Sunday Night Random

My eyes are tired.

My hands are gritty from playing in mud and dirt all day. I took a shower so they are clean. But they are rough. Handling seventy-pound blocks, and shovels and rakes, and hauling heavy rain-damp dirt around. A few days wasting away at the docking station at work will soften them up again.

I read The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. It's very good. But the ending is ambiguous. I don't usually like ambiguous endings because I don't understand them. I think they are very fashionable. An ambiguous ending is a way for an author to appear more clever than his audience. Of course, in this case, he is.

I have a novel inside that won't die. So I must write it. But when I try, I cannot. I have many ideas as to why this might be and therefore ideas on what to do about it. None of them will happen overnight. Some of them have taken years to not happen.

After the audition yesterday we went to lunch at Fannie Annie's in Old Town. Annie's has been there forever, a fun place with a bar and kitchen on the first floor, and you have to find yourself a table somewhere on the second or third. I think there's also a bar in the basement. All the walls and ceilings are covered with pictures, ancient newspapers, musical instruments, shoes, sports equipment. From our table an entire four-person horse-drawn buggy could be seen hanging over the stairs. I wondered why someone had written "Rudy V" on a framed picture of President McKinley.

It was a beautiful warm sunny day and the bikers were everywhere. Bikers aren't what they used to be. They wear leather vests and all, but have extraordinarily expensive motorcycles and all work for professional wages either as systems analysts for the State or software engineers at local corporations. Just another club to join. But they feel tough and stand around looking confident. I enjoy pushing through them when they block a narrow passage. One small heart challenges another. Always, politeness.

A dye in my wife's new tattoo raised an allergy and an infection and it hurts a lot and we don't know how it'll look once it has gotten better and the swelling gone down and the skin returned to normal. I am not satisfied with my own ink, but corrections / additions have not yet become clear.