Those aren’t trophy ears hanging off my bandolier
Inspired by O’Brien, virally transmitted by Cochrane, I bring you the latest and strangest blog meme (excuse me, Dean — meem):
I am Dax Montana.
I ground my right heel into the dirtbag’s chest and made him eat my muzzle. I brought my left knee up into his groin, not full force, but hard enough to bruise. Figured he’d want something to remember our time together.
He had an eyeful now. I hoped he enjoyed it.
I used the pistol to probe his molars for cavities. “It’s not easy having a high center of gravity,” I said. “In fact, it’s a real handicap. If one of your officers came into the precinct with a broken arm, you wouldn’t stare at the cast, would you?”
He shook his head like a good little dirtbag. Corwin from Homicide chose that moment to poke his head in.
“Chief, do you have the file on Pluto Banks — oh, hi, Dax. Chief been getting randy again?”
“This is our private sexual harassment seminar.” I took out my pistol and wiped the barrel on the Chief’s face. “Which you just passed with flying colors, right?”
“Mm-hm,” Chief Larabell said while trying to look anywhere but at my decolletage.
“Now, why don’t you two tell me about Banks.”
The Chief got to his feet and brushed himself off. “Corwin, brief Montana, will you? I, ah, need to use the bathroom.”
After he left, I wiped my knee with the Chief’s cap. “Look at this. The leather is ruined. I wish that man would learn to control his bladder.”
Depth of memory
After my August 16 post about my grandfather, my sister made copies of some old black and white photos of her and Papa. They arrived in the mail today, a most welcome surprise.
Photos in a minute. Dean, I’m working on your meem*, honest. I wrote a quickie scene this morning before the creativity organ pooped out like a whoopie cushion; I’m hoping I’ll finish tomorrow. The rest of you, check out Dean’s meem. You won’t regret it.
‘Kay, here’s Papa and Sis. Check out the cool car in the background:
With Paintshop Pro, I can enlarge things down to the individual pixel. So I thought, wouldn’t it be kewl to enlarge the car’s license plate? Just like in Blade Runner when Deckard used his high tech toy not only to enlarge a photograph but look around corners, too. If that worked, this should be a piece of cake.
Didn’t work, damn it. Technology SUCKS!
What I like about this picture: Papa’s Hawaiian shirt, and the way they’re both squinting into that hot Southern California sun.
Here’s another one. Sis’s comments:
My personal favorite. I never saw the girl by the fence til I enlarged the picture.
Hmm, let’s get a closer look:
If you stand back, it’s, it’s Abraham Lincoln! (Is that joke too obscure?) Anyway, the photo (not the dopy close-up) really makes me nostalgic for Southern California. Love that palm tree. And the look of joy on both of their faces, too: she was his first grandchild, and his pride shows.
D.
*Dean’s definition: A ‘meem’ is like a ‘meme’, only crappier. I love that line.
SBD: Do you really need that ring?
To get the taste of Trouble in High Heels out of my mouth, I picked up Jennifer Crusie’s Fast Women at our local used bookstore. I peeled through it in a week, record time for me.
Here’s the set-up: sisters-in-law Nell, Suze, and Margie (related through their marriages to the men of the Dysart family) are the eponymous fast women. Nell, our protag, has been through a rough divorce. Forty-something, cancer thin, and an emotional zombie, she takes a temp job at a detective agency, where she soon tries to run Gabe McKenna’s life and gets her post-divorce cherry popped by Gabe’s cousin Riley.
Despite the early Nell-on-Riley action, this is Gabe’s and Nell’s romance, with Suze + Riley playing a strong supporting role. An embezzling mystery (which soon becomes a murder mystery) provides a good slug of narrative drive, as does the verbal back-and-forth between Gabe and Nell. Margie is the weak link of the team, a bewildering character whom Crusie did little to develop.
For me, the most interesting part of Fast Women was Crusie’s dissection of the reasons why people get married. She seems to be saying that folks get married for the wrong reasons all the time, so it’s not enough to end that romance with a ring — the ring needs to be offered for the right reasons, too. As Nell speculates towards the end,
It should be harder to get married, she thought. You should have to take tests, get a learner’s permit, you should need more than a pulse and twenty bucks to get a license.
For today’s Smart Bitches Day post, I’d like to pose a question: is marriage a necessity for an HEA?
Let’s look at it. Happily ever after. We end up together, we’re bonded, we’ve vowed to be there for one another no matter what crap the fates throw our way. Sure sounds like marriage to me, but that narrowminded opinion shows disrespect to those folks who have bonded for life without license, ring, or ceremony. Alan Rickman and his gal, for example. And what about all the married couples who are living unhappily ever after, or have made a farce of their vows? Surely happily ever after should not require a wedding ring.
Opinions?
D.
PS: There’s even some girl-on-girl action in Fast Women. I shit you not. I would have taken it a good deal farther, but that’s me for you.
Live video blogging, tonight at 8 PM PST
Hmm. Maybe even 7 PM PST, depending upon when the troops want dinner.
It’s proving to be a crappy weekend for writing. I wonder whether my block indicates an unhappy muse. But if she doesn’t like the direction I’m taking things, why doesn’t she suggest something different? C’mon, babe, talk to me!
