content: other

Apparently I'm producing again.
Hooray. Now I can use my wordmaking skills to complain about other things, instead of complaining about their disuse.

Went to Wheaton (almost typed Elgin, gah) Wednesday night, and spent yesterday with Dave. Between one thing and another it was good. I'm not sure if emotionally it came out at a net positive. As I have said before, we don't really have what I'd call arguments, just heavily emotionally charged discussions. We don't disagree as to what the goal is, I'm saying, but instead the how and why. Our circumstances are in some ways pretty bad at this time and it is frustrating and saddening to both of us. And I think nothing is worse than to see your beloved made miserable and have no power to help them. Which we both have got to deal with now. As well as actually being made miserable at times by various things. It's well and good and laudable to be more worried about your partner's sadness than your own, but you have to eventually address the causes of your own sadness, even if for no other reason (at first) than to stop hurting them with it.

That being said, Valentine's Day had all the things it ought in spite of the above. Including going out to eat, if you count driving through Burger King on the way back from the bank. Which I'm inclined to count, myself, because by that point we didn't even realize how hungry we'd gotten, and the burgers perked us up considerably.

I stayed up, though I hadn't meant to, till three in the morning, and finished the second book of Elizabeth Moon's trilogy The Deed of Paksennarion. I'd read the first book awhile back on the Free Library and had very much wanted to know the rest of the story. And it's one of those full-immersion books where you feel you'll be all right if you just see what happens next, only by the time the next thing has happened there's something else you badly want to see resolved. The back cover compares Moon's work favorably to Tolkien, and I don't think it's off the mark at all. She's less long-winded than him, even, and a little more balanced in terms of honor versus seriousness. I'd love to set a D&D campaign in her storyverse. So well fleshed out on such nice bones!

Pearl texted Dad last night to tell him to tell me to call her or Myke as soon as I got back. I didn't. I didn't really think it through clearly, but I think I was just so emotionally drained that I didn't want to handle anything more strenuous than Paksennarion and her fictional troubles with evil elves and feckless humans and her own stubborn single-mindedness. I feel bad about it, but I don't know that I'll be able to go out to Michigan next week as planned. After I pay the rent with today's paycheck I can pretty much buy groceries, but not laundry or gas or reactivating my cell phone.

But anyway. Back on the subject of producing. I came up with this while driving back to Chicago last night. I'd been singing some of my good crop of 07 songs, Randy McCarroll and Sight and some older ones too, hoping I'd get something new by greasing the wheels a bit. Songs come in through a hole in your heart (I've long wanted to write a song with that line in it, who knows if I ever will) and I knew my heart was in the proper shape for one. As the first line suggests, I started it right after driving past that enormous graveyard that 290 cuts through the middle of, the one I always wave to and greet by saying "hello, the dead" as I drive past.
This is the second thing I've written inspired by Lois Bujold, the first being that lovely little sonnet-length poem, the needs of modern escapist fiction. You may recognize the chorus and title from a conversation Cordelia had with Mark, I forget which book it was in.

[love and other things]

say good evening as I pass the graves
they're receding fast like marble waves
for the mass who learned not to be brave
back in grammar school

I feel a fool, a fool, a fool
I feel a fool, a fool, a fool
a fool for love, for love
and other things

by my enemies my table's set
they keep asking me "you finished yet?"
they'll forgive, they say, but not forget
don't mean to be cruel

I feel a fool, a fool, a fool
I feel a fool, a fool, a fool
a fool for love, for love
and other things

what I'm paid for ain't my specialty
I exist to make a recipe
for what swept away the mess in me
I must build the tools

leather wings, labyrinth strings
quickenings, stones that sing
the fire I'm from the ashes of
the velvet fist, the iron glove

a fool, a fool a fool for love
and other things