tale, but I know I've gone overboard with that. I want the character "Tony" to be disoriented and exhausted through most of the story, and I want my readers to feel a little that way too, but not so much that the disorientation leads them to abandon the tale out of frustration.

For instance, there's a cold-blooded killing fairly early in the story. Tony doesn't commit the killing, his companion does. The killing might even be justified as an act of self-defense, even though it was almost certainly avoidable. I don't give Tony any time to react or reflect on this terrible and traumatic event. A couple of pages later, he's on to the next thing.

I'm sure I'm going to have to go back and flesh all of this out, but right now I just want to get the tale out of me. That's assuming the tale is in me to begin with--I have to admit I'm not exactly sure where it's headed.

I'm also doubting my decision to tell this tale in the first person. It works beautifully in the first few dozen pages, but Tony's kind of an odd guy with some less than charming personality traits. I want the readers to root for him and not be repulsed by him, but they may get sick of him at some point. I'm in too deep to back out of that decision now, so I'll see what I can do to soften him up a bit.

There are things I like about what I've got so far. First of all, this tale has some really funny moments. I'm sure about that. Then there's the idea that I'm playing with a bunch of big ideas (war, wealth, greed, transience, etc.) even if I'm adding nothing to the table in my shallow explorations of them. Then there's my lead character. He is someone you almost never see in stories in the lead role. In most other tales Tony would be either pathetic or the bad guy and never heroic. I think Tony's age and status will appeal to the slightly older and more affluent people who can still read.

Finally, I really like how visual this story is. At least it's visual to me. I hope I'm effectively transporting the very visual images in my head onto the paper.

Good sign: I'm starting to dream about Project Y. That's been happening in the last couple of nights.

Here's a little out of context sample from page 70 of Project Y:

“Look lady, what I’m waiting for is nothing. I don’t really know who you are or what you think you’re doing, but I’m not about to take off my clothes for you as part of your little green-haired lesbian biker chick ritual. What I am about to do is walk out of this room, get a good night’s sleep and get back to my life. It’s been interesting and you really are beautiful—thanks for sharing. It’s too bad that you play for the other team. Good night Hot-Lanta.”

When I came to, I was naked and in the center of the circle. I saw the rumpled pile that was my clothes in a corner of the room. I never saw the punch that took me down, but the inside of my head felt like it was filled with agitated weasels rampaging through a tub of Jell-O.

Like pulling teeth

Pounds lost so far: 5 (of 60)
Progress of Project Y: 19,298 words.

I'm finding that writing is a little bit like pulling teeth. Which brings me to . . .

. . . I've always been a great big baby when I go to the dentist. One time, already having been numbed, I fled a dental office after catching sight of the tools about to be used to remove my wisdom teeth.

My favorite Dentist of all time is Denise, my dentist in New Orleans. She was competent, kind and a little goofy and never gave me the idea that her goal in our relationship was to have me pay for her next vacation home.

I had a wacky dentist in Miami who was militant about his patients feeling no pain. He used Novocaine, hypnosis, nitrous oxide and every other trick in the book to keep you from feeling a thing. Loved that guy.

One time I broke a tooth at a sales meeting and spent my off day in DC at the Watergate getting a temporary filling.

My current dentist is okay, but not my favorite of all time. She runs a small factory with a bunch of chairs going at once, and I usually only see her for a brief very businesslike interaction before she's off to the next profit center.

I went to the dentist (or more properly, visited her factory) this morning for the six month checkup. The gum around one of my teeth showed signs of disease and they wanted to refer me to a periodontal specialist for possible surgery.

After determining that my tooth wasn't going to fall out any time soon, I took a pass on that referral for several reasons:

1. The word surgery frightens me to death.

2. They pointed out that it would be "very expensive". I'm not sure what "very expensive" means in terms of actual US Dollars, but since my next paycheck is a long way away, we don't have dental insurance right now and I just spent a ridiculous amount of money to have a geriatric golden retriever operated on, I'm not ready at the moment to part with whatever specialist money amounts to if I don't absolutely have to.

3. My gum has had had absolutely no pain or discomfort until this very morning when the hygienist stuck that sharp pointed thingy into it.

