Out of Step to the Music That Only They Could Hear

It's not that Rutger's fat. It's that his head keeps shrinking. Right?

Right.

Meanwhile RTT is supposed to be arriving in Lawn Guyland at 5pm this afternoon.

He was originally supposed to be coming down to visit me on 12/26, which would have been far more convenient. Cassandra and Allan were out of town, and I had planned little adventures.

That trip just sort of… disappeared, without any consultation with moi, just as this trip has just sort of… appeared without any consultation with moi.

He's my son, I love him, blah, blah, blah.

Thing is, though, because of how horrible he was to me before I left Ithaca, every interaction I have with RTT stresses me out enormously, and when I get stressed out, the autoimmune disease gets worse. Plus it's an imposition on Cassandra, who, of course, is perfectly pleasant about it, but still…

I had prepared myself mentally for the 12/26 trip.

I've had no time to prepare myself for this trip.

Big breakouts all over my legs this morning and even with the Celebrex, I feel as though somebody spent the night beating me up with a heavy metal baseball bat.

RTT is only staying through Friday, and he has Syracuse University pals on Lawn Guyland, and I'm sure we'll have a pleasant time.

I'm feeling sick though. Like a a little forest creature. All I really want to do is lay in the sun and read Bernard Malamud and make comforting chitchat with Bambi and Thumper.

###

Three nights ago, I dreamed I was writing a short story. The story began, On a bright sunny day in October 2011, two boys sauntered toward DeWitt Park. A brisk wind sang through the dying leaves, giving the moment something of the ambiance of the last scene in a movie. The boys passed a Newport and an iPod back and forth, shuffling deliberately out of step to music only they could hear, no one else.

"[INSERT PERFECT LINE OF DIALOGUE HERE]," said the taller of the kids.

Every time the perfect line of dialogue came up, I would wake up and say to myself, "My, that's a perfect line of dialogue!" and then stagger to the bathroom to throw up.

Then I'd fall back asleep, and dream the exact same dream all over again, down to the opening lines of the story and the perfect line of dialogue.

I think it was the Celebrex that was making me throw up. The rheumatoid arthritis thing that goes along with the autoimmune disease has been so painful and debilitating that I finally ordered Celebrex off the Internet.

In the past, I toughed things like this out. In the past, though, I didn't have a chronic disease with no clear cut ending in sight. The pain is usually worse in the morning, so I figured I'd pop some meds preemptively before I fell asleep.

Cassandra suggested taking the Celebrex with food, so I've been doing that first thing in the morning. It has made a difference with the nausea. I mean I still feel it, but not to the point where I'm moved to worship the porcelain goddess. Celebrex hasn't kicked in yet this morning, so I feel like shit. But there's no reason to suppose it won't.

###

Anyway, that dream made me realize that I haven't done anything that could remotely be called creative in weeks and weeks and weeks. So last night I took out the Brokeback Mountain/Dinosaur DNA hybridization story I was writing as my little offering to Clark (formerly THE DOM – and by the way, I was quite unfair to him in these pages some months back. He is actually quite delightful, makes me laugh a lot, doesn't take himself seriously at all.)

Scenes are all blocked out; first draft is complete up to final and trickiest scene. When I write fiction, I always just pour it all on to the page, but I keep a NOTES journal in which I keep track of logical inconsistencies, dialogue/descriptions that need to be backplanted to establish foreshadowing etc etc. So I always write a second draft, incorporating those things, and then voila! The piece is done.

I also pulled out the Steinbeck/Campbell novel which is something like 700 pages long and reread the first chapter. Eleanor loved it; chezsci did not.

Does seem like I really should do something with this novel. I mean, it does have commercial possibilities. I suppose where it really went astray is that I wanted to impose a kind of Tom's Midnight Garden sensibility to the magical realism, which means that the Chinese girl actually has to interact with Campbell and Steinbeck as Campbell and Steinbeck, rather than as disembodied voyeurs.

Maybe I will try to eke out a couple of hours first thing in the morning to work on it.

I generally like getting up very, very early in the morning, but that's been hard recently, given how dark and how cold it is here very, very early in the morning.