this was the week that was: 7.20.03

Weekends are a wash.

Spending the weekday struggling to go to bed at a reasonable time and get up with a slim enough window to get clean and get to work somehow warps my life ethic when it comes to weekends. Despite the urge to sleep in, I keep waking up at 7, 8 — wide awake when I all I really want is to destroy this lack I've built up for the last 5 days.

This week, especially, calls for long, uninterrupted stretches of rem sleep. Work kind of immediately turned sour on Monday, enough that I had a few hours of envisioning gathering my stuff and walking out, trailing obscenities and pointed commentary. So, my life running in odd circuits of fate, I get an e-mail from my friend Gina a few hours after that, asking if I still have any interest in a gig. A writing gig. Living off writing. It'd be a warped interpretation of my vision, not quite the free-willed, self-driven existence I envision, living off my writing. But closer than I've come before, if you don't count my last stretch of unemployment, doing trade magazine and other freelance stuff to pad out my severance pay and well-timed tax returns.

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I can act given very little set-up and very small windows of time, but this sent me into a weird tailspin, perseverating and tearing off fingernails. What I'd gain in quality of worklife and (ostensibly) quality of writing would be offset by a dip in pay and the nature of my life going sideways for a few weeks. But that decision was taken out of my hands by a shortened schedule and my own need to train someone to replace me, so what coulda been seems will not be. Still, it was nice to be wanted, an experience new to me since I tend to stay with a job until it becomes a burned-out shell, filled with bad blood and anxiousness and then quit or get fired. I'm guessing there's a life lesson buried in here somewhere, but it's far too early and far too humid to brood.

Writing-wise, things are going pretty strong. Started a new project, about which I've been pretty unwilling to speak for fear of queering it in my head. It's still progressing strongly, constantly fed by each new piece of research I turn over, each natural evolution of the original concept. The collaboration with Vinny has produced 20 pages or so on my end, and seems, if anything else, to serve as a repository for all these odds and sods built up in my head and resigned to the margins of countless notebooks. The Twelve is almost done. Almost. I've started on some other side projects involving friends, not-necessarily-collaborative pieces that, in theory, I would finish and hand off to the other end to do what they wilt.

My new scheme is fishing. Me and Sanders are tenuously planning to go fish in one of the many cricks and streams of Missouri in search of garbagefish and whatever subnautical oddness. I somehow suspect that the peaceful contemplation that fishing represents will be lost to me in a flurry of impaled thumbs and tangled line.

I've got two Pitch pieces due this week, and am working on getting some more freelance work, enough to pad out the horrible spaces between me and work. The summer is just getting worse, it hit 104 on Friday without benefit of humidity (which bumped the heat index up to something akin to 110 or so), and beyond the miserable feeling the high-pressure dome erected around KC, I've never been a big fan of summer anyhow, notwithstanding the 9pm sunsets, which never cease to amuse and awe me. Writing seems complementary to hiding out from the heat, basking in high-powered air conditioning and cold water whenever I want it. It's due to hit 100 today, so, beyond breakfast, I don't forsee myself going anywhere unless mass amounts of money or drugs are involved.

The other big event is, as you can hopefully see now, the re-design of thoughtpeach. The new layout — laughing academy scrapbook — is the product of countless hours, days and weeks spent laboring over figuring out MT, making mistakes and fixing them and finally giving up and turning to someone for help. Thanks to Charity for taking my ideas and making them work, for intuiting what I was shooting for and surpassing what I ever expected this to be.

There are now sections, actual html pages separate from this blog, none of which have any content yet, as well as a photoblog and a reading journal/music journal. In the ensuing weeks, I should have a better handle on everything, have some of these sections done and actually get the content flowing through the blog at a quicker and more efficient rate. It's been a steep learning curve as it is, and messing with the intricacies of tables, Moveable type and photoshop has left me slightly brain numb and distant. I'd be interested to hear what, if anything, people think of the new design.

The heat's hitting 90 right now, at 9:30 in the morning, and the citronella candles on my balcony are melting down to huge tubs of permanent melt. God help me, I've got to move somewhere normal.