So we agreed to see where we stand in six months and I agreed to floss like a good boy. Hopefully that will help the situation and allow me to escape the specialist.

Out of context snippet from page 56 of Project Y:

“Secondly, as has been mentioned any number of times already, I’m the god of war—I’m not really a warrior myself. There’s a difference honey, so being big, ugly and butch isn’t a prerequisite.”

“Okay, whatever,” I said rolling my eyes.

“Don’t you dare speak to me with that tone of voice or I’ll turn you into a newt or something.”

“Can you actually do that?” I asked.

“I don’t know really know,” he said thoughtfully. “But I really don’t think you want me to try.”

Mr. Wilson

I have become Mr. Wilson.

You probably are familiar with the Dennis the Menace cartoon that's run for many decades. Dennis is the five and a half year old (I checked his age on the official website) boy who is always up to mischief and spends much of his time exasperating his elderly neighbor George Wilson.

Back when I was a little menace, I never was really a fan of this very popular cartoon. I'm only now discovering that it isn't really about Dennis at all--it's about the other characters in the strip and how they react to him.

The next door neighbors have a little boy about Dennis' age. Luke always shows up at inopportune times, when I'm mowing the lawn or engaged in some other project, to show off his latest prize bug, bird's nest or gap in his teeth.

The other day Luke and his little sister Lexie decided that it would be a wonderful idea to explore under the deck of our house. They found a clay pot and a couple of bags of potting soil. They ripped open the bags and placed the dirt into the pot. then they ripped out a bunch of Teri's daisies and "planted" them in the pot, leaving it in the middle of our back yard and other stuff scattered in various places. I was in my office and heard them out there, but I was busy and didn't think anything of it until I saw the mess they had made.

The next day, when Luke materialized in the garage while I was working out, I told him it wasn't nice of him to wreak havoc with the flowers and generally trash my back yard. I could see his little eyes dart and the little wheels spin before he said "um, that might have been Lexie."

When I told him that he was really, truly busted, he looked a little sorry, and he looked even sorrier when I told him he and his sister were banished for life from my back yard.

That's when it occurred to me that I have become Mr. Wilson. Or maybe I'm Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino telling the local punks to "stay off of my lawn!"

Teri got home from San Francisco late yesterday afternoon and we celebrated her return with a feast of grilled fish, grilled vegetables and fresh San Francisco sourdough bread she brought with her. All the veggies came from my garden and included tomatoes (with fresh basil from the garden), a poblano pepper, a gorgeous eggplant, zucchini, yellow squash and a type of white squash that looks like a flying saucer and I think are called patty pans. Teri chopped all of the leftover veggies and put them over beds of pasta along with a little feta cheese for her lunches this week.

The figs on my tree will be ripe soon and then we'll begin having my favorite late summer treat from my garden: figs speared on rosemary sprigs, basted with balsamic vinegar, olive oil and a dash of sea salt, then grilled. Incredibly tasty. The fig tree is pretty loaded this year, so we're going to have a big crop in a few weeks. My peaches, on the other hand, are a bust this year. There are lots of them, but they're really ugly and I don't think any are going to ripen to edibility.

There was something else incredibly insightful I wanted to write about today, but I can't remember it now. Teri keeps telling me that I need to write down my ideas as they come to me or they'll get away. She's right, of course, and this is the proof.

Bachelor Boy

While Teri is off in San Francisco at her academic meeting with her fellow advertising professors, I'm in bachelor paradise.

Yeah right.

Actually, I spent the better part of today cleaning the house from stem to stern. It had been pretty well trashed from a normal week's worth of living compounded by a couple of days of my complete neglect while I lived the wild life of a "single" guy and dog nurse. For several days dishes, pots and pans stayed where they landed and didn't get washed or even rinsed off. Clothes, newspapers, junk mail, magazines and the other flotsam and jetsam of daily life similarly got scattered through the house and ignored thereafter. The house pretty much looked like it had suffered a break-in at the hands of a band of particularly hungry burglars.

I had just finished vacuuming the last room this afternoon and had the house pretty well scrubbed and spotless for Teri's return tomorrow when I noticed that the place was getting a little stuffy.

