15 posts tagged “knuckleheads”
I'm posting, frankly, just to be writing something. I've got inertia of the fingers, if not of the brain, and the only way to shake it off is to start slapping words onto the screen. So here we are, me and this blog, staring each other down like cowboys in a Leone film (I get to be Lee Van Cleef; fuck you, blog). It's been a while since I've been here. I'd totally forgotten I'd picked a theme of skulls with cranberry eyes. I'll leave it for now.
Querying continues apace. I've had two requests for the full manuscript now (one agent, one publisher), and got two very nice, very positive, very energizing "no, thank yous" for my trouble. The publisher used words like "intensely readable" and "laugh out loud funny without trying too hard," and the agent said it was like a Miranda July movie produced by the Coen Brothers and directed by Tarantino. So as rejections go, I'm feeling pretty good. I took some time off over the holidays because I figured everybody was busy being a slackass drunkard like me. But I've gotten a membership in the Mystery Writers of America and plan to keep sending the book out, hopefully using their resources to work smarter.
The missus and I weathered a big time crisis and have come out better for it. It shook us up but also seems to have gotten our priorities back in whack. A conscious kindness to each other has morphed into re-kindled attraction and a fair amount of hot, groping sex. Which is good. We like each other better and love each other stronger (and bang each other goofy). A-plus on that.
I'm still ambivalent about comedy. Still doing two or three shows a week and making good dough, but the Eye of the Tiger has dimmed, and frankly, I don't miss it so much. I'm definitely thinking of my career in the past tense, even if the financial reality hasn't caught up to that yet. It's still fun, I'm still funny, and I can still hold my own, but I don't have that hunger anymore, and frankly, I'm beginning to see that hunger for the pathetic desperation it really is. I was never good at the "hey, look at me! look at me!" aspect of being in showbiz, but now I'm finding myself with active contempt for people who're good at it. I'll still sell you a CD if you want, though.
I now like basketball, and want a Rajon Rondo jersey stat.
The knuckleheads are maniacal, destructive little bundles of unconditional love, one of whom won't wear pants and the other of whom is getting ninja-like in his sneaking of snacks, and I thank the God-Universe for them every single day, even when I'm scrubbing jelly off the TV.
And the new American Gladiators? Oh, HELL YES.
Number one son (he's six) just changed our outgoing answering machine message to "Nobody is home right now. We're out destroying houses. Please leave a message after the poop or I will kill you in the face."
Hell, yes, I'm leaving it like that.
My heart goes out to my poor wife: less than 18 hours after being hauled offstage by Morrissey's bodyguard, she is currently at our first honest-to-god parent/teacher conference, trying to strike a balance between sticking up for our slightly weird kid and letting the teacher explain just what's been going on. I complain plenty about the schizoid nature of my daytime/nighttime existence, but this just puts me to shame.
Things continue apace. My half-assed shows this weekend turned out to be incredibly fun. I sold plenty of CD's and killed all three sets. The opener was a good friend and great comic, and the feature was someone I didn't know and completely underwhelming, but all in all, a fine weekend of comedy jokes.
I continue to query agents (plural, thanks to Jodi's bad influence) who are far too important to deal with the likes of me. That's not false modesty - I'm just querying rock-star-level people at the moment. Nothing ventured and all that. I'm building a mail merge file of mere mortals and will start sending those letters out once I reload on stamps and envelopes.
Me and the Missus are doing well, I guess. We've had a sort of passive/aggressive detente going the last couple weeks, and I'm not sure exactly where it's coming from. I either feel like a victim or an asshole, depending on the hour of the day. But then everything will be hunky dory and giggling at the Simpsons, so I don't know what's up. Maybe it's just living in a house with two crazy kids.
I miss Colorado like anything. Mountains make me good inside.
I just got done booking two tickets to Colorado for the end of August so that Knucklehead #1 and myself can visit his grandparents on their home turf. I'm excited for any number of reasons - decent Mexican food, seeing some old friends, showing my son around where I grew up, letting him and his grandparents bond a bit, and just soaking up some serious Rocky Mountain atmosphere.
I never knew I'd miss the West as much as I do.
