Finished the First Draft

See title above. It was a struggle. Took everything I had. Just as I was thinking that I had it about 90% done, my eye started to snag on all sorts of awkward sentences, baffling constructions, etc. And I had to ignore these things and press on to the end, get it into a big document and print it out and hand it off to a writer friend for a first look.

It's all difficult. I wake up in the wee hours thinking about certain points in the novel, tracing the plot backward and forwards, trying to decide if it holds up. My state of mind (burnout, insomnia) is reminiscent of the state I get into when I'm writing code. In both cases, the moment I lay down to sleep my mind turns a sweeping spotlight on the work I've just done and begins a serious but seemingly random inspection. All I can do is lie there and watch as lines of dialog or subroutines leap out and me and are slowly scrolled past my field of vision.

But the novel is away. It's off to the first of several reviewers for comments etc. I can't tell if it's any good. In baseball terms the novel is a home run swing, but I'm still not sure if I'm hearing the solid crack of wood on leather or a whiffing sound (complete w/groaning catcalling crowd).

Last night I had a dream that turned into a perfect short story. It involved a drive in an old sedan, a dirt road, an aged and hated rival, and the interior of a white cinderblock room with no doors or windows. The climax took place in the room. It was great. I woke up and told myself to remember it all. I lay awake and fixed all the details in my mind, then I fell back asleep. In the morning everything but the few details I've salvaged (and related above) was gone, washed away by a mighty river of dream-sewage. Oh well. That's how it is these days.

The Somnolent D.O.

I've been sick, man. All kinds of sick. A sinus infection that sprinkled bits of jagged metal down my throat; an earache that's been leaking this clear substance, a headache of viselike proportions, and, to top it all off, some epic gas. It must be January, the month during which I always seem to fall apart.

So the other night I was lying in bed, trying not to choke on my own drainage, afraid to swallow for fear of the pain in my throat, slowly, with as much patience as I could stand, letting the clouds of my sweet noxious gas fill the night air. My fever was spiking and I'd thrown the blankets off to keep myself from sweating. In all respects I was a miserable man.

Then my sleeping wife, with a kind of sigh, sat up from her side of the bed, leaned across me (in the process penetrating the meaty center of my gas cloud), and threw the covers over my body. Then she tucked the bedspread tightly on either side of me, put her hand on my chest, murmured something unintelligible, and rolled back onto her side, all without waking up!

Yes, I was give the dutch oven by my wife, in her sleep. There was something so sweet about that, something so comforting, that I soon feel asleep myself.

Scrote Bite

Ye who have young toddlers, beware! This could happen to you.

I was standing in the kitchen eating my dessert from a cup, holding the cup fairly high and looking across the room at my wife. This is the setup. It's important to know how my body was positioned in light of the coming event.

As I was rather engrossed in my conversation, I was not really aware that my toddler son was hanging on my legs and whining (he'd pretty much been hanging on my legs and whining all day). Next thing I know, a stab of intense pain radiated up from my scrotum and, looking down, I saw my son's little teeth clenched down on a tab of my shorts, which just happened to contain a piece of scrotum as well. Needless to say, my reaction was animated. I roared in pain, jumped back about three feet, and, pointing my finger, said "No!" to my little son.

Shocked by all this noise and motion, my son began to cry, and so, in a roundabout way, his mission was accomplished. He was once again being held and comforted by his father. Meanwhile, with my free hand, I massaged the bag. My goodness, what a shock.

Is there anything, anything in the world, that soaks up more of your time than a small child? Anything? It's really insane. Some weekends I really think I'm going to go totally insane. If I read ONE sentence of a book over a weekend it's a miracle.

Ducks

Something, anything, in lieu of finishing the draft of the manuscript. I've hit a kind of mini-wall and am having trouble surmounting it. I don't know if it's the head cold that makes everything fuzzy and drains my writing of its emotional content, or if the writing itself is just bad. I do know that I have to keep pressing onward, one way or the other, and write something down so that I don't get completely bogged.

So last night a package arrived for the toddler son, a brace(?) of four rubber duckies with electrodes on the bottom of their bodies which, when connected by some conducting material such as a fingertip or water, caused LEDs in the ducks' bodies to begin flashing various garish colors such as electric blue, day-glo pink, sherbert orange, etc. You get the idea. Toddler son LOVED them. He went crazy. Tossed them between his hands, clutched them to his chest, staggered all around the kitchen pressing his awkward tiny finger against the two metal buds trying to ignite the ducks. But this was just the warm-up. When we put him in the tub with his ducks, the water of course kept them blinking nonstop (part of the design I'm sure). He had a fabulous time.

Wasn't so stoked when we shut the bathroom door and turned out the light, plunging the bathroom into complete darkness. Then he was not so stoked. The wild strobing colors made him nervous and I'm sure the laughing adult faces looked rather grotesque as they flashed and faded in our disco bathroom. He, of course, looked adorable throughout as he struggled to be brave, and lost. We didn't let him cry; when we opened the door to let the light from the hallway spill in, he immediately calmed down and went back to dunking and clutching those garish ducks.