I looked at our digital thermostat and saw that it was dead and I couldn't get the system to work at all. That's a disaster in steamy Alabama in July. I called an AC outfit and to my shock they said they could be out in an hour or so. I love that about Birmingham. In New Orleans, you had to beg the plumber, electrician or AC guy to come out. And if it was a weekend, forget about it. And then when the AC person (or whoever) did agree to come out, you could bet that they'd either be late or not show up at all.

Not here. In Birmingham, if you call, they'll come, God bless 'em!

Flipping the circuit breakers and giving the thermostat a good thump with my fist did nothing positive, thereby exhausting my technical bag of tricks, so I went into the attic to see if something obvious was wrong with the blower thingie up there, as opposed to the spinny thingie outside. Have I mentioned that I'm not in the least mechanical? I have no idea what I would be looking for, so there really was no point in my climbing up there. To my astonishment, in the attic I was able to determine the source of the problem and to actually fix it!

Turns out the drain pipe wasn't working properly and the drain pan had filled up triggering a sensor that shut down the entire system so as to prevent the attic from soaking the ceiling. I siphoned out the drain pan and, voila!, the AC went right back on.

Then I went outside where the AC water drains and determined that I am an idiot. I had recently moved the silicone drain hose attached to the the PVC pipe that drains the AC and it was actually at an uphill angle as a result of my recent maneuver and causing a vacuum that prevented the AC water from draining. The drain pan filled and, duh, the unit shut down.

I called the AC guys back and told them their services were no longer required, saving us the $79.95 service call fee plus whatever add-ons they would have deemed necessary. Since the tech hadn't left the previous call yet, this was not a problem. Hooray!

So I managed to feel both really clever and really stupid simultaneously.

I got up early this morning and turned the TV on at 6 a.m. to watch today's Tour de France stage live. There's something mesmerizing to me about this particular event, even though I really don't know anything about the sport of bicycling. I had invested several happy mindless hours watching this when in the last 15 minutes of today's exciting mountain stage, my dear wife and my dear mother called almost simultaneously. I sighed and flipped the TV off. Now I don't have a clue how the stage ended, or who's holding the yellow jersey. Glad I invested those hours of watching guys on bikes only to have no earthly idea as to the end result.

Teri had called to tell me about having had cocktails in a very cool circa 1940s San Francisco bar followed by a fine dinner at a great Italian place the night before. Her group was ending their meeting at 2 p.m. today to take a trolley tour of the city and a hike across the Bay Bridge. This will be followed by another fine dinner in that gorgeous city.

In contrast to Teri's experience, I haven't left the house in two days, had hotdogs for lunch today and may have Easy Mac for dinner tonight. And, if I'm lucky, there will be an old movie worth watching on the boob tube. Woo Hoo!

I did get some good work done yesterday.

Project Y is up to 15,106 words and counting and I'm pretty happy with what I'm producing so far. Go me!

Callie the Wonder Dog continues her dramatic improvement. She's still fighting to get to her feet, but she is getting up more often and isn't weaving around like she's drunk once she is up. She's not running yet, but she's at least walking purposefully. We both slept through the night last night and she did a full lap around the house this morning.

Recovery ward

Callie the Wonder Dog is getting stronger by the day and her personality is back in full force. When Teri gets home on Sunday she won't believe the dramatic improvement from when she left our very, very sick puppy early Thursday morning.

Today she even rolled in the grass for a minute, asked for a belly rub and ate every bit of her breakfast--all are very positive signs.

She's still weak, is having some pain, struggles to get her back legs up when she stands, and isn't too steady on her feet when she does get up, so she has a long way to go, but at least we're past the crisis phase.

I promise that the next post will be about something other than a post-operative golden retriever--with any luck it will be how much I accomplished with Project X and Project Y. Between the dog and my complete preoccupation with getting our France pictures sorted and catalogued, I haven't accomplished much at all at work this week. At least my photo albums are turning out great. I hope folks are enjoying them.

Good luck to Mike and Jen as they make their big move this weekend. We're thinking about you. Let us know how it's going.

I'm happy that Teri is having a good time at her academic meeting, but bachelor life is the pits.