It's especially weird because I kind of hate my home town: Colorado Springs. I always tell people that if Donald Rumsfeld was a city, it would be Colorado Springs. It was always kind of a grey, conservative place, being home to no fewer than 5 military bases (and NORAD - it was strange growing up knowing you lived next door to the Soviets' #1 nuke target). And then in the early 90's, family-values and conservative Christian groups infested the city like so many bible-thumping cockroaches, and my town really changed right before my eyes.
So I miss it, and yet I hate it, and yet I can't wait to go back.
(The knucklehead in question)
Who the fuck gives ink stamps as party favors to two year olds?
I'm drinking Dixie Stingers, watching the Red Sox, and playing Dwight Yoakam songs on the gee-tar. Life, as they say, is very, very good.
Tomorrow I'll hang with the knuckleheads, read some comic books, and then head to a party thrown by a legitimate mad scientist, whose roofdeck will be perfect for firework viewing and whiskey drinking.
Everything is going to be all right.
We foisted the knuckleheads on their grandparents this weekend and lived a blissful 48 hours like grownups.
We ate Japanese food TWICE (from two different restaurants), we watched R-rated movies (The Departed), we worked on the house (new light fixtures), we worked in the yard (got the Missus's garden planted and my square foot garden built), we slept in (well, the Missus did - I got up at my usual early hour and watched spaghetti westerns) and generally remembered that yes, we do in fact like each other a lot, which is sometimes hard to remember with two screaming maniacs laying seige to the house.
Also, I learned two songs on the guitar and watched the Red Sox curb-stomp the goddamn Yankees. All in all, a pretty banner weekend.
Having finished my draft, I find myself kind of in a weird headspace. I've been so ludicrously obsessed with the thing that I feel like the rug's been yanked out from underneath me. I feel like Kramer* after Kenny Rogers Chicken shut down.
Kenny.
Kenny.
Per the advice of every real writer I know, I did start a new project today, just to be working on something. It could be kind of good, but mostly it feels like I'm hitting on an ugly chick because my real girlfriend and I are on a break.
Spent Easter at the in-laws', and it was very nice. The food was aces, and the Knuckleheads did a great job of keeping each other entertained, so I could actually relax a bit. Gramma did, of course, practically pour chocolate and sugar down their throats, so by bedtime, they were wound extra-tight. Knucklehead One was pretty much just vibrating in bed. The duclet tones of Joe Castiglione calling the Sox game** on the radio finally knocked him out, though.
The Missus insisted I buy her and her sister*** Morrissey tickets at the very instant they went on sale last week, and since I did it online, I got two free iTunes downloads from Ticketbastard, which I kept as my fee for being their ticket mule. Since I almost never buy individual tracks, being more of an album-oriented geezer, I decided to snag a couple of songs that I love but have lost possession of somewhere in the cassette tape to CD to iPod transition, namely Crazy Mary by Victoria Williams and Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns by Mother Love Bone, both of which were played a million times back in the day, when I had just graduated from college with a degree so useless that the only job I could get was delivering bundles of newspapers to 7-11's at 3:00 in the morning.
I'm fumbling through the chords for Crazy Mary on the guitar now. I cannot stop listening to this song.
*Pre-Nazi Kramer, natch.
**Jonathan Papelbon, motherfuckers! JONATHAN PAPELBON!!!
***I demand kudos for the phrase "Missus insisted I buy her and her sister..."
I was just sitting here in the dining room, figuring out which tactic to take when negotiating with the Missus for some time away from the Knuckleheads so I could write. My goal was 60,000 words by the end of the month (or a finished first draft, whichever came first), and I was pretty sure I'd need a couple hours this weekend to make it.
Well, I decided to cut and paste in the pages I wrote on the sly at the day gig, and what do you know? I'm at 60,133 words and going strong. Right now, if I had to predict, I'd ballpark the finished draft at around 67,000, with about another 10,000 that'll get added when I (a) revise the sections I know need to be seriously revised, and (b) when I fill in all the parts that say things like [find out if this is true] or [can an Impala SS really go this fast?]. Real literary stuff I'm writing here, obviously.
Point is, for the first time, I really feel like I might actually get this thing done. I don't think I'll make my deadline of having the draft finished by Opening Day, which I picked because I fully expect my productivity to plummet once baseball starts. Good news is that there's a lot of day games that first week, so my nights should still be free for writing.