Anyway, apologies to my patient readers. I know how frustrating it can be to beta-read installments which don’t come when expected . . . and then, by the time you get it, you’ve forgotten where you were. I think I’ll send out what I have, two chapters instead of three. Plus, I fixed the dearth of kissing in the last sex scene. I can’t write kissing as well as Kate Le Rothwell or Jennifer Crusie, but I did my best.
Despite the lack of writing (and, oy, Eugie has been very patient with my latest Tangent assignment), I’ve gotten a lot done on the cooking, cleaning, and laundry front. And mouse-killing. Can’t forget mouse-killing.
See y’all later, I hope.
D.
Things that go kathunk in the night
Kate’s post on why she’s too good for most men is just too funny. The comment thread is priceless, especially my comments, which speak volumes towards why I am too good for most women. Kate, I thought about writing my version of this post, but it kept coming out serious. Being too good . . . well, let’s just say it’s my curse.
And here’s proof.
***
Late last night, we watched the end of Wait Until Dark, a movie which proves Hollywood has been and forever will be* silly. I’m talking Snakes on a Plane silly. If they remade Wait Until Dark today, Samuel L. Jackson would be the cop who storms in at the end, ranting about motherfucking drugs in a motherfucking doll. My favorite part: baddy Alan Arkin (looking incredibly young) douses Audrey Hepburn’s apartment with gasoline to, um, terrorize her. And then for the next fifteen minutes Arkin and Hepburn take turns lighting matches to scare each other.
People. I’ve worked in a burn ward. DO NOT MIX GASOLINE AND MATCHES, ‘kay?
And then there’s the darkness. Audrey Hepburn is blind, so to help the viewers empathize with her horror, much of the climax is shot in the dark. Oy.
Afterwards, we turned out the lights to go to sleep and heard a massive kathunk from the roof.
There is only one Trek
For anyone over forty, the only Star Trek featured a plump guy with thinning hair named Shatner and an odd-looking guy (even without the ears and the makeup) named Nimoy. Patrick Stewart? Feh. If I ever publish my trilogy, you’ll find out what I think of Jean Luc Picard.
Hat tip to Blue Gal for leading me by the nose to a brilliant website full of Star Trek inspirational posters. Go give ’em some love. For now, here’s a teaser — and for the record, I always knew this about McCoy and Spock. They didn’t call McCoy “Bones” for nothing.
If you must talk about something, answer me this: why do blackberries taste so much better off the vine than when they’re store-bought?
D.
I hear boos from the peanut gallery
Balls and Walnuts extends its welcome to Britney Spears fans the world over. You see, someone at the Hey Britney Forums discovered my photoshop of her infant son holding a beer, tied to the front of Mel Gibson’s Road Warrior car (apropos of Britney’s reckless child care practices).
Unfortunately, my critic writes in Spanish, and the only thing I can understand is that I’m a muy mala persona for creating such an image. That is just so wrong. I’m a muy mal person — damn it, get the sex right. Britney, she’s a muy mala persona. Are we straight on that?
It’s 10:40 PM and Jake is asking us about the meaning of life. I told him I’m hoping I’ll get through life hurting as few people as possible and hopefully helping a few. Karen told him, “My life has no meaning,” which was news to me. She can be so disturbing sometimes.
Meanwhile, NBC Chicago’s website has posted a photo proving psychic Dorothy Allison correctly guessed the appearance of JonBenet Ramsey’s killer:
Yeah, I think it’s pretty effing amazing. She’s wrong on the eyes, nose, lips, chin, facial shape, and hair style, but damn! She guessed it was a guy. I am impressed, and also a little creeped out, given the obvious resemblance to another killer:
But, honestly: can Fox News and the media in general find any more ways of trivializing this poor girl’s murder?
D.
No good deed . . .
After hearing the diagnosis, I had a sit-down with Mist, our new black cat. I would have asked Ash, but I couldn’t get anything out of her but the F-bomb.
“You don’t know what it was like in that hell-hole,” Mist said, referring to the Humane Society shelter. “Ash and I were the smallest ones there. We had to give up more than a bit of tail just to stay fed.”
I sighed and decided to try one more time. “That still doesn’t explain how you got a sexually transmitted disease IN YOUR EYE.”
Ash chose this moment to saunter by, farting as she passed. “Fuck you, Meester Doctor know-eet-all.”
California dreaming
When my uncle died, the house on Atlantic Boulevard stood vacant save for decades-old furniture, piles of trinkets (in Yiddish, tchotchkes), and garbage of one form or another. My parents wanted to know if there was anything I wanted, so I told them: one thing, only one thing. I wanted my grandfather’s talent agency publicity photo from his time as a failed actor.
I liked Papa better than any of my other grandparents. I suspect he related better to kids than my other grandparents. We had/have similar personalities, too. We’re both dreamers and bullshit artists. We’re both forever imagining riches around the corner. For Papa, it was the breakout acting career, or the properties in Hesperia and Ontario, or (I discovered today, talking to my mother) investments in Long Beach oil. For me, it’s the breakout novel, the movie deal, or (when I’m feeling glum about the writing) a stroke of luck with the lottery.