A new dawn

Things on my mind today:

1. Callie the Wonder Dog. Everybody got some sleep last night and she's doing much better today but the poor girl still has to really struggle just to get to her feet. She's eating and drinking and resisting me when I give her the twice daily dose of antibiotics, so things are definitely improving. Now if she can just get her land legs back I'll feel a lot better.

2. Teri. She's out of town until Sunday for one of her academic meetings. Even though I travelled for a living for so many years, I always hate it when Teri leaves me for a business trip of her own. Weird, I know. Teri really hated to go this time with Callie needing so much extra attention right now.

3. Mike and Jen. The movers started packing them up on Wednesday and on Friday or Saturday they and the kids will all pile into their van for the last drive out of Lynchburg and into their new lives in Columbus, Ga.

Frankendog

Last night was difficult and definitely not in keeping with the spirit of "the best year ever".

Today hasn't been so wonderful either.

Callie the Wonder Dog came home after her surprise surgery, and she's a very sick old lady. She's really struggling to get to her feet to the point where I've had to help her up a few times. She's fallen several times and it just makes me heartsick to see that.

I was stunned when I saw the extent of the incision and just how weak and dopey she was when I picked her up from the vet. Had I known how hard this would be on her, I wouldn't have agreed to the surgery.

You can see from the picture (sorry about that) just how big the incision was, and we're calling her Frankendog for now.

She was in pretty severe pain last night. I actually spent the night on the floor with her and Teri did too for most of the night, and that seemed to comfort her a bit. This morning we asked the vet to prescribe some heavy duty painkillers for her. After her first dose this morning, she slept the day away, which is the best thing for her right now.

She ate this afternoon and actually got to her feet by herself just a few minutes ago to peek in on me in the office, so I'm praying that her strength will return.

Teri and I have moved the furniture and carpets around so that she'll have a better chance of standing rather than falling and sliding on those slick hardwood floors of ours.

Add to all this the experience of a morning spent with Larry the Cable Guy, and my joy is complete. Teri and I switched our phone and internet service over to the cable company to save a few bucks by bundling the TV, internet and telephone services. I set the switch date for today a while back, before we knew Callie needed surgery.

All our technology is up and running, but it took several hours with "Larry" to get everything working properly.

Back to work

Note today to anyone who has landed here or on the Marjorie blog looking for trip pictures: I'm passing on an e-mail each day with links to everyone's best Franceriffic photos to anyone interested. I've posted a bunch of albums on the Kodak Gallery website. Pop me an e-mail if you want to be included in the mailing list and you'll get an album a day for the next couple of weeks.

It's back to work today after a few days of blissful R&R and one day of worry.

Callie the Wonder Dog has had a growth on her back hip that has been getting bigger over recent weeks. Our vet checked her out while we had her at the petitentary during the 4th of July weekend and he recommended surgery to remove the growth. The surgery was yesterday and all went well, and I'll be able to pick her up in a couple of hours. We'll get the biopsy results in a few days.

Callie is a 13 year old golden retriever we've had since she was a puppy. Since Teri and I never had kids of our own, and since she is a truly special dog, we love her in a way that most other people probably see as ridiculous. If you've ever been around Callie, you know what a great animal she is. While she was at the petitentary, the vets had her out of her kennel and she hung around with them in the lab for hours. This is how people have always treated her--she's everyone's buddy and a pleasure to share time with.

We know that our remaining time with Callie is limited. Our vet says that her arthritis is going to catch up with her in the next year or so, if whatever this tumor is doesn't get her first. I can see it coming, and the day we have to make that last trip to the vet is going to be a rough one.

Scram, our Katrina rescue kitty, came back from the petitentary as pissed off and indignant as ever. It always takes the Prince of Bayberry a day or two to settle down after being caged. That's my boy.

Other than thinking about Callie more than we should have, we had a fantastic 4th weekend. We spent it with our friends Jeff and Cathleen. There was boating and swimming, fireworks and Jeff and Cathleen's incredible cooking.

On the second day we hit most of the barbecue joints in Etowah County buying a pound of chopped pork barbecue and a styrofoam cup or two of sauce from each. Then we had a blind taste-off as we worked through every combination and permutation of the meats and accompanying sauces. There was a noticable difference in each of the meats--some were more smoky and the flavor varied more than I thought it would. But the sauces from each place showed the most variety. One sauce that I thought was awful tasted like a mixture of catsup and salsa (eew!) while another was sinus clearingly hot.

And the winner? Us!

The downside to the fabulous weekend is that you won't see me posting my weight progress for a couple of days as there was more than a little diet backsliding going on.

Soak up the sun

Pounds lost--3! Only 57 to go.

Yesterday was devoted to the pursuit of sunshine and mental health and I found plenty of both.

I stuffed the bike in the back of the Jeep and headed for Oak Mountain on a gorgeous day. I got to Trailer Park Beach around 11:30 a.m. and swam and soaked up rays for a couple of hours. The SPF 30 I put on my face and shoulders did its job, but I got a sunburn over the rest of my body (well, the parts not covered by my swim trunks).

After sunning and swimming, I did a little biking around the park.

I picked up the most beautiful poblano peppers at the Mexican market on the way home, and they'll find their way to Gadsden for our Fourth of July celebration.

I read the first couple of stories in Strout's book. I'm deferring judgment for now.

Since nothing "creative" happened yesterday, how about a record review?

Brad Paisley's new album "American Saturday Night" dropped this week and it's simply wonderful. In this day of I-Tunes, I almost never buy an entire album, but I bought this one and you should too.

Paisley is a terrific songwriter and an amazing guitar player. His albums are pretty formulaic . . . there are always a couple of heartbreak songs (Everybody's Here and Oh Yeah, You're Gone on this album), at least one "bubba" song (Catch All the Fish), sentimental family songs (No and Anything Like Me), a musical bon-bon (Back to the Future), and a couple of witty ditties about l'amour (You Do the Math and The Pants). The formula is predictable, but predictable in a really good way.

But Paisley's best songs are the ones that cross lines of style and reflect current American culture. On this Album American Saturday Night and Welcome to the Future particularly show off Paisley's skills as both a musician and writer. Only Paisley would title a country album after a New York-centric song celebrating the American melting pot.

In Welcome to the Future, Paisley, still a fairly young man, reminds us how much times have changed since his childhood:

"And I'd have given anything to have my own Pac Man game at home;
I used to have to get a ride down to the arcade, now I've got it on my phone," he sings.

And you can hear the double edge of the current age in his voice when he sings "Look around it's all so clear, wherever we were going, well, we're here."

Paisley rode in the Orpheus Mardi Gras parade several years back, when I was a member of that krewe, and I was able to dance while he played at our post-parade party on Lundi Gras night. What a treat! He truly is one of the great guitar players of any age, and getting to watch him play as I danced from just a few feet away was a true treat.

Project Y

Pounds lost so far: 2 of 60. Hey, this diet and exercise thing could actually work.

My muse for Project Y showed up yesterday and her name isn't Chloe or Wynona--it's Nat'ly. If you've ever lived in New Orleans, you can hear Nat'ly's voice in your head right now and she was right there on my shoulder and whispering in my ear yesterday through two long sessions and about 7,093 words.

Apparently 130,000 words is about average for a book, so project Y is definitely on its way to becoming something.

I'm giving both Project X and Project Y a rest today and heading for Oak Mountain for a little biking, a little swimming on Trailer Park Beach, and some quality time with Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.

Olive Kitteridge (Is it a collection of short stories? Is it a novel? It's both!, say the critics) won this year's Pulitzer for fiction, so I figure I ought to read it if only to see what a Pulitzer prize winning book looks and feels like. Confederacy of Dunces is the only Pulitzer prize winner on my short list of all-time favorites. Nearly 30 years after its publication, it's still the best and truest representation I've ever seen of New Orleans and her people. If I were running the Pulitzer show Stephen King's The Stand would have won in 1978 instead of Elbow Room by someone named James Alan McPherson. The Pulitzers are sort of like the Oscars on steroids--if it's a popular and enduring work of fiction, it has little or no chance of winning the top prize. Oh well--I'll give you a brief review of Strout's book once I've slogged through it, but I'm not holding out much hope that I'll enjoy it.