The Dream

So the dream started off on an old and venerable drawbridge spanning two Florida islands. Below me was a strip of bright-blue water. I was second in line at the drawbridge, behind a truck with a white Topper. I got out of the car and walked to the edge of the drawbridge to watch the various sailing vessels hurrying through the gap. As each boat passed, I swung somehow from its rigging and described these crazy loops, wild kiting swings above the bridge and water. As I descended from each of these euphoric leaps, I re-entered the crowd of people who had gathered on the edge of the bridge and every time I'd hit this dirty-looking, ponytailed redneck guy in the back. He had a maroon face and small round spectacles screwed into his fleshy cheeks.
Eventually the bridge went up, preventing one last hurrying sailboat from making its passage, and then the dream shifted to the sandstone dungeon of a Spanish Fort from the 1500's. The scenes were all exceptionally vivid and bright. The camera panned downward to a man in a khaki shirt, then ran behind him as he turned, and I realized it was me in the dungeon but with Robert Redford's body and that perfect Robert-Redford wing of blond hair sweeping across my forehead.
I was elated to be so handsome (and to have such perfect hair) but a bit mystified by this sudden transformation. I was let out by the jailers and found myself on the sidewalk of a modern city. I was heading home, feeling absolutely no worries. I was joined by a man in a dark suit who began to tell me that I had another "assignment"
I asked him if it was top secret (the POV had exited my body again and was tracking us as we walked along the street, the stranger a little ahead of me on a narrow sidewalk) and he said of course it was, handing me a slip of paper. I didn't understand the instructions on the slip of paper so the man took me to an outdoor cafe where we sat across from one another near some small pine bushes. While we were waiting for drinks, he began carving some kind of occult symbol into the wooden table with a meat cleaver
I found the stranger and his movements to be ominous and oppressive. The dream had turned from light to dark. I told my handler that I did not want to be in his employ, that he had the wrong man, that I was nobody's spy.
He said, "Don't you remember?"
My dream shifted to a little room, POV facing a small fire grate set at the base of a cinderblock wall. A head appeared in the fire grate. It was mine, but my features were coarse and aged and I was bald. Not the resplendent Redford, but just another grimy schmoe. Then the POV rushed back into my body and I saw, looking into the cinderblock room, that my wife (who happened to be Barbara Streisand don't ask me why) had been pinned to the wall. Her flesh was peeled off her bones. I thought she was dead, then I realized that there was something alive inside her, inside the spread-open cavity of her body, some entity that was roughly five feet long and worm-shaped, and this creature looked at me and began (to my horror, of course) to manipulate the slack facial features like a puppet master while making mewling sounds that I knew I should understand.
Cut to a small room with many shelves full of masks, prosthetic hands, fake legs, etc. and there I am in the center of the room, revealed as a wormlike creature now that I've shed my Redford-ness. I'm hooked to some kind of machine that injects a current of blue electricity through my body and I'm saying (while furiously smoking a cigarette w/my wormlike mouth) "I can live forever. I can live forever."
The predominating feeling was one of horror and loss. I woke up but was too afraid to move. I could not be sure I was no longer dreaming. It was 1:22 in the morning. I lay there asking for guidance. I was afraid to leave the room for fear of what I'd see. Some aspect of myself externalized, some indigenous secret horror. I continued to ask for help. Finally I was told to get up and go to the bathroom, and I did.
I came back to bed, still sweaty and oppressed. After about five minutes I delivered myself of a tremendous fart and immediately began to feel better. The spell dissolved with my flatus and I felt that I had again entered my "right" mind. Soon afterward I fell asleep.

My Wife

My wife just imitated me while I was on the phone. When I hung up with someone she repeated the last few phrases with a kind of salacious twist, as if to imply that I was trying to seduce the woman with whom I'd been speaking. I get tired of that sort of thing; it's a drum she never tires of beating, even though I've never slept with another woman in our 453 years of marriage.

So, she became aware pretty quickly that I didn't find it funny and is now trying to make it up via a series of rather mindless comments designed to force a response from me. It's fine. I've responded. Set her mind at ease; why not? What the hell difference does it make to me? I'm a fucking husband and father, come on over here and trample on me, please. Don't worry a thing about it.

Random New Year Thoughts

Hate Ed Harris. Why does he appear in so many movies? Can we please get someone else to do the steely-eyed, head-slightly-cocked thing? So tired of Ed Harris.

Last night my wife and I both had gas. Her flatuses smelled like the beach and mine smelled like burned meat. Together we had a sort of Luau going.

This morning we walked on the beach. We always see a man and woman in their 50's walking in the same direction; the man is usually wearing only shorts, his barreled, white-haired chest thrust manfully upward toward his shoulders, his short arms dangling over his hips. He looks vaguely apelike. His woman is the complete opposite. Where he is practically naked, she's completely clothed. She wears a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, sunglasses, and a floppy woven hat tied under her chin which completely obscures her face. Connecting these two wildly disparate persons is an old swaybacked German Shepherd with tufted fur. The dog always walks directly between the couple, never to one side or the other. We like to think of the dog as an equation. That is, that the dog represents an obscure formula which somehow unites the ape-man and the English gardener woman.

Also this morning, on the beach, my wife said that she likes to whisper things to into my baby son's ears, little sweet nothings which she imagines will become lodged in the nodes and whorls of his brain, and these whispers will wait there, packed tightly in their little nooks, until one day some emotional or physical cataclysm will shake them loose and then, in a time of crisis, he'll hear all those loving whispers as they trickle